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.