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

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.