Doctor Who: The Lost Episodes

I first started watching Doctor Who around 1984. Back then, being a fan of the show could be a bit frustrating. This was in the days before the BBC began releasing Doctor Who on videotape, and long before DVDs existed. The only episodes one could see were those showing on the local PBS channels. In my case, that was WLIW Channel 21, which was airing the Tom Baker and Peter Davison stories.

As far as obtaining information on older Doctor Who, sources in the 1980s were limited if you lived in the States. I had to rely on the Target novelisations, the occasional issue of Doctor Who Magazine that showed up in the comic shops, and the odd sci-fi reference book containing a few black & white photos offering tantalizing glimpses of 1960s and early 70s stories. Oh, yes, eventually I got my hands on The Doctor Who Programme Guide by Jean-Marc Lofficier. I read it so many times that my copy is totally dog-eared.

In 1986, another PBS channel began airing the Jon Pertwee stories on Sunday mornings. I was thrilled to be able watch those early 1970s serials, which had often been alluded to in the Peter Davison stories. But the material from the 1960s still remained beyond my grasp.

Adding to my frustration was word-of-mouth from older fans who'd seen those stories when they first aired. These fans had such nostalgic memories of the material, and many held the opinion that then-current Doctor Who could not hold a candle to the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton stories from two decades earlier.

The problem was the fact that throughout the 1970s the BBC systematically erased or destroyed the majority of the master tapes for the Sixties Doctor Who episodes, along with numerous other television programs. There were a few reasons for this. The BBC wanted to save on storage space. Also, contracts with unions typically prevented shows from being broadcast more than once or twice, as the feeling by organized labor was that reruns would rob actors of new jobs and income. Finally, no one had any idea that VCRs and DVDs would one day exist, providing the BBC with a completely new distribution outlet, not to mention a huge source of revenue.

So, back in the mid-80s, it was commonly believed that the majority of the Sixties stories no longer existed. I resigned myself to the fact that I would never be able to watch The Daleks' Masterplan or The Evil of the Daleks or Tomb of the Cybermen, serials which older fans decreed were The Greatest Doctor Who Stories Ever.

What I didn't realize was that, behind the scenes, both the BBC and fans of the show had begun searching for copies of the many missing episodes. By the 1990s, a good deal of them had been recovered, either from abroad (many of the shows had been sold overseas by the BBC) or from really unlike locations such as church basements and the trunks of old cars.

I clearly remember how huge a deal it was when all four episodes of Tomb of the Cybermen were discovered in 1992 in the archives of a Hong Kong television station. I had read the novelisation of Tomb several years before, and actually found it kind of dull, truth be told. Also, by now I was a little more incredulous that the quality of those old stories could really be determined solely by the twenty year-old memories of fans. So I approached Tomb with the attitude of "well, let's see if it's really as good as people claim." And, actually, it turned out to be really good. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Nowadays it's one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who stories.

Of course, by this time, I'd had the opportunity to see a number of other complete Sixties Doctor Who serials, which finally started airing on PBS around 1990. And I realized something: some of them truly were classics, but others were of variable quality, with a few being very mediocre, padded-out efforts. Which, really, you could say about most periods in the show's history. I think the nostalgia of childhood memories can be very self-deceptive.

That said, it is a shame that such a significant number of Doctor Who episodes are lost. I would like to be able to view them, and make up my own mind. As of this writing (January 2010) there are 108 of the 253 episodes filmed in the Sixties missing from the BBC archives. The odds are slim that any more will surface. But the most recent discovery of a lost episode was only six years ago, in 2004. So it is conceivable that a few more episodes, or at least partial clips, might be floating around somewhere in the world.

In any case, there are now many opportunities to view the existing material from the Sixties. All of the complete stories are being digitally restored and released on DVD by the BBC. Many of the episodes from incomplete serials are collected on the three disk DVD set Lost In Time. Complete audio tracks exist for every episode due to fans copying them off their televisions with tape recorders during the original broadcasts. And nearly all the episodes have various still pictures called "telesnaps" in existence. It's possible to reconstruct the lost stories in one way or another.

Also, the BBC recreated the two missing episodes of the 1969 story The Invasion via computer animation paired up with the original audio tracks. The results were very impressive. If the BBC is willing to spend the time and money, they could use this technique to complete other serials that are only missing one or two episodes.

So, in a dream world, what missing episodes would I like to see resurface? At the top of my list would be the last episode of The Tenth Planet, which has the very first regeneration, as the Doctor transforms from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton. It would also be nice if at least one of the seven episodes from the lavish historical serial Marco Polo, from the show's first season, was discovered. It's very odd that none are currently known to exist, when practically the rest of the entire first year of Doctor Who is intact, except for two episodes from The Reign of Terror. And the final episode of The Evil of the Daleks, with the legendary Dalek civil war, would be fun to see.

Actually, pretty much any episode from Patrick Troughton's era would be a nice discovery (excluding The Space Pirates, which even back in the Sixties was considered very dull by most viewers). Of the twenty-one serials he starred in, only six are completely intact, seven if you count the restored version of The Invasion. There are a lot of gaps in Troughton's three-year run, especially his first two seasons. None of the episodes from his first two stories are known to exist, aside from a few very brief clips. Troughton's first complete episode is part three of his third story, The Underwater Menace.

(That one existing part of The Underwater Menace is quite bizarre, with a kind of "so bad it's good" quality. The villain, Professor Zaroff, is completely over the top. He's an absolute nutter who wants to destroy the world simply because in his mind this would be a great scientific achievement. And the episode ends with him triumphantly proclaiming "Nothing in the world can stop me now!")

It was not until I finally saw Tomb of the Cybermen and episodes from various incomplete stories that I realized just what an amazing job Troughton did portraying the Doctor. I think the paucity of existing material featuring Troughton has led to him being underrated by younger fans of the show. It's one thing for people who watched the show in the Sixties to tell