Ben Okonkwo: Jonathan, quick — before we get into anything, tell me: how many Doctor Who episodes do you think exist from the show's first six years?
Jonathan Ingles: I mean — I have no idea. Most of them?
Ben Okonkwo: 158. Out of 253. The other 95 are gone. And the BBC ran that programme. They didn't lose those tapes to a flood or a warehouse fire — they erased them. Deliberately. Between 1967 and 1978.
Jonathan Ingles: Hold on. The BBC erased Doctor Who.
Ben Okonkwo: They called it wiping — you take the magnetic tape, you erase the content, you reuse the stock. It was standard practice. Tape was expensive and storage space was limited and nobody, nobody at the time thought these episodes had any value past their original broadcast run.
Jonathan Ingles: And the conflicting departments thing? Because I've read that it wasn't even one clean decision — it's messier than that.
Ben Okonkwo: That's the actually interesting part. The BBC Film Library and BBC Enterprises had overlapping and unclear responsibilities for what got kept. So in practice — neither of them did it. Each assumed the other was archiving. No malice required. Just a system that assigned preservation to no one in particular.
Jonathan Ingles: That's the thing that should unsettle people. Because 'nobody was responsible' sounds like an excuse, but it's actually the diagnosis.
Ben Okonkwo: And it raises a question I don't think has a comfortable answer — if the BBC could lose 95 episodes of Doctor Who this way, through bureaucratic ambiguity and a single bad assumption about value, what else is disappearing right now on exactly the same logic?
Jonathan Ingles: And the answer is: the same thing that was always happening. The medium was already telling you it was dying — and nobody listened. That's the part I want to pull on, because it's counterintuitive. Analog formats are not silent about their decay. Nitrate film, for instance — it doesn't just fade. It becomes sticky, it starts to smell, and in advanced stages it becomes flammable. You can literally smell a deteriorating acetate tape because vinegar syndrome produces acetic acid. Someone walks into a vault and it smells like a salad dressing factory — that's the tape dying. These formats announce themselves.
Ben Okonkwo: So if you can smell it dying — why didn't people act?
Jonathan Ingles: The Library of Congress finding. Videotape lasts decades. Not centuries — decades. Film and paper, properly stored, can survive for centuries. Most people running archives in the 1970s and 80s knew the tape was degrading. They just assumed they had more runway than they did. The visible decay created false confidence, not urgency.
Ben Okonkwo: Hm. The smell was evidence of a problem but also — evidence you still had time?
Jonathan Ingles: Exactly that. And CLIR documented the mechanisms in detail — the polyurethane binder on magnetic tape hydrolyzes from heat and humidity, which causes the oxide layer to shed. Sticky shed syndrome. You thread a deteriorating tape through a playback head and it literally gums up the machine. That's not subtle. But knowing a thing is happening and acting on that knowledge are two completely different decisions.
Ben Okonkwo: Wait — so the tape audibly fails on playback?
Jonathan Ingles: The heads seize. You can hear the drag. It's — I mean, picture a conservator at a regional television archive, 1991, threading a tape from a 1965 broadcast. The machine starts grinding. She knows immediately. She also knows she has maybe four hundred other tapes in that same condition and a digitization budget of roughly nothing. The decay was visible. The intervention never came.
Ben Okonkwo: That's the gap right there. Visible decay is not the same as institutional will to act on it.
Jonathan Ingles: Right — and frankly, the visibility actually made it worse in one specific way. Because visible decay gave archivists something to report upward. 'We know about the problem.' That report substitutes for action. It becomes the action.
Ben Okonkwo: So the documentation of the crisis became cover for not solving it.
Jonathan Ingles: Look, CLIR publishes foundational work on magnetic media degradation. The knowledge is there. It's been there. The problem was never that we didn't understand vinegar syndrome or sticky shed. The problem was that understanding the chemistry of decay and treating it as a resource allocation emergency are not the same response.
Ben Okonkwo: And the thing I keep wondering — if visible decay was already this dangerous because it created false confidence, what happens when the format doesn't warn you at all?
