There is a similar case with Top Gear. Aside from the popularity of Clarkson/May/Hammond and the fantastic cinematography, the show had great editors with an ear for soundtracks. Unfortunately it seems a lot of the tracks were only licensed for broadcast TV and the DVDs have some stock music where the rights were no longer available. There are also some gags which don't work any more because the audio doesn't make sense.

I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere.

It's a shame they never released the full series on DVD (or blu-ray). Most of it is available if you consult a chart of all the releases, but they've been cut and rearranged to fit on discs, and the soundtrack is as you say. I imagine they didn't due to problems like this at the time, but after the scandal and with how much time has passed, they'll never actually bother, unless someone straight up steals/copies the broadcast tapes from the archives and do us all a favour.

I assume you mean the only place you can legally watch them

I think it’s true for a lot of BBC shows, many had great music, but the BBC also ran hugely popular radio stations and i think it was through that they were able to license a large amount of music.

> the worst outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniracers#Lawsuit

Or 007 GoldenEye where Microsoft for some reason bought the rights only to throw them into a paper shredder

GoldenEye was re-released for Xbox One and is available to purchase right now: https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/goldeneye-007/9n6639h...

Oh, finally

And TV shows too. If they don't have the soundtrack-free version available, they have to do surgery to remove the music in postproduction somehow, or just not re-release at all.

That might actually be a better outcome though as then those interested in those games will be funneled towards authentic pirate preservations whereas if there is a butchered re-release then some buyers will not even be aware that they are not getting the real deal.

In the end the situation around sound track licensing in different media seems so counter productive to even the interests of the rights holders. Essentially shows and games that incorporate songs are free advertisements for those songs and in no way compete with direct sales / streaming of that music on its own.