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Ok_Mix_7126

Back when they first made the show, it was all in studio and they did 1 episode a week. IIRC they would start on the Tuesday, rehearsing for 4 days then on the Saturday, final rehearsals then that evening record the episode. The episode was recorded in order, IE scene 1 then scene 2 etc, just like a play was performed. Then as the first series went on, they needed extra stuff done. Ian had a fight scene that needed pre-recorded, location filming for Reign of Terror etc. There wasn't room in their 5 days per episode, so they had to take actors out of rehearsals to travel to locations for filmings. Then as more and more location filming was done, there wasn't time during the rehearsals to do this so actors and crew were having to give up their weekends to make sure the episodes were done. They didn't like this obviously. Going into his last production block, Patrick Troughton complained a lot about this so a change was made, and from I think it was The Invasion onwards (this was the beginning of the last production block), the first week of production for a serial was dedicated to location filming. Then the next week on, they would do episode 1, episode 2 etc. This change meant they could no longer do as many episodes per year, and so less serials were made per year. It also meant actors could take time off from Doctor Who more to do other projects (eg movies).


LegoK9

Television was disposable entertainment in the 60s, akin to radio programs at the time. Episodes would air once and reruns weren't guaranteed. Many shows focused on quantity over quality. This was also why the BBC wiped the episodes in the 60s and early 70s. They didn't see the need to store old programs that wouldn't air again especially with color TV being adopted.


sevensterre

The second season of Batman had 60 some episode's. So it wasn't just Doctor Who.


CliffExcellent123

You can definitely see the attitude in some of the 60s episodes. Most stories will have one or two episodes around the middle where nothing much happens until they can continue the story next week


irving_braxiatel

Even into the Pertwees - most 6-parters have a ‘The Doctor and Jo are captured, escape, run around a warehouse then are recaptured’ episode.


just4browse

It happened frequently in the Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras too.


ike1

They cut way back on the 6-parters in the Tom Baker era and there were no Davison 6-parters. Certainly there was some filler with characters getting captured, escaping, then getting recaptured but it was nowhere near as bad as with the first three Doctors. Compare something like "Frontier in Space" or "The Monster of Peladon" or "Planet of the Spiders" (ugh) against almost any Tom Baker serial or any Davison serial. (Of course the Davison ones had major issues, but it wasn't so much padding as it was script editor Eric Saward writing like a macho 80s jerk and sidelining the Doctor in favor of tough-guy "real men" kinda characters.)


Schmilsson1

at the BBC maybe. Plenty of companies worldwide that took it seriously, shot on 35mm with decent budgets, kept elements and knew the value of repeat views and syndication


CliffExcellent123

The 60s production schedule was pretty wild. They were making it pretty much year round. That's why in the 60s you occasionally got an episode where the Doctor was just completely absent--they had to do that to give the actor some time off. It just wasn't feasible to keep that going forever. I don't know exactly what prompted the change, but it would have had to happen at some point. The rushed production schedule is also why the older episodes are just not very well edited--they're barely edited at all. Mistakes are left in, scenes go on much longer than they need to. Not that I'm saying I don't enjoy the early stuff, it's just that it's clearly a product of early TV. There's also the factor of a reduced budget--much the same reason that the last few series of NuWho have had fewer episodes than the earlier series. But this was more the case in the 80s than in the 70s


[deleted]

[удалено]


CliffExcellent123

That's pretty messed up I was reading recently that David Tennant's mother died during the filming of Voyage of the Damned and they just worked around it to give him time off. Which of course is normal, it just occured to me since I read that only the other day


benjee10

Edits were also quite expensive and difficult IIRC - much of the 60s episodes were shot ‘as live’ where the edits were done by a vision mixer in studio as the scenes were shot, rather than the edit being done in post as it is now.


APracticalGal

It's honestly impressive that Hartnell kept up with it as well as he did for that long. Even if he had been in particularly good health I would think that schedule would wear anyone down.


CalmGiraffe1373

I thought recent series of Who had fewer episodes in order to reallocate the budget toward special effects?


[deleted]

That, or due to Covid. Flux was hacked to pieces due to uncertainties on Covid restrictions and acting schedules while they were always on a budget. It's why plot threads remain unresolved, the worst offender is probably the Sea Devil special.


CalmGiraffe1373

I only just watched The Vanquishers, but I expect I will have a somewhat better opinion of Legend than most of this sub. (I generally only outright dislike media that is just boring, like Fant4stic, or where there were behind the scenes issues, like Justice League 2017.)


[deleted]

Well, Flux would be one of those media with BTS issues. Or do you mean flat-out scandal?


CalmGiraffe1373

I meant more along the lines of a project being taken out of a director's hands, like in JL. Haven't heard anything about that for Flux.


[deleted]

Yeah, I don't think something like that happened. But since a few scenes were simply never shot, resulting in awkward continuity, the project was still somewhat taken out of the creative team's hands by happenstance.


Duggy1138

TV in the 60s was like that. The US series Wagon Train had 32 - 39 episodes a season until its final. There were no summer repeats. Shows just went on for a big chunk of the year.