Jonathan Ingles: That's actually where it gets worse — because the DuMont archives didn't warn anyone. They didn't decay. They were dumped into the Hudson River in 1977.
Ben Okonkwo: Physically thrown in. Not a fire, not a flood.
Jonathan Ingles: Someone got a memo. Clear this warehouse by Friday, storage budget is cut, DuMont's been off the air since 1956 — nobody's asking for these tapes. And into the river they go. That's not chemistry. That's a decision with a deadline.
Ben Okonkwo: And here's what I want to push on — is that actually different from what the BBC did? Because I think we treat deliberate destruction and passive neglect as separate categories. But the causal mechanism might be identical.
Jonathan Ingles: They're the same economic logic. Treating something as commercially exhausted means treating it as disposable — whether you wipe the tape or put it in the river is almost incidental. The decision precedes both acts.
Ben Okonkwo: Okay, but — actually, no, I want to be careful here. The BBC deletion programme ran from 1967 to 1978, and that was a resource and rights decision made at the institutional level. The DuMont disposal in 1977 is one facilities manager with a Friday deadline and no inventory list. The scale of deliberateness is different even if the outcome isn't.
Jonathan Ingles: The Internet Archive's Vanishing Culture documentation makes exactly this point — it's not anecdotal. Institutional deprioritization is the through-line. Whether it's a committee decision at the BBC or a facilities guy with a skip loader, the upstream cause is the same: nobody assigned future value to the content.
Ben Okonkwo: And it's not even limited to formats that could degrade. The very earliest television broadcasts — live transmission, no tape at all. No decay process required for total loss. They're gone because there was nothing to preserve in the first place.
Jonathan Ingles: Which is — I mean, that's the extreme version of the same logic. If nobody decided it was worth recording, the format question is irrelevant.
Ben Okonkwo: So the through-line across all of it — the BBC wiping Doctor Who, the DuMont archives in the Hudson, live broadcasts that never existed on tape — is that institutions assigned zero future value and the content followed that assignment to its conclusion. The BBC and DuMont weren't uniquely irresponsible. They were responding rationally to incentives that made archived content worthless.
Jonathan Ingles: Rational actors, catastrophic collective outcome. And the thing is — that incentive structure didn't die in 1978. It just migrated to a new format. Which is where this gets uncomfortable in a way we haven't touched yet.
Ben Okonkwo: You mean the digital assumption — that copying solves everything. Because I think that's where the real trap is, and it's the part of this that should genuinely alarm people.
Jonathan Ingles: The digital assumption is exactly the trap. Because people think switching from tape to hard drives solved the decay problem. It didn't. It replaced slow, visible decay with something categorically more dangerous — silent, sudden failure. A deteriorating tape tells you it's dying. A failing hard drive? The LED is still green. The folder still opens. You can have a drive that is actively corrupting data and nothing looks different from the outside.
Ben Okonkwo: Wait — no visible sign at all?
Jonathan Ingles: Nothing. And I want to make this concrete. Picture a digital archivist at a regional broadcaster, 2019, checking a hard drive that holds thirty years of digitized local news footage. She opens the directory. The files are listed. She spot-checks two clips. They play. She closes the drive and logs it as verified. What she doesn't know is that four hundred other files on that same drive have silently corrupted — bit rot, sector failure, nobody announced it. She finds out two years later when someone actually tries to access them.
Ben Okonkwo: So the spot-check was evidence that nothing was wrong, when it was actually evidence that the spot-check is insufficient.
Jonathan Ingles: Right — and now layer in the paradox, because this is the part that I think is genuinely underappreciated. Digital can be copied perfectly. Indefinitely. That's real. You don't get generational loss like with analog dubbing. But that capability is also — I mean, it's almost a trap. Because it means the urgency never arrives. There's no smell. No grinding playback head. The preservation work never feels critical until the drive is already dead.
Ben Okonkwo: So the infinite-copy argument actually reduces the copies made.
