We must resist the temptation to censor media and film archives

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Should I throw away my Doctor Who DVDs? It’s a question that has taken on new urgency, both because I am approaching middle age and it is, after all, a children’s programme, and because the BBC has announced that it will put all the long-running show’s surviving episodes on its iPlayer streaming platform.

But it’s also a question that illuminates how “the golden age of television” has also been the golden age of the archive: material that would once have been lost, or at least locked in a studio’s vault, has been preserved and made available to view.

Now that golden age is ending, giving way to a new era of deletion and censorship. And with this comes questions about not only the durability of cultural archives, but the obligations of states and institutions to preserve them.

Because Doctor Who is a 60-year-old show, quite a lot has changed since it first appeared on our TV screens. Society has become more tolerant, not least of adults with strong opinions about children’s television. More importantly, when many of the earliest episodes aired, the expectation was that they would be seen once and then forgotten.

The same, of course, is true of newspapers and magazines. Old copies might be found in the British Library or other such archives, but the expectation of my predecessor fifty years ago was not that someone might, with a touch of a button, be able to read his stories decades later.

So the question that not just broadcasters, but all media organisations face is: to what extent should the archival material that appears on their websites reflect their editorial standards and practices today, as opposed to the norms at the time of their original appearance?

That question has already led some streaming companies to take an axe to their back catalogues. Disney+ infamously edited out Daryl Hannah’s bare bottom in Splash, on the grounds that while 1984’s young minds could safely see a naked backside, the children of the 2020s could not.

In a yet sillier example, an episode of the sitcom Community was removed from Hulu and Netflix because it features a character wearing black face paint to dress up as a dark elf. This represents a historical first, in which a programme has been censored to avoid offending a fictional race. A host of other comedies have also had episodes pulled from streaming services.

And although Doctor Who has always been liberal for its times, it has also always been of its times. The 1964 episode “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” features the Doctor saying his granddaughter needs a good smack, while 1966’s “The Celestial Toymaker” features the N-word; 1977’s “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” is every bit as racially insensitive as the title suggests.

Technological ease of search and the digitisation of archives has created a general expectation that we can always access a near-complete collection. But this has changed as concerns around content have seen original programming removed from streaming services — in some cases, without consumers ever having the opportunity to purchase them permanently.

Ultimately, no one has a god-given right to watch The Tomb of the Cybermen, crude racial caricatures and all, on BBC’s iPlayer. But adult viewers should have the freedom to make up their own minds about what they can tolerate on screen.

Troubling decisions have also been made outside the land of fiction. The BBC has, in recent weeks, removed some content featuring Russell Brand, following rape and sexual assault allegations against the presenter. A former employer of mine, the New Statesman, took down a number of articles edited or written by its former editor Peter Wilby, that took on a new and sinister light following Wilby’s conviction for watching images of child sexual abuse.

Yet whatever Brand may or may not have done, the BBC did, in fact, employ him and air material featuring him. Wilby’s horrific crimes are, sadly, as much a part of the New Statesman’s history as anything else. The organisational decisions to remove their material raises the same question of whether archives and websites should aim to be a living history or a perfect one.

The best solution for publishers and broadcasters is, in my view, to have a policy of addition rather than subtraction: new notes and introductions are fine, but deleting our mistakes and creating the impression of a happier, better-run past is a mistake. Given, though, that this doesn’t seem to be the way the wind is blowing, I think I’ll keep hold of my Doctor Who DVDs for a little while longer.

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