Rhodesia and Zambia - The Picture Round

Copyright exzim

Faithful followers of this blog (I know I may be imagining you) will remember that, in this post, in furtherance of my eccentric anti-bicycling agenda, I set out a fairly convoluted argument to the effect that RTV in Rhodesia and ZTV in Zambia were the same company at around the time both bought and showed Doctor Who. That, I suggested, was why their TV schedules were so similar. 

I do enjoy a convoluted argument. But this is, to some extent, a Doctor Who flavoured blog. And it therefore occurred to me (quite naturally) that the simplest thing to do would be to travel back in time, and get myself some photographic evidence.

Impossible, you say? It sort of isn't. This link will take you to a collection of photographs by 'exzim', who worked for RTV in Kitwe (Zambia) from 1963 to 1965, and in Salisbury (Rhodesia) in 1966. And he's very kindly given me his permission to reproduce the pictures that follow. I'm enormously grateful.

Before going further, though, I need to stress that they are copyright and they mustn't be copied or linked to without his express agreement. I know what you Internet types are like. Don't do it, kids.

By way of background, exzim was one of four British engineers hired by RTV in mid-1963; he and one other went to Kitwe, one went to Salisbury, and one to Bulawayo.  

exzim and his colleague's contracts then passed to the new ZTV on independence. And, after two years, while the others returned to England, he went on to work at RTV in Salisbury (his former Kitwe colleague returned to work in Zambia briefly in 1967 and, on the instructions of the Zambian government, moved the equipment to Lusaka). 

Here are the RTV Studios in Kitwe in 1963:

Copyright exzim - see http://www.pbase.com/exzim/profile

Notice the RTV logo?  I gather it was replaced with a ZTV one eventually. And this next picture is between those two stages, when the RTV logo has been removed, but the ZTV one hasn't yet been added:

Copyright exzim - see http://www.pbase.com/exzim/profile

Neither logo is in evidence in the next picture either. But it's useful to have a fair idea of what somewhere you're  reading about actually looked like, and I've included it for completeness:

Copyright exzim - see http://www.pbase.com/exzim/profile

Moving on to Salisbury in 1966, I think some inside views are called for:

Copyright exzim - see http://www.pbase.com/exzim/profile

Copyright exzim - see http://www.pbase.com/exzim/profile

A serious news programme for a time of serious news. 

I recognise Harold Wilson and Ian Smith, but not the others. The camera, presumably, is a Philips* one (I'll come back to that below).

Back outside, this picture documents an attempt to set up a video link from the RTV studio in Highlands to the downtown:

I don't know about you, but I  enjoyed those. What's more, as you'll have gathered above, exzim was also kind enough to tell me a little about his time at RTV. 

Again with his permission, here's some of what he had to say:

'Your summary of the relations between ITV, RTV, and ZTV is correct as far as I know. They had a lock on distribution rights for that area for many programs, it wasn't big enough for people to fight over, so they split ITV to avoid sanctions and just went on'. 

And: 

'The Dutch ownership resulted in all the equipment being of Phillips manufacture, which made replacement parts availability difficult. But the work was of interest, and I always say I learnt my job in Africa.'

 And, intriguingly, this:  

'Before UDI, while some sort of relations existed between Zambia and Rhodesia, the programs were 'bicycled' by Central African Airways. With UDI, and the breakup of CAA, the programs were shipped back to South Africa, then back to the UK and then back to Zambia as I understand. But I'm not sure, I was in Salisbury when UDI occurred.'

And:

'I would think in those days (1960s) there was insufficient air traffic between African nations to make biking the tapes or films between them possible. My guess is that they were returned to London, and then sent on from there. To the best of my knowledge, which admittedly could be wrong, it was quicker to fly from Lusaka into London and then out to Nigeria, than to try to fly to Nigeria directly. BOAC had a daily overnight flight to Kenya, Ndola in Zambia, Salisbury, (Harare) and Johannesburg, and South African Airway had the same. We had spare tubes (valves) for the equipment delivered that way. After UDI the Salisbury stop was dropped. 

Sabena had a flight out of Brussels that went Madrid (I think), 
Kinshasa (Leopoldville), Johannesburg, and various ex French states had connections into Paris.  

After UDI and the movement against apartheid got going, SAA changed their routing to Luanda in Angola, the Cape Verde Islands, Geneva, London, and TAP, the Portuguese airline did the same. 

Air traffic was still a colonial times relic.'  

More about these and other things later, I hope. 

Meanwhile, exzim's galleries also include some fascinating photographs of his time at ABC in Teddington, Middlesex. Not least of these is a photograph of a production meeting for Armchair Theatre, which is of course another series with lots of missing episodes. You should take a look.

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*Small update (18 April 2015) - it appears that this is in fact a Fernseh camera! Thanks to exzim and his Facebook associates for clarifying that. It looks like the 1963 model shown here:

http://www.oebl.de/Fernseh/Kamera/index.html

Mathematical puzzle

The picture has absolutely nothing at all to do with what I'm going to say - it's just a clock.

