Lost Doctor Who Episode Found

JSDopefish writes "In an event that most Doctor Who fans thought couldn't happen, another lost episode of Doctor Who has turned up. It's Episode Two of the 1965 William Hartnell serial, 'The Dalek Masterplan.' No word yet as to how it will be released, this news is just breaking today apparently. This is great news for fans, as the last time a lost episode was turned up was in 1999, and most folks had given up hope there were any others left to be discovered. For those who don't know, in the '70s the BBC routinely junked old stories. Not just Dr Who, but all their shows. Repeats and sales weren't an issue then. There's something like 115 or so lost Doctor Who episodes total."

Comments

My kids love these!

[darnok]

The really old Dr Who shows are being repeated (possibly in order) on the ABC in Australia. I thought my kids (7 & 5) would only be interested once they got to (a) colour episodes and (b) Tom Baker.

Boy, was I wrong! These are kids who still don't understand that Dad once had a *black and white* TV, but they love the shows with the first doctor. Even when I was a keen Dr Who fan, I found the first Dr pretty tough to watch, but my kids never miss it.

I'm still waiting for them to tell me the TV's broken because there's no color...

Dalek's operating system?

[Debian Troll's Best]

Here's a question for all those die-hard Dr Who fans out there. Is there a mention in any publications (The Dr. Who Technical Manual, for instance) what software the Dalek's ran? I know at their core they were the shrivelled remains of a Kaled, but all those servo motors, life support systems and weapons had to be running some type of OS. Might it have been Debian? apt-get install davros? Just a thought.

Re:What was worse than losing a few episodes...

[Zeinfeld]

Things started going badly south during the Colin Baker era and the Sylvester McCoy episodes were just awful. What a shame that just as they finally had the ability to create decent special effects the writing fell apart.

One of my cousins used to do the special effects for Dr Who. He did K9 and wrote some of the scripts. He even spent some years trying to get another series off the ground after Terry Nation died

In their time they were not that bad. If you compare them to the Star Trek 'effects' of the same vintage there is no comparison, the BBC effects were low budget but they were much more imaginative. Star Trek's idea of originality was a new pattern of ridges on a new kind of alien's forehead.

Of course over in the UK we teach this thing called evolution in the schools so there is kind of an assumption that aliens are likely to be completely different.

The other thing is that the BBC still does a lot with radio, we are quite used to seeing stuff that leaves much to the imagination.

Re:collection

[blincoln]

Dr. Who had 26 seasons.

That's an awful lot of boxed sets =).

To be honest, a lot of the earlier ones wouldn't sell enough to justify the manufacturing cost. Space (the Canadian sci-fi channel) showed the early episodes while I was going to school up there and the ratings were abyssmal.

Doctor Who missing episodes

[BigBadBus]

So, we're now down to 108 missing episodes (in 1982, it was 136)... For more info, look here and here. For some info on lost UK TV in general, have a look at this page.

Re:Wow, "lost" episodes?

[Wildfire Darkstar]

All of these 115 lost episodes were from the 1960s, before the advent of VCRs. It's possible someone could have hooked up an old fashioned camera and recorded the broadcasts manuaully, but it's not like this was something very many people bothered to do.

Although, interestingly, a number of people did do the best they could at the time. Specifically, they set up audio equipment to record to soundtrack to these episodes, and these sound-only recordings have survived to the present. The BBC, having obtained these soundtracks from the fans who recorded them, has been releasing them, with linking narration, on CD for several years now. Also, a mini-fan industry (not for profit, of course) has sprung up to "reconstruct" the episodes using these soundtracks and surviving clips and still images to give a (very) rough estimate of the original: a sort of semi-animated storybook format.

Interestingly, these fan-recorded audios tend to be of generally high quality, so much so that the so-called Reconstruction Team (the internal BBC group responsible for remastering and touching up these old DW broadcasts for video release) has occassionally used them to redub official BBC copies of extant episodes.

There are dozens of articles and books written on this sad chapter in the BBC's archival history, none of which shine well on them. Apparently, it was a classic case of miscommunication between branches of the company: the warehouses responsible for the wiping of most of these episodes simply assumed that some other branch of the BBC was archiving them, and never bothered to check and find out that no such branch actually existed. Go figure.