Comment by nephihaha
12 hours ago
The BBC can be very pigheaded, i.e. offering no incentives for people coming forward.
Even without losses, they have a trackrecord of stockpiling a lot of old content but not making it available to the public. I doubt this would happen to Doctor Who but it would elsewhere. You would think with streaming that the BBC could make a lot of obscure old content available, but they don't.
It is a big world out there. Surely there are archivists who would make a digital copy outside of BBC jurisdiction, and then said digital copy could be similarly provided via sneaker net to a (presumably) friendly Swedish seaman.
It feels very doable, given the downstream effects of Brexit.
That's not just the BBC, it's any broadcaster, because it costs nonzero dollars, time, and effort to move something online that they have no idea whether anyone cares about. Our national TV archives are like that as well, tons of stuff in vaults but if you want to see it you need to contact them and ask for it. I did that for some zany 80s comedy that they had listed but wasn't online, a few weeks later it was online, they just needed an indication that there was some interest in it.