And now to work:

Here's something that's always looked like a bit of a mystery. According to Broadwcast, BBC records - specifically, a memo dated 7 July 1965 -  show that, in 1965, Television International Enterprises Ltd (TIE) 'bought [Doctor Who] prints for showing in Gibraltar, Aden, Trinidad, and Bermuda". 

Those prints were the following stories (26 episodes):

• An Unearthly Child
• The Daleks
• Inside the Spaceship
• Marco Polo
• The Keys of Marinus

And the price TIE paid was (according to Broadwcast's report of the same July 1965 memo) £1,587 2s 11d, at £75 per print.

This presents a bit of a maths problem. Whether they bought one set of prints, two sets, or thee or four sets (26, 52, 78 or 104 individual episodes), there's no way to arrive at a total price of £1,587 2s 11d if each print was £75. What you get is a range of answers from £1,950 to £7,800. 

Why is this? Well, I think the answer is actually quite straightforward, as it turns out. They weren't paying £75 per print - they were paying £75 per hour.

Gloriously, shuzbot from the Planet Mondas Forum was able to get hold of TIE's written proposal for setting up a television service in Aden (from the British Library - see this link). 

The document dates from 23 February 1962 according to the National Archives listing (there doesn't seem to be a date on the document itself, but it mentions on page three that Jamaica's TV service is due to start 'early next year', and it in fact started in August 1963).

Appendix IV outlines the costs that will be involved in obtaining programme material from the BBC and others. The bit that relates to the BBC says this:

'... The production and programme property available for Commonwealth Television Services can be obtained for Aden at approximately $40 per hour excluding freight provided that Aden Television accepts material that is being supplied to at least four other stations for which TIE (Sales) has programming responsibility' 

The document then goes on to talk about other distributors, including ITC (distributors for ATV), whose material is said to be obtainable for 'US $40 per hour under the same conditions as for the BBC'. 

Notably, it also mentions 'Granada and AR' (the latter must mean Associated Rediffusion), saying that they 'have yet to be approached over the $20 per half hour basic price' but are 'likely' to accept it. 

So: on the face of it, TIE's MO was to contact the programme distributors they proposed to buy from in advance of actually buying anything, and negotiate a flat hourly rate for all future programme purchases.

And if that equated to a cost of $40 per hour to each of five stations, as the Aden proposal suggests, then the overall rate was $200 per hour.

Was it still $200 per hour in 1965? Well, it would have been sensible for TIE to negotiate a deal that covered a number of years, so that they could have a degree of certainty about their incomings and outgoings. And, in that connection, it's worth noting that the Aden proposal itself includes forecasts for the next five years. 

The dollar to pound exchange rate didn't move around much between 1962 and 1965. In 1962, $200 was just under £71; and in 1965, it was just under £72 (there are lots of places on the Internet where you can check this). That's pretty close to the £75 figure quoted in that BBC memo.

But I think the clincher is this: I've added up the total duration of the first five Doctor Who serials, using the timings available on the Doctor Who Reference Guide site. 

Those first 26 episodes had a combined total duration of 634 minutes, 26 seconds. And £75 per hour is £1.25 per minute. 

So that would make the total cost of one set of prints (priced down to the last second), £793.04.

£793.04?! That's a bit disappointing. It still doesn't seem to fit. 

Unless ... TIE bought two sets of prints. Which, at £75 per hour, would be £1,586.08. 

And that is pretty close to the £1,587 2s 11d that they actually paid. 

Factor in the likelihood of some small discrepancies between the episode timings I've used and the ones used by the BBC (there'd need to be less than a minute's worth of difference overall), and it's close enough to persuade me that TIE did buy two sets of prints, and paid £75 per hour for them.

And that's it. 

Dubbing - an Arabian Adventure

[From the Television Services site - see below]

I thought I'd see whether I could find out a little more about whoever dubbed at least these Doctor Who serials into Arabic in the 1960s: 

A An Unearthly Child
B The Daleks
C Inside the Spaceship
E The Keys of Marinus
F The Aztecs
G The Sensorites
J Planet of Giants
K The Dalek Invasion of Earth
L The Rescue

Stay calm - all of those are present and correct in the BBC archives. The only currently missing episodes in the run of serials from A to L are: 

• All seven episodes of Serial D, Marco Polo
• Episodes 5 and 6 of Serial H, The Reign of Terror

And there's nothing to suggest that either serial was ever dubbed into another language, or sold in the Middle East. 

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that there's no Serial 'I', either - hence that well known motivational saying, 'There's no I in Doctor Who'. 

This is because the BBC never made a Serial I.

Or did they?

No, they didn't.

Or did they? 

No. 

The search for the missing Serial I continues. 

Let's move on. I said 'whoever' dubbed those serials onto Arabic - but in fact, we know who it was. We just don't know all that much about them.

