The Macra Terror

It's interesting the lengths that some will go to in the search to recover missing footage. For a long while it was widely thought that the clip of the second Doctor as seen by the Time Lords when preparing to take him out of time in "The Three Doctors" was taken from "The Macra Terror", this despite the fact it was a clearly contemporary looking Troughton, obviously filmed on location, and didn't feature any giant crabs.

Now speculation is fine, but when "2 seconds of The Macra Terror (possibly from episode 1)" finds its way into a professionally published article on existing material, the words "straws" and "clutching" float to mind. The thing is, it's not even as if anyone actually had the original footage, you can just sort of see it on a TV screen in one Pertwee episode.

The same sort of thing happened once when somebody informed me that some new footage from "The Wheel In Space" had been "uncovered". It hadn't, but some astute person had realised that the establishing model shot used in "The War Games" hailed from episode 1, so technically we DID actually own a bit of this episode. Such trickery in order to falsely reclaim back a bit of the past is not restricted to moving images; I remember being wowed by some rare "Marco Polo" telesnaps in a book some years ago (coincidentally the same publication that touted up the "Macra" find!) until I spotted some of the frozen images in various episodes of "The Aztecs". Some monkey obviously decided to bolster his "Marco Polo" photo album with a few opportune near matches.

The issue of just when we "have" something came to light when re-viewing the thrilling Australian cini-clips recently. Some of them are less than a second long! Arguably they are little less than photos, which no-one claims to be missing episode clips when a camera is pointed at them for a second or two. Yet most of the cini clips at least have worth for depicting little-seen scenes or characters in missing episodes. But I was forced to ponder on the worth of those that don't. What use are such missing clips if they don't tell us anything? Why do we WANT five seconds, or even a minute, of footage from an episode we don't have? What use is it when the rest of the episode doesn't exist to be enjoyed? Why is the "Power of the Daleks" trailer, for example, of any historical interest to us? We have the telesnaps already and if the rest of the episode turns up, it's unlikely to be missing this exact scene. Also nestling amongst the cini-clips, for some unknown reason, are blurry, annoyingly lengthy extracts from "The Macra Terror" titles, at least disproving the myth that the first opening sequence to bear Troughton's face was "The Faceless Ones". So maybe they do have a use?

I don't know why this particular story doesn't get taken very seriously. It seems to be the home of fanciful rumours and myths more than of serious comment on the episodes themselves. Perhaps the silly music on the soundtrack did it, or maybe it was having our suspicions confirmed about the big crabs on those Censor clips. I'm sure there's a decent Doctor Who adventure in there somewhere as well, if only one day a real complete episode would come back. Final memory of "The Macra Terror"? Some wags at a convention with a tape labelled "Macra Terror - complete episodes" on it. You lifted it up and were greeted by a pop-up comedy crab as a punch line. Says it all really.