FUCKING BBC

An occasional series.

It’s pointless to be permanently angry about the BBC’s disastrous historical policy of wiping programmes after transmission to re-use the tapes to record 'The Black & White Minstrel Show' but, every now and again, I come across a specific example that pinpoints just what a stupid and short-sighted practice it was.

Case in point: ‘Out Of This World’, a 1962 sci fi anthology introduced by Boris Karloff. Of the fourteen episodes that were produced, only one survives.

Particularly infuriating is the loss of ‘The Cold Equations’, an episode based on a short story by Tom Godwin. In it, an astronaut transporting vital medical supplies to a planet colony is horrified to realise that he has a stowaway, a teenage girl. The girl threatens everything as the ship’s weight has been worked out so exactly that any additional ballast will cause it to crash on impact, killing everyone on board, destroying the cargo and condemning the six people waiting for medicine to death. In the end, after much soul searching from both characters and ground control, the girl walks into the airlock and is jettisoned into space.   

But this show is lost now, having been removed from this world at the press of a button, like a stowaway in an airlock. For the record, the girl was played by Jane Asher, and the pilot was played by Peter Wyngarde, one of my heroes, and an actor of uncommon presence and charisma. It really bothers me that I can never see this show, that no-one can ever see it. What a waste! Fucking BBC.