Here are the pre-existing facts:

Broadwcast says this:

'The BBC employed the services of the dubbing facilities at the Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni Studios in Beirut, Lebanon. Founded in 1962, Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni was also known as UNIART STUDIOs. The Lebanese civil war forced the company to re-locate to Cyprus in 1975.' 

And it provides a link to this page on the Discogs music site, which says:

'UNIART Studios (In Arabic: استوديو الاتحاد الفني (studio al-Ittihad al-Fanni)). Studio located in Beirut, Lebanon. Belongs to the Lebanese company Uniart.'

We know for certain that Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni was the name of the company that did the dubbing work on Hartnell Who. A small number of Arabic language prints still exist, and the soundtracks of several of them have been included as audio options on DVD releases of the relevant stories - for example, episode 4 of The Aztecs. 

Broadwcast notes that the soundtracks all start and end with a narrator saying, inter alia:

'Translated into Arabic and direction of voice dubbing by Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni'  

[He says that in Arabic, obviously. Broadwcast must have had the narration translated. Which is quite amazing, when you think about it]

According to Google Translate, Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni means something along the lines of 'Artistic' (or 'Technical') Union. Or, as Broadwcast has it, it may mean 'Arts Union' or 'Union of Arts' (hence UNIART). 

We also know the date when the print of Aztecs 4, at least, was made. 
Richard Molesworth's Wiped! (page 127 of the 2nd edition, 2013) says that the relevant print - which is in a private collection and was borrowed for the purposes of  preparing the first DVD release - was examined in 2002, and found to date from 1967.  

To its great credit, Broadwcast is a little more specific, saying (on the Tunisia page, as I write) that November 1967 is actually printed on the film.

And that, I think, is about it. It's not very much, is it? Again, who were these people? Do we have to rely solely on Discogs for evidence of the link between Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni and UNIART?  And did they really move to Cyprus in 1975? 

Please try to contain your excitement as I reveal the answers to these questions.

Taken together, this document and this one provide somewhat better evidence that Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni and UNIART were the same company. 

The first is a paper by one Ramez Maluf (Dubbing Into Arabic: A Trojan Horse At The Gates? - Lebanese American University, 2003), which says this: 

According to the bibliography, the source of the information about Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni - who aren't referred to as UNIART anywhere in the paper - was this:

So that's probably fairly robust evidence, on the face of it. Bear that name, and the names Sobhi Abou Loghd and Abed El Majid Abu Laban, in mind as we move on to the second document. 

But first - is Mr Maluf's work perhaps the source of Broadwcast's suggestion that Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni relocated to Cyprus in 1975? Although a hasty reading might have run the two together, it's clear that he's talking there about Filmali, which was a different company altogether. Al-Itthad Al-Fanni were still based in Beirut as late as 1980, if our second document is to believed. 

And there's no reason why we shouldn't believe the whimsically titled

Study 8 AN INTEGRATED MULTI-MEDIA APPROACH Facilities, Constraints, Recommendations

Study 8 was prepared for UNESCO by one Khalil Buhaisi, and is dated 30 June 1980. It appears that Mr Buhaisi was a media consultant appointed by UNESCO to look at existing media facilities in Arab states, as part of a feasibility study for a Palestinian Open University. And one of the states he visited was Lebanon, where he encountered UNIART. 

This is from pages 6 and 7 of his report:

Study 8 doesn't mention the name Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni - but, as you can see, the owners of UNIART were the same three people that Mr Maluf has reported as being founders of Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni in 1963. It seems that they must have been the same company (and, in passing, it's interesting that they apparently didn't just dub TV programmes - they also distributed them). 

Anyway - there you have: 

• the people who owned the company that dubbed Doctor Who into Arabic

• the date when the company was founded (1963, on this evidence, not 1962)

• the location of their offices and recording studios - respectively, Verdun Street and Madame Curie Street in Beirut. 

• evidence that they didn't leave for Cyprus in 1975

Does the company still exist? No. 

I know that with reasonable certainty because I've had a look at another company that was active in the field in Beirut in the 1960s, which does still exist, and which also has premises on Madame Curie Street - namely, Television Services. 

There's an article about them in the September/October 1967 edition of ARAMCO World, and it's worth reproducing here because it may at least help to give a feel for how these things worked:


[There's an HTML version here, which is slightly easier to read. The first part is about TV in the Middle East generally and is fascinating - but if you want to look at just the bit about dubbing, scroll down to the bottom]

All that experience of dealing with 'hmm, umm and err' and they never had the chance to dub William Hartnell. Heartbreaking, that's what it is. 

Anyway, from that article it's just a short Google-ride via the name Kan'an Abu Khadra to Television Services, who have a website and a Facebook page. 

I asked them whether they had anything to do with Al-Ittihad Al-Fanni/UNIART, and they were kind enough to reply almost straight away. This is from 4 April 2015:

And hmm ... umm ... err ... that's it. 

Except to say that Television Services seem like nice people, and have some marvellous archive pictures on their website and Facebook page. In the highly unlikely event that anyone reading this can put some work their way, they deserve it for those alone.