Censor clip

Censor clips were a common practice in numerous countries to physically remove some clips from the tape which were deemed offensive. This was common practice in Australia and New Zealand while they were broadcasting new Doctor Who serials.

For each episode, the section that was considered inappropriate for viewers was physically cut from the 16mm film print and spliced back together to hide the cut. In 1996, Damian Shanahan and Ellen Parry discovered a wide collection of censor clips from Doctor Who in Australia. In 2002, Graham Howard, a New Zealand fan, located a film collector who possessed any censor clips from the NZBC, such as Episodes 2, 4, and 5 of The Web of Fear and Episode 5 of The Wheel in Space.

Damian Shanahan and Ellen Parry had found paper records relating to early to mid William Hartnell stories, the excised portions for all stories from An Unearthly Child to The Gunfighters had been destroyed some time before their investigation.

These are important in the context of Doctor Who archive history because some of those moments were the only surviving clips original to their respective episodes, which had long gone missing as a result of the BBC's archival policies. Select few episodes have the opposite problem, with frames and even full scenes missing from recovered copies of episodes, forcing reconstruction crews to get creative when creating a presentable version of the full story.

Examples

 * A sword-fight scene in The Time Meddler was censored in Nigeria. This is one of the few instances of a censor clip being bad in the search for missing episodes, as when the rest of the episode was recovered this scene was not in the reel. This was documented in the DVD feature The Lost Twelve Seconds. It was recreated for the Blu-ray release of the Season 2 - The Collection.
 * The sequence in Fury from the Deep of Quill gassing Maggie Harris, was censored in Australia. The scene was among those found in 1996. The rest of the episode has not been found elsewhere.