Editing Out of the Unknown (section)

==Archive status==
Of the forty-nine episodes of ''Out of the Unknown'' only twenty survive in their entirety, mainly from series one.

=== Background ===
Until 1978, when the [[BBC]] Film and Videotape Library was created as a permanent archive for all its television programmes, the BBC had no central archive. The [[videotapes]] and [[Kinescope|film recordings]] stored in the BBC's various libraries were often either wiped or discarded for recording new programmes and to free storage space to reduce costs. The BBC Film Library kept only some programmes that were made on film, while the Engineering Department handled videotape but had no mandate to retain material. Some shows were kept by [[BBC Enterprises]], but they too had limited storage space and kept only material that was considered commercially exploitable. In the mid-1970s BBC Enterprises disposed of a lot of older material for which the rights to sell the programmes had expired, and the Engineering Department routinely wiped videotapes in an era when rescreening potential was limited.

The wiping policy officially came to an end in 1978, when the means to further exploit programmes by taking advantage of the new market for home [[Videocassette recorder|VCRs]] started to become apparent. The prevailing view had also begun to shift toward the attitude that archive programmes should, in any case, be preserved for posterity and historical and cultural reasons. The BBC Film Library was turned into a combined Film & Videotape Library for the preservation of both media.

=== Recovery ===
After the archive purge ended in 1978 only 17 episodes of the series were retained. Series 1 has fared remarkably well, with the fortuitous retention of ten 16&nbsp;mm film [[Kinescope|telerecordings]] made for the purposes of overseas sales. These were discovered at Villiers House, alongside several 60s ''Doctor Who'' episodes. Of the other seven, one episode was from Series 2, one episode from Series 3, and five episodes from Series 4, all retained in their original broadcast format (''The Machine Stops'' in 35&nbsp;mm telerecording in the Brentford library, and the rest in 625 line colour 2-inch [[Quadruplex videotape]]).

Recovery of the missing episodes had often been in the form of clips, either audio or video. The recovered visual clips from series 3 and 4 were in black and white since they were from 16&nbsp;mm t/r of the episodes for overseas broadcast. They were restored in 2014 using Richard Russell's colour recovery process, which uses colour signal information (commonly referred to as chroma dots) embedded in the 16mm black and white film recordings, to recreate the colour part of the original signal.

* A 2½-minutes section of ''Satisfaction Guaranteed'' survived, courtesy a 28/12/67 edition BBC-1 science documentary series Towards Tomorrow entitled Robot.
* The fourth-series episodes ''The Last Witness'' and ''The Uninvited'', both of which are missing, were remade as episodes of ''[[Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense]]'' – respectively as "A Distant Scream" and "In Possession" – and broadcast in the UK in 1986.
* Around the same time, Ian Levine discovered ''Lambda 1'' which was returned.
* Parts of an almost 2½ minutes segment of the series 3 episode ''Liar!'' resurfaced for the first time after the archive purge in a 1997 Future Fantastic documentary series edition 'I Robot'.
* In late January 1999, during the BBC's then systematic D3 conversion of its archived videotapes, the b/w extant recording (with colour signals retained) of series 3 episode ''The Little Black Bag'' was discovered. Having started work on the regional archives, the fragments turned up on an engineering training tape held in the Glasgow holdings of BBC Scotland. The videotape recording starts mid-way, just after Full has cured Angie of the facial scars inflicted on her by a criminal gang she has become involved with. The recovered material begins after this 'eyeline shot' of the gang moving to the rear of the room, with the recording then capturing the action up to third-last scene when Angie tragically demonstrates the medical kit's instruments to a suspicious Mrs. Coleman. Unfortunately, the last thirty seconds of the play were missing from the recording.
* The two missing episodes of the mostly extant first series have end-credits sequences extant on a 1965 BBC Graphics Department showreel, recovered by BBC engineer Steve Roberts in the late nineties.
* Around the same time, 6 audio fragments of the episode ''The Prophet'' and 5 audio fragments of the episodes ''Get Off My Cloud'' (both having ''Doctor Who'' connection) begun started circulating. Both sets of clips originated from the fairly extensive reel-to-reel tape collection of SF fan Trevor Wells, which also contained 3 clips from ''Second Childhood,'' 2 short clips from ''The Fastest Draw'', 1 long clip from ''Satisfaction Guaranteed'', 4 clips from ''Immortality Inc.'', 2 clips from ''Liar!'', 12 clips from ''Something In The Cellar'', 2 clips from ''Random Quest'', 4 clips from ''The Little Black Bag'', 4 clips from ''1+1=1.5'', 6 clips from ''The Fosters'' and 5 clips from ''Target Generation.'' (Probably the surviving audio clips of second season originate from the repeat broadcast of ''The Machine Stops'', ''Level 7'', ''Second Childhood'', ''The Fastest Draw'', ''Satisfaction Guaranteed'' and ''The Prophet'' on BBC 1 in early 1967.) Trevor used an Elizabethan LZ34 recorder and he was able to reuse many of his old tapes to record new tracks at a slower speed. In each case, Trevor recorded only fragments of the broadcast plays as ‘snapshots’ of the various stories; in any case, he found that the cost of tapes prevented him from recording the plays in their entirety. Despite the relative quality of several of these recordings having deteriorated over the years, Trevor's 'snapshots' currently remain the only known record of many missing episodes.
* In 2002, a complete off-air recording of the penultimate episode ''The Uninvited'' was discovered. It was made on 15 August 1972 by fan Martin Townley, during Series 4 repeat broadcast on BBC2 in 1972. A number of other episodes (including ''The Chopper'') were also recorded, although ''The Uninvited'' is the only one to have survived. It was the first complete audio recording of any ''Out of the Unknown'' episode to be discovered.
* In early 2003, a complete recording of ''The Yellow Pill'' was discovered. The existence first came to light, when archive TV enthusiast Mark Slater had an opportunity to sift through approximately 70 reel-to-reel audio tapes owned by his friend Keith Underhill, a SF fan who had routinely taped various television broadcasts since 1968 (including that of ''The Naked Sun'' and ''Liar!'' which were unfortunately wiped).
* Off-screen photographs, called [[tele-snaps]], which were taken by John Cura exist from the missing episodes ''The Fox and the Forest'', ''Andover and the Android'', ''Frankenstein Mark 2'', ''Second Childhood'', ''The Eye'', ''The Fastest Draw'', ''Too Many Cooks'', ''Walk's End'', ''Satisfaction Guaranteed'' and ''The Prophet''. These were published in Mark Ward's ''Out of the Unknown: A guide to the legendary BBC series'' in 2004. A complete set of Tele-snaps from Series 3, when loaned by Alan Bromly's wife to an interested party, went missing. And no telesnaps exist for Series 4, which was produced after John Cura's death.
* In 2004, ''Tunnel Under the World'' was found in a private collection. The return of the episode to the archive was apparently a lengthy process, as the collector who had it had apparently tried to contact BBC about the episode back in 2001.
* In circa 2005, it emerged that the BBC sound archives already held recordings of ''Beach Head'' and ''The Naked Sun'', the latter having 4 minutes 20 seconds missing. To date, there is no information on their origin or how long they had been held in the archive, although it can obviously be inferred that the recording of ''The Naked Sun'' stems from its one and only broadcast in the UK during February 1969.
* A b/w clip of the series 3 episode ''Random Quest'' (featured in a 22/10/70 ''Nationwide'' interview of Roberta Gibbs) was located by BBC archivist Andrew Martin in September 2005, following a lead from engineer James Insell. Next year, a new adaptation of the same story was made for [[BBC Four]] and broadcast on 27 November 2006 as part of that channel's ''Science Fiction Britannia'' season.
* The episode ''Level Seven'' was returned to the archive as a film copy by a European broadcaster in 2006, shown at the [[British Film Institute]] South Bank in August 2009.
* All the series aired in Australia from September 1967 to 1973 in b/w since colour TV appeared in Australia for the first time in 1975. Transmission began with Time in Advance. Unfortunately contractual limitations entailed that the Season 2 and 3 Asimov stories weren’t part of the package. Last showing in Australia was The Sons and Daughters Of Tomorrow. Often, the overseas viewing prints were physically edited for content by local censor boards, before transmission for reasons such as excessive violence, fright-inducing material. In 2017, 2 b/w censor clips, each from ''Immortality Inc.'' and ''The Last Witness'' were discovered.
Neither any audio and/ or video extracts nor any tele-snaps exists from the Series 4 episodes ''Taste of Evil'', ''The Sons and Daughters of Tomorrow'', ''The Chopper'' and ''The Shattered Eye''. The only remains from these episodes are some production stills and brief summaries of these episodes.

