This article was taken from the January issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online

In 1967, the BBC set about junking its Doctor Who archive: a moment sci-fi fans wish they could travel back in time to prevent. There are 108 vintage episodes missing, but since 1978 a number have been rediscovered as 16mm black-and-white films. The BBC shot many of these series in colour, but made monochrome copies for countries such as Australia, where many TV companies were still broadcasting in greyscale. The reels had sat in archives since. Now, the Doctor Who Restoration Team, an independent group contracted by the BBC, is using a new technique to regenerate The Doctor in colour.

Their method is a refined version of that trialled on the 2009


Planet of the Daleks rerelease; it is now being deployed on a seven-part 1970 Jon Pertwee adventure, The Ambassadors of Death. "It seemed almost impossible," says Steve Roberts, 45, the team's supervisor and a BBC senior engineer. "But when they made the black-and-white recordings, they didn't filter off the colour carrier [encoded as a 'chroma dot' pattern in each frame], which for the last few decades has been nothing more than an annoyance." Team member Richard Russell used the signal to reverse-engineer raw colour pictures that could be retouched frame by frame. "It's very, very labour intensive -- several hundred man hours' work every episode," says Roberts. Luckily, a new "quadrant editor" is helping them to produce better source material upfront, so they hope to deliver the Ambassadors episodes to the BBC within weeks.

Roberts got into this work through Who fandom -- but has it ruined the show for him? "Yeah... We were always fans. We used to pull these stories out to watch just for enjoyment. Now I'm like,

'I'll watch something else.'" restoration-team.co.uk