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Reeltime Pictures Ltd is a British film, television and video production company and a distributor of the films of other companies, founded in 1984[1] by Keith Barnfather.
As well as producing corporate and business television, it has made a number of broadcast documentary series includingLost Trains of Cyprus andPhoenix – A Story from the Diaspora.
The company is also known for its many documentaries about the long-running television seriesDoctor Who (Barnfather was a founding member of theDoctor Who Appreciation Society) and in particular forMyth Makers, a series of interviews with people associated with the making of the series. Many of these programs were hosted by actorNicholas Briggs, who provided the voice of theDaleks in the 2005 series ofDoctor Who.
Reeltime Pictures also pioneered a technique of creatingdirect-to-videoDoctor Who spin-offs, despite theBBC's close guarding of the series, by building the spin-offs around incidental characters and monsters licensed directly from the writers who created them. Their first effort, 1987'sWartime, was a small-scale piece built aroundSergeant Benton ofUNIT, a recurring character from the 1970s. In 1987, Reeltime producedMyth Runner, a parody ofBlade Runner written, directed by and starring Briggs, featuring outtakes from theMyth Makers video series.
Later and more ambitious productions includeMindgame,Downtime, andDæmos Rising. Despite its non-BBC-licensed status, a novelisation ofDowntime was released as part of the BBC-licensedVirgin Missing AdventuresDoctor Who spin-off novels. The narrative ofDowntime was expanded to incorporate theDoctor, a character missing from the video version for copyright reasons, with the narrative of the original production forming the middle third of the novel.
The success of these ventures inspired and opened the door for later releases byBBV andBig Finish Productions with storylines featuring characters and races fromDoctor Who, but not necessarily the Doctor himself (although BBV produced two series featuring Doctor-like characters portrayed byColin Baker andSylvester McCoy, while Big Finish also obtained a license that allowed them to feature the Doctor).
The company continues to output a wide variety of programming, including patient information films forMoorfields Eye Hospital.
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