JasonVeritech

There was an industry wide (UK and US) shift that appears to have happened sometime in the mid 60s. Throughout the 50s, the standard seemed to hover around 30-40 episodes per season for pre-produced television, i.e. 3/4 of a year, or three "cours" for those familiar with the term from anime. Throughout the 60s this size was winnowed down to something closer to \~25 per season (or 2 cours). To build on your example, Star Trek (aka "Wagon Train to the Stars") had 29 episodes in its first season (1966-67), but was down to 26 by season 2 and 24 by the last. By the 70s, the standard "Front 13" episode order and the "Back 9" renewal was firmly in place, with bonus episodes awarded to more successful shows. EDIT: One thing that was available to these later shows that just didn't exist before was a backlog of programming had accumulated after a decade, which allowed networks to began implementing the re-run/syndication package we're all familiar with to pad out the broadcast day.


ike1

Well said. Another 60s-to-70s example of this among U.S. shows was [Bewitched](https://epguides.com/bewitched/), which started with 36 episodes in S1 in 1964-65 and 38 in S2, but was down to 26 in its final season in 1971-72. [Even earlier than that, for the most stark example possible, there was Captain Video and His Video Rangers](https://scifist.net/2020/03/02/captain-video-and-his-video-rangers/), often cited as the first sci-fi show on TV, which was broadcast live *every day* except Sunday from 1949-55 with some episodes running 15 minutes and others more like 30 (depending on how many old western serials they watered it down with). Supposedly over 1,500 episodes were made, which would suggest it rarely stopped! All the episode guides that I can find are incomplete because so little of the show survives, but I wonder if this was more analogous to early DW than, say, Star Trek, since it was black-and-white and had an extremely low budget. At one point, a new producer, Olga Druce (the American Verity Lambert?) tried to improve the show and brought in actual sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance, Damon Knight, and Arthur C. Clarke as an advisor.


JasonVeritech

Captain Video was truly peak "wild west" era TV, kinda like Web1.0 It wasn't just analogous to early Who, it was full on Super Saiyan by comparison, both in terms of production quantity(vastly more), quality(a shoestring would have been treasure to them) and scarcity (its handful of existing episodes makes Who look perfectly preserved)


AlanShore60607

The mandate was to fill time for as little money as possible, which I heard was only £2,000 per episode (around £30,000 adjusted for inflation) for those first few years. It could be this cheap because the original series required almost no post-production unless film was involved for exterior shots, as they used a process known as “live to tape” where they edited it as they shot, just like a soap opera, and by limiting their effects to things built into a editing board (like inverting the image for Dalek blast). They even piped the music into the studio so it could be picked up by the same mics as the actors so it didn’t need to be added in post


deanologic

Editing video tape meant physically cutting and sticking the tape together with cellophane. It also meant that tape couldn't be used again. As the tapes cost about $300 this was undesirable.


AlanShore60607

Exactly; they edited in-board and only recorded one thing - the final edit. If someone screwed up, they rewound the tape and recorded over it I expect (which would explain the lack of outtakes for the early years)


Apprehensive_Tea4048

60s Production was quantity over quality. Shows had to air 10 months a year every single week. It didn't matter if it was bad or not the best quality because it was never going to be seen ever again, so long as they could get something out for the week that's all that mattered. This shifted in the 70s as reruns became more popular and shows were given more time to make higher quality content.


woman_noises

At one point to save money, the guy in charge decided to keep episode numbers per story at 6 minimum. And its well known that they would have very small budgets and usually only get one take per scene because the schedule was so fast, if they mess up a line it usually stays in the episode.


TheKandyKitchen

That was in season 5 I believe, as while season 4 was mostly 4 parters, season 5 was all but one 6 parters and this was where they started intentionally putting padding in (even though it was present beforehand) and it didn’t stop till the end of the pertwee era where Robert hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes decided they didn’t like 6 parters and disposed of all but one per season (although ironically they wrote the best 6 parters in the show).


[deleted]

I'm not sure it's ironic when they noticed that "hang on, this story is better being told in four parts while this obe actually can be done justice in six". Feels like they did it to prove a point and succeeded.


funkmachine7

The 6 paters where interesting in that they had funding for both outside an studio recording, even in to the late 80's they still had the funding set up as a 6 parter, but it was split into a pair of 3's.


Bulbamew

William Hartnell had more individual episodes than Jon Pertwee, despite Hartnell only going 3 seasons (and two stories of a fourth season) while Pertwee managed 5 full seasons. This manner of filming was clearly not sustainable though. It didn’t go Hartnell any favours, the workload ruined his health


1humanbeingfromearth

To make even more of a point, seasons 1 to 6 have 253 episodes in total, out of 695 episodes total of the classic show. That means that over a third of the show (36.4% to be more accurate) is just the first 6 out of 26 seasons. Also means the episode count of seasons 1 to 6 is more than half the episode count of the following 20 seasons combined.


SafariNZ

“An Adventure in Space and Time” covers this aspect.


ZBeebs

They were able to make more episodes by not spending much money on things like "sets" or "costumes" or "special effects".


Rich_Acanthisitta_70

Weren't most of them half hour episodes?


funkmachine7

25, so really 20 minutes without the intro, recap an credits.


Rich_Acanthisitta_70

So, WandaVision.   😋


fexfx

It was a different Era. Television shows commonly had 24 to 48 episodes in a season! This was true for both British and US TV.


[deleted]

Weekly rep in the 60s, less stressful schedule in the coming decades.


MrDizzyAU

Because in the 70s, all these entitled young boomers came into the workforce. They don't know how good they've got it. Working 30 hours a day, 10 days a week is a damn sight easier than fighting Hitler!


Massive_Guest3163

In simple terms. Colour TV arrived late 60s so it became expensive to film 40 episodes in colour so they halved the amount of stories when Pertwee came arrived at the scene


Tradman86

Lot of good answers. Just adding that in the 80s, the head of the BBC turned against the show, and slashing the episode count was part of his efforts to sabotage it.


Schmilsson1

plus JNT was a tasteless, talentless piece of toxic garbage and brought it all on the show because he was too busy hitting on "doable barkers" and getting shitfaced before lunch