"I take it you're yet another member of the UNIT team?" "Yes. Depressing, isn't it?" -- Doctor Who and the Silurians

TV I love restoration stories -- those explanations by technicians about cleaning up films for dvd release. The documentary in the Blade Runner: Final Cut boxset which explained just how Ridley Scott's film manages to look quite so amazing after all these years. I'll write some more on that when I've finished this week of Christmas shopping.

But that seems as nothing to the ingenuity which has gone into a forthcoming release of Doctor Who in which the job was to restore colour to Jon Pertwee's cheeks after the original tapes were wiped and the only copies available were a b/w film and a recording of the show on VHS tape made by a fan when it was shown on US television:

"In the end, to maximise flexibility, it was decided to start with a one-light ungraded Spirit transfer of the film, and a DVNRed, "ball-park graded" colour videotape copy for the basic clean up. This work was undertaken by Jonathan Wood at BBC Resources, then the tapes handed on to our cleanup team at SVS in Manchester. They tackled the video defects in the usual way, with frame-by-frame deblobbing on each episode. Although this meant that 14 episodes had to be worked on in this way, it meant that the peculiar problems inherent to the different source formats could be tackled independently."

I have only a vague idea of what any of that means but it all sounds very complicated but the results speak for themselves. Now about the CG lizards for Invasion of the Dinosaurs...