Doctor Who Restoration Team

The Doctor Who Restoration Team is a loose collection of Doctor Who fans, many within the television industry, who restore Doctor Who episodes for release on DVD.

The Restoration Team was formed in 1992 when a small group of Doctor Who fans approached the BBC's Television Archivist wanting funding for a unique project. This original project was to restore monochrome recordings of a Jon Pertwee story back to their original colour form, as the originals had been lost. The results of this were so successful that the BBC Archives co-funded the Team to restore three more complete stories. Since then, the Team has expanded and has contributed to many Doctor Who projects for both BBC Television and BBC Worldwide. These include many of the final Doctor Who VHS releases and all of the "classic series" DVD releases to date.

During the original colour restorations, the team were keen to present the episodes as close to the original broadcast master tapes as possible, as explained by senior Restoration Team content producer Steve Roberts:

One thing which the team had to constantly be wary of was the temptation to not just restore, but to also improve on the original ... This would not be in the spirit of restoration, and the viewer would not be seeing a fair representation of the story as it originally was.

In 1997, whilst working on the VHS release of The War Machines, the approach of straight restoration, that of returning the episodes to their original state, became compromised by the desire to improve upon what was originally broadcast. Sound engineer Mark Ayres explained the difficulties:

There are some difficult decisions as to how far I should take my work. Because the original video has been transferred to film, I've tried to remove anything which was added during the process of optical copying – in other words taking it back to its condition on original transmission.

The War Machines featured a couple of instances of sound effects being faded in at the wrong points during the original studio recordings. Ayres:

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