=== Home video releases and future ===
Plans were made in 1990s to release two episodes from the series on VHS, but the plan was shelved.

{{Cleanup section|date=November 2024|reason=[[Sentence clause structure#Run-on sentences|Run-on sentences]]}}All surviving episodes of ''Out of the Unknown'', as well as reconstructions (the first three–''Beach Head'', ''The Naked Sun'' and ''The Yellow Pill''– were reconstructed using original audio, publicity photos and CGI, while ''The Uninvited'' has the surviving audio has been synchronized to a copy of the camera script due to the lack of photographs and ''The Little Black Bag'' has some sections reconstructed with the audio segments mentioned above) and clips of some of the missing episodes (except that of ''Immortality Inc.'' and ''The Last Witness''), were released on [[DVD]] by the BFI on 24 November 2014 (delayed from 27 October), with audio commentaries and interviews with cast and crew, a new documentary called ''Return of the Unknown'', extensive stills galleries, and a fully illustrated booklet with essays by show expert Mark Ward with full episode credits.

As mentioned above, Isaac Asimov granted permission for his stories to be adapted on the condition that they could only be shown in the UK: sales to foreign territories were not allowed. Of the six adaptations of Isaac Asimov stories, only two from Series 1 survive. With the rest four being not aired outside UK, the recovery of the missing Asimov episodes from overseas sources remains unlikely.

It is alleged that Beach Head was transferred to b/w 35&nbsp;mm film to allow it to be shown from a cinema projector in Italy but that may have never been returned.

32 episodes from Series 1, 2 and 3 (except the Asimov stories) screened in New Zealand (in black and white of course since colour television was formally introduced to New Zealand in 1973–1975 and the episodes aired till circa 1970), then the prints were sent to various overseas stations such as Finland in October 1968 and February 1970, Hungary in February 1969, Sweden (March 1970), Sierra Leone (December 1971) and Yugoslavia in June 1973. However the episodes from Season 3 ''Something In the Cellar'', ''Random Quest'', ''Little Black Bag'', ''1+1=1.5'', ''The Fosters'', ''Yellow Pill'', ''Target Generation'', ''Get Off My Cloud'' (all from Season 3) have no "fate" recorded against them in the TVNZ archive files, so it is possible these might still exist somewhere in New Zealand.

Some uncertainty still surrounds the fate of the last episodes of Series 4, ''The Chopper'' and ''The Shattered Eye'' apparently documented as being dispatched to Dubai in the 1976 but not returned. Some BBC records continue to list these as still extant, suggesting a hope in the future.

The [[BBC Archive Treasure Hunt]], a public appeal campaign, continues to search for lost episodes.