Tele - snaps Tele - snaps — also rendered Tele - Snaps and telesnaps — were photographs taken by John Cura of a television programme ' s transmission . In the days when the price of videotape was still prohibitive , they offered a means of capturing some kind of visual record of television . In many cases , they became the " only " surviving visual record of monochromatic episodes that went missing from the British Broadcasting Corporation ' s archives . Tele - snaps were only taken of " Doctor Who " episodes produced from " An Unearthly Child " in 1963 through to " The Mind Robber " in 1968 . Not all stories were known to be tele - snapped , however , so there are some stories which are both missing and without tele - snaps . Overview . In 1947 John Cura , a self - taught man with a passion for electronics , sent a letter to the BBC offering what he called " Tele - Snaps " , or still photographs taken at various intervals during the programme ' s broadcast . His basic method was simple : point a 35mm camera at a television and shoot . Normally , Cura would take around sixty photographs for a half - hour episode and provide these on a contact sheet to the BBC or other interested buyers . The devil , however , was in the details . Cura ' s process was unique , which is why the word " tele - snaps " applies solely to his work . Two things made his services unique : his camera and his practice of providing contact sheets of entire episodes . His camera took images at the speed of 1 / 25th of a second — the standard PAL frame rate . And he had his camera set to an unknown focal length so that it would appear slightly blurry to the operator , but stood a better chance of counteracting the convex nature of early television screens . These two things meant that he was able to capture individual frames of programmes with each click , whereas his rivals , at least initially , couldn ' t . Thus their waste rate was much higher than his , meaning he got a much higher percentage of " good " images of each show . Tele - snaps can further be characterised by what they are " not " : Though " Doctor Who " fans are naturally focused on tele - snaps of " Doctor Who " , this work was only a minor portion of Cura ' s output . His heyday was in the 1950s and his workload increased tremendously after ITV started broadcasts in the middle of that decade . When he first started capturing " Doctor Who " he was nearing the end of his " golden age " . He made a decision in 1964 to increase his prices , and this made the BBC balk . Almost immediately , business from the BBC began to slow , and certainly by 1965 , " Doctor Who " producer John Wiles couldn ' t quite justify the tele - snap expense in his budgets . Although Cura would regain his " Doctor Who " commissions under Innes Lloyd , Wiles showed they were a producer ' s " choice " not a " pro forma " part of making " Doctor Who " . Of course , this had pretty much always been the case , since " Doctor Who " episodes had always been completely telerecorded . After Cura died in 1969 , his widow offered his complete collection of negatives and prints — literally hundreds of thousands of images — to the BBC . When they rudely declined the offer , she burned the entire archive . This was a devastating loss to cultural historians , since unique images from television of the mid - 20th century were destroyed in that intentional blaze . Certainly , the negatives to " Doctor Who " tele - snaps were lost " en masse " at this point . But it was also probable that tele - snaps that we now consider " missing " were destroyed then , too . Legality . The legality of Cura ' s tele - snaps was never settled by the courts or Parliament in his lifetime , though the BBC were certainly concerned about it . In the 1950s , they tried to get the British Parliament to enact legislation that defined ownership of the " image " of a transmission , specifically because they wanted to restrict or even eliminate Cura ' s business . Parliament , however , never obliged . Despite this , they did ask him to limit the people to whom he sold the telesnaps . He mostly ignored this request . In fact , the BBC were never able to exercise any traditional element of copyright control over tele - snaps . They had no physical access to the negatives , nor did they get a royalty when he sold his images to others . Worse , they actually paid him for images of what was ostensibly their own work . So they were his " de facto " copyright — even though , technically , the matter was never resolved . Availability . The hunt for tele - snaps is a bit like the hunt for missing episodes themselves . The BBC largely trashed their collection of tele - snaps , leaving it up to amateur sleuths to find them . After a lot of false trails , a few discoveries have been made . The biggest haul of tele - snaps was the stupendous find at the BBC Written Archive Centre in Reading , England . Discovered in 1993 by Stephen James Walker and Marcus Hearn , the find included virtually every known tele - snap from the Innes Lloyd and Derrick Sherwin eras . They were immediately fast - tracked for publication in " Doctor Who Magazine " by its then - editor Gary Russell . Unlike the missing episode hunt , however , finding tele - snaps is a much smaller - scale affair that begins with the production notes held by the BBC . These notes tell whether the producer had actually commissioned the tele - snaps . Conventional wisdom holds that if a producer didn ' t commission the tele - snaps , they probably don ' t exist . This presumption may be incorrect , however . Cura could well have tele - snapped a serial for which he wasn ' t commissioned by the BBC , since he accepted commissions from actors and directors and — by the 1960s — simply anyone who would pay . He was also known to take tele - snaps speculatively in the hopes of selling them on to interested parties . Indeed , the fact that many tele - snaps were found in the hands of director s suggests the tantalising possibility that other individuals might well have commissioned " Doctor Who " tele - snaps privately from Cura . Adding fuel to this possibility is the fact that the relatively minor guest actor , Michael Wolf and writer Hugh David were the original sources of tele - snaps on " The Moonbase " and " The Highlanders " , respectively . First principle . Nevertheless , the basic assumption of people interested in tele - snaps is that they have to have been commissioned by the BBC to exist . And what we can say in general is : This means there ' s a significant period of 1965 where there are no known tele - snaps . Again , Cura " could have " made tele - snaps and sold them to other people , but we don ' t know . Stories without any visual record . If the episodes themselves also are missing , then there simply is no visual record of those stories . This means that there are only three stories which have absolutely no visual record whatsoever , barring , in one story ' s case , some off - screen 8mm cine camera footage . : Episodes without any visual record . A number of partially - missing stories , however , have no visual records for their missing episodes . In most cases that means that individual characters do have some surviving material . But there are some unlucky actors who appeared in only a single episode who have no visual records at all . In addition to the above whole serial s , " individual episodes " without visual records are : Other cases . Obviously , the above questions are the ones that most interest " Doctor Who " fans . But if you ' re a fan of tele - snaps , then you might be interested in some other issues : Most fans simply don ' t care when tele - snaps of existing episodes go missing , but it is certainly known , for instance , that " The Chase " and " The Web Planet " — amongst others — were fully tele - snapped , but no one knows where those tele - snaps are . Of slightly greater interest are those episodes whose tele - snap status isn ' t clearly known . " The Lion " , for instance has an ambiguous status , which used to be a matter of some fan consternation . After the episode was recovered in New Zealand , however , the issue of whether Cura had been commissioned became less pressing . Indeed , " The Crusade " is a highly interesting case , because there are full tele - snaps for the missing episodes " The Knight of Jaffa " and " The Warlords " , but production records don ' t clearly indicate whether " The Lion " and " The Wheel of Fortune " were tele - snapped . Still , they are " presumed " tele - snapped , since it would be odd to tele - snap only episodes one and three of a four - part story . Where you can see them . " Doctor Who Magazine " was the first place that published tele - snaps for public consumption . They ran a regular feature , in which they tried to assemble a story by captioning tele - snaps . Even as late as DWMSE 34 , they used tele - snaps in this way . The Doctor Who website took much the same approach , and even had the most complete collection of tele - snaps available for public consumption . Tele - snaps also form the basis for most professional and amateur video reconstructions of missing and / or incomplete 1960s " Doctor Who " adventures , such as those made by Loose Cannon Productions .