Sometimes truth is stranger than science fiction.
An ailing “Doctor Who” superfan spent a mini-fortune to recreate 97 lost episodes of the series using AI – so he’d be able to watch it all again before he dies.
London music producer Ian Levine, 71, sold his royalties to finance his mission to fill the gaps in the archives of the beloved British TV series that he said cost £100,000, or more than $130,000 — even though he knows they will likely never be widely seen.
“I’ve come very close to death four times,” said Levine, who is battling nasal cancer and has been confined to a wheelchair since a stroke 11 years ago left him with limited use of his left side.
“I thought, ‘I don’t want to die not having seen them,’ so I made it my mission to see them before I die,” he said. “I made a lot of sacrifices to do this.”
Levine — who has previously suffered from bladder cancer, sepsis and single sarcoidosis — estimates he spent £70,000 of his own dough while a group of other Who fans chipped in another £30,000 through a donation campaign. He searched the world as far as Bangladesh and Turkey to find designers up to the job of making moving AI images out of production photos, notes and the actual audio from the stories.
“For every good one I found, I found 20 scammers who wanted you to, ‘send £100 first or I won’t do it and then I’ll send you a clip,’” he told The Post in a phone interview from England. “Nineteen out of 20 times the clips were absolutely laughable, just countless trash… I got ripped off by 19 different people. It cost me about at least £10,000 in rip-offs.”
Since the AI remakes aren’t authorized by the BBC he is now only sharing the videos with the small group of friends and fellow diehards who also contributed to the effort, said Levine, who has been hooked on the show since it debuted in the UK in 1963, and was an unofficial fan adviser to the program in the 80s.
The BBC one had a policy of purging film after broadcasts in what now seems like a bizarre and terribly short-sighted move that left major gaps in its archives — including the first six, black-and-white seasons of “Doctor Who,” which focuses on the adventures of a mysterious alien who travels in time and space.
Copies of the lost stories have turned up over the years in private collections and been found in foreign TV studios where they had been shipped for broadcast years ago — but the reality is many or most of those still missing no longer exist in any form.
The BBC itself has used surviving fan-made audio recordings of the TV broadcasts to make animated recreations of several of the missing episodes, but Levine and some other purists have dismissed them as “cartoons” that aren’t authentic to the original, low-budget productions.
Levine’s outspoken nature has long made him polarizing figure in the rabid fandom of the show. Recent fiery takes that sparked backlash, include railing against casting a woman in the title role in 2017 and blasting recent episodes for a perceived “woke” agenda.
“‘Doctor Who’ you take your beloved character, like Tarzan, a timeless character, that people who’ve grown up with love and you’re squashing it into a box,” Levine, who is openly gay, said of recent criticisms. “It’s something I feel quite strongly about it.”
Levine’s recreations now have their own critics, with an entire section of online fandom brutally mocking their quality — and their maker.
But others look at Levine as a hero for his recreations.
“At the end of the day he’s just a fan — a fan just like me — a little bit nerdy, a little bit bonkers, a lot hyperbolic, enthusiastic to the max and desperate to see things again that have been lost,” said Paul Ebbs, a writer and a fan who has seen the recreations and blames some of the backlash on some fans’ “Luddite attitude to AI.”
“Ian saw all these shows on the original broadcast — they are part of his developmental DNA – he wants those feelings back, he wants to experience those magical moments again before he shuffles off the mortals,” Ebbs, 50, added. “As a fan, I feel so lucky to have been able to see them and so glad that Ian stuck his head in the lion’s mouth to get them made. All power to him, I say.”
With the vitriol he’s seen and the money he’s spent, the music producer said it’s all been worth it because he can now stream every episode of the show in original or AI format from his five-terabyte harddrive.
“It has to be worth it for the pleasure it’s brought me to see them,” Levine said. “Doctor Who runs all night in my bedroom, complete, nothing missing.”
“Doctor Who” ran from 1963-1989, then relaunched in 2005 with 14 different actors so far playing the lead. Its latest season, streaming on Disney+, premiered Saturday.
