Sixty years ago, two episodes of Doctor Who aired on the BBC and then, as far as anyone knew, ceased to exist. This week they came back.
The charity Film is Fabulous!, which works to preserve cinema and television history, found the two episodes in film cans wrapped in plastic bags among a water-logged collection of films at a private collector’s estate. Despite the condition of the surrounding materials, both episodes were in pristine condition.
The episodes are “The Nightmare Begins” and “Devil’s Planet,” the first and third installments of the twelve-part 1965 serial “The Daleks’ Master Plan,” written by Dalek creator Terry Nation and featuring William Hartnell’s First Doctor alongside companion Steven Taylor, played by Peter Purves. The second episode of the arc had already been found previously, meaning the first three episodes are now complete. The serial is one of the longest in the show’s history, and only five of its twelve total episodes have now been recovered.
The first three episodes are particularly significant because they contain the first appearance of actor Nicholas Courtney in Doctor Who. He would go on to play the beloved Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart across decades of the show’s run.
Film is Fabulous! screened the recovered episodes for Purves himself before the public announcement, inviting him to a local cinema on a pretext. He sat down to watch footage he had almost certainly assumed was gone forever. “Twenty-seven of mine still are missing, but I’m delighted that two have been found,” the 87-year-old Purves told the BBC. “It’s rather sad, but it’s great when some turn up.”
Both episodes are now available to watch for free. UK viewers can find them on BBC iPlayer. International viewers, including those in the US, can watch them on the Doctor Who Classic YouTube channel at the links below:
How the BBC Lost Its Own History
The story behind these missing episodes is one of institutional carelessness on a scale that is difficult to comprehend in retrospect. Between 1967 and 1978, the BBC routinely deleted archive programmes for practical reasons including lack of storage space and scarcity of materials. As a result, 95 of the first 253 episodes of Doctor Who are currently missing, primarily from seasons three, four, and five.
The mechanics of how it happened involve a failure of communication between two BBC departments that each assumed the other was handling preservation. The BBC Film Library had no responsibility for storing programmes that had not originated on film, while BBC Enterprises wiped their own reels without coordination. As each body believed it was the other’s responsibility to archive the material, both destroyed their own copies.
Stories like “The Daleks’ Master Plan” were particularly vulnerable because international censors declined to pick up the serial for broadcast due to its violence, which included the first onscreen death of a companion. With those international broadcast reels having become a key source for hunting missing episodes over the decades, it was presumed for years that the Master Plan episodes kept only in the UK were likely gone forever.
A Sixty-Year Hunt
The search for lost episodes has produced remarkable finds over the decades, almost always from the most unexpected corners of the world.
In 1978, eleven episodes were located from various overseas sources, marking the start of organized international searches. The BBC had been selling syndication rights to foreign broadcasters since the 1960s, and those 16mm film copies sent abroad sometimes survived long after the British originals were destroyed.
One of the more notable recoveries came in 1992 when the entirety of “The Tomb of the Cybermen” was found in Hong Kong, returning a complete Second Doctor serial to the archives.
The largest single haul came in October 2013, when archive television recovery expert Phillip Morris located nine complete episodes at a television relay station in Nigeria: five episodes of “The Enemy of the World” and four episodes of “The Web of Fear.” That discovery made worldwide news and raised hopes that more material remained to be found. Those hopes were justified, though it took another twelve years.
Justin Smith, chair of trustees of Film is Fabulous!, said after the current discovery: “We know that other episodes are in existence. We don’t know where they are or who’s got them, otherwise we’d be knocking on doors. But I think there are more. The only question is when and where they will come to light.”
BBC archivist Paul Vanezis has stated that the two recovered episodes were “bonus” discoveries on top of episodes he is already aware exist but have not yet made their way back to the archives.
Ninety-five episodes remain missing. The search continues.
What do you think about the recovery of these lost Doctor Who episodes? Let us know in the comments.
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