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. 

Workers Of The World Unite! You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Bicycling Chains!

[This is largely lifted from a post I made on 25 February 2015 on the very wonderful Planet Mondas Forum].

Serious students of Doctor Who's overseas sales and transmissions in the 1960s and early 1970s will be familiar with the notion of bicycling chains. We've all pored over them for hours, long into the night, with only strong drink to sustain us, and a glowing cigarette end to light our way.
















For frivolous students of Doctor Who, teetotallers and non-smokers, the idea, in a nutshell is this: not all overseas broadcasters would get a fresh set of telerecordings straight from BBC Television Enterprises when they bought the series. The sales were made on the basis that a broadcaster would, on demand, return the prints; destroy them; or send ('bicycle') them on to another broadcaster. 

One obvious advantage of this was that it was cheaper than striking new prints all the time; and another was that, if the country receiving the print was relatively close to the one sending it, shipping would also be cheaper and quicker. 

Clearly, bicycling did happen. There's a 1966 article in The Listener that mentions it, which has been published for posterity on Broadwcast - 'A comprehensive online guide to the foreign airdates and worldwide transmissions of Doctor Who'. 

But. Did it happen to the extent that Broadwcast suggests?  I wish to propose a radical new hypothesis for consideration: No, it probably didn't. I'm inclined to think that bicycling chains are largely an illusion, caused by staring too long and too hard at things from a distance of 50 years (yes, like the canals of Mars). 

For starters, one key piece of evidence for their existence seems to be the fact that Rhodesia and Zambia had extraordinarily similar TV schedules (three weeks apart) when Doctor Who debuted in 1965. 

But that may very well have been a special and exceptional case, given that they were effectively the same country when their respective TV stations began in 1960 and 1961: namely, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which didn't break up until the end of 1963. 

There's a great big version of this map here. 

Moreover: Broadwcast's bicycling chains page notes that, according to the 1967 BBC Handbook (page 34), Television Enterprises' Programme Supply Department had sent out 10,700 prints the previous year, and 'in addition' some 3,000 prints were bicycled. It's suggested that this means that most prints 'were only used once'. 

But it doesn't necessarily mean that at all. Some of those 10,700 could have been prints that had been sent out once, sent back to the BBC, and then sent out again. 

And, any way you look at it, the conclusion has to be that, when a TV station received a BBC programme in 1967, it would have been bicycled from somewhere else in only 28% of cases. 

Again - none of this is to suggest that bicycling didn't happen at all. Obviously, it did. But we could easily be talking mostly about ad hoc arrangements that existed between limited numbers of broadcasters who happened to be geographically close to one another and/or linked in some way, not long and complicated chains spanning multiple countries or even continents. 

I therefore wonder whether our default assumption when considering a particular country's Doctor Who purchases should be: they probably got them direct from the BBC and probably didn't send them on to anyone else.