Piracy is Preservation
Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads "Preserve the media you can before it's gone forever." The Wikipedia article reads, "No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were transferred to film for editing before transmission and exist in their broadcast form. [88] Some episodes have been returned to the BBC from the archives of other countries that bought prints for broadcast or by private individuals who acquired them by various means. Early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved, as well as excerpts filmed from the television screen onto 8 mm cine film and clips that were shown on other programmes. Audio versions of all lost episodes exist from home viewers who made tape recordings of the show. Short clips from every story with the exception of Marco Polo (1964), "Mission to the Unknown" (1965) and The Massacre (1966) also exist."
This is extremely common with media that is seen as "artless" mass market as well. Dr. Who was pulp and not deemed worth preserving.
Another example is the show that made me get into model making: Art Attack. A disney show made in the UK that was never collected or released in the original version.
There are some torrents of the Hindi version apparently, but that's all.
Oh true.
Art attack was also shown in Australia in the 90s. Surely there must be some copies somewhere. Maybe that's just wishful thinking
Canadian here, we also had it. Hopefully someone has it recorded.
There are tons of full episodes of Art Attack on Youtube. Not sure if it's every episode, but they are digital rips, not VHS quality