Workers Of The World Unite! You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Bicycling Chains!

[This is largely lifted from a post I made on 25 February 2015 on the very wonderful Planet Mondas Forum].

Serious students of Doctor Who's overseas sales and transmissions in the 1960s and early 1970s will be familiar with the notion of bicycling chains. We've all pored over them for hours, long into the night, with only strong drink to sustain us, and a glowing cigarette end to light our way.
















For frivolous students of Doctor Who, teetotallers and non-smokers, the idea, in a nutshell is this: not all overseas broadcasters would get a fresh set of telerecordings straight from BBC Television Enterprises when they bought the series. The sales were made on the basis that a broadcaster would, on demand, return the prints; destroy them; or send ('bicycle') them on to another broadcaster. 

One obvious advantage of this was that it was cheaper than striking new prints all the time; and another was that, if the country receiving the print was relatively close to the one sending it, shipping would also be cheaper and quicker. 

Clearly, bicycling did happen. There's a 1966 article in The Listener that mentions it, which has been published for posterity on Broadwcast - 'A comprehensive online guide to the foreign airdates and worldwide transmissions of Doctor Who'. 

But. Did it happen to the extent that Broadwcast suggests?  I wish to propose a radical new hypothesis for consideration: No, it probably didn't. I'm inclined to think that bicycling chains are largely an illusion, caused by staring too long and too hard at things from a distance of 50 years (yes, like the canals of Mars). 

For starters, one key piece of evidence for their existence seems to be the fact that Rhodesia and Zambia had extraordinarily similar TV schedules (three weeks apart) when Doctor Who debuted in 1965. 

But that may very well have been a special and exceptional case, given that they were effectively the same country when their respective TV stations began in 1960 and 1961: namely, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which didn't break up until the end of 1963. 

There's a great big version of this map here. 

Moreover: Broadwcast's bicycling chains page notes that, according to the 1967 BBC Handbook (page 34), Television Enterprises' Programme Supply Department had sent out 10,700 prints the previous year, and 'in addition' some 3,000 prints were bicycled. It's suggested that this means that most prints 'were only used once'. 

But it doesn't necessarily mean that at all. Some of those 10,700 could have been prints that had been sent out once, sent back to the BBC, and then sent out again. 

And, any way you look at it, the conclusion has to be that, when a TV station received a BBC programme in 1967, it would have been bicycled from somewhere else in only 28% of cases. 

Again - none of this is to suggest that bicycling didn't happen at all. Obviously, it did. But we could easily be talking mostly about ad hoc arrangements that existed between limited numbers of broadcasters who happened to be geographically close to one another and/or linked in some way, not long and complicated chains spanning multiple countries or even continents. 

I therefore wonder whether our default assumption when considering a particular country's Doctor Who purchases should be: they probably got them direct from the BBC and probably didn't send them on to anyone else.