Jonathan Ingles: That's the exact paradox. And then there's a second layer — even when the file survives, you can lose access through obsolescence. Early game cartridges. Proprietary disc formats. Content that physically exists but cannot be read because the hardware to read it is gone. The medium outlived the machine.
Ben Okonkwo: Which connects — actually, that maps almost exactly onto what Amazon and Netflix do when licensing expires.
Jonathan Ingles: Say more.
Ben Okonkwo: So streaming services remove significant volumes of films and TV when licensing agreements expire or the content isn't commercially viable anymore. That content might still exist somewhere — in a private publisher archive — but there's no guarantee of future public access. Which is functionally the same as the BBC wiping tape. The result is identical. The mechanism is a contract clause instead of a bulk eraser.
Jonathan Ingles: And the copyright framework is what makes that permanent. Because libraries and cultural institutions can't legally preserve what they can't legally copy. Long-term control sits with commercial rights holders, not archives. The Library of Congress cannot step in and say 'this is at risk, we're making a preservation copy.' The law won't allow it.
Ben Okonkwo: There's a 2025 paper — Indian Journal of Legal Review — that actually argues piracy has become a significant informal preservation mechanism as a result. The argument being that when rights frameworks prioritize commercial ownership over cultural access, informal copying fills the gap. I'll flag: it's one jurisdiction, India, and it's a single study, so I'd hold that finding carefully. But the logic it describes isn't geographically limited.
Jonathan Ingles: I'll grant the mechanism without endorsing the policy implication. And frankly, the proposed alternative — there's a blockchain and NFT framework floated in preservation circles, the idea being that decentralized ownership solves the obsolescence problem — it suffers the exact same vulnerability it claims to fix. The tokens depend on networks that can go offline. The files still need hardware to read them. You've just renamed the single point of failure.
Ben Okonkwo: So the pattern is consistent — every technical solution inherits the institutional problem underneath it. Which means the real question isn't which format survives longest. It's who decides it's worth saving in the first place.
Jonathan Ingles: And that's — I mean, that's the actual conclusion, isn't it. Not that we failed to solve a technical problem. We solved plenty of technical problems. We understood vinegar syndrome. CLIR documented sticky shed syndrome in detail. The Library of Congress told us videotape lasts decades, not centuries. We knew. The conclusion is that the categories taking the highest losses — early television, regional radio, early mobile games, niche streaming releases — they all share the same three conditions simultaneously. Format vulnerability, institutional deprioritization, zero commercial incentive. All three at once. That's not bad luck.
Ben Okonkwo: And grassroots communities are still out there doing recovery work — pulling content from private collections, fan archives. That's real. But irreversible degradation is irreversible. Vinegar syndrome doesn't pause while someone fundraises.
Jonathan Ingles: No. It doesn't.
Ben Okonkwo: The thing that clicked for me — going through all of this — is that we frame media loss as something happening to us. Like an external force. But the era-specific loss rates show a pattern. Pre-1970s television loses at structurally higher rates than film from the same period. Not because the tape was harder to keep. Because the institutions running the tape decided broadcasts were ephemeral and films weren't. That was a choice. Dressed up as a storage constraint.
Jonathan Ingles: We preserved what generated revenue. Everything else got assigned to no one. That's — frankly, that's the whole story.
Ben Okonkwo: Yeah. And I'm not sure there's a comfortable version of that.
Jonathan Ingles: There isn't one. The DuMont archives in the Hudson River in 1977, the BBC wiping 95 Doctor Who episodes, Amazon pulling a film the moment a licensing agreement lapses — same decision, different decade, different mechanism. The through-line is that someone with authority looked at the content and decided the cost of keeping it exceeded any imaginable future value.
Ben Okonkwo: Right — and what I'll carry out of this is something small, actually. Not the scale of the loss. Just the specific image of a BBC archivist in 1968 erasing a Doctor Who tape to reuse the stock, genuinely believing they were making a reasonable resource decision. They weren't wrong by the logic available to them. That's the part that sits uncomfortably.
