Tele-snaps

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Tele-snaps were off-screen photographs of BBC television broadcasts taken by John Cura before the advent of video recording. For many early programmes Tele-snaps are the only surviving record of their appearance. From 1947 until 1968, Cura operated a business selling the 250,000-plus Tele-snaps he took. The photographs were snapped in half of a normal frame of 35mm film, at an exposure of 1/25th of a second. They were mostly purchased by actors and directors to use as records and examples of their work before the advent of videocassette recorders. From the 1990s onwards, tele-snaps have often been used by groups of fans to recreate lost Doctor Who episodes, creating "reconstructions" by marrying the images to fan-recorded off-air soundtracks of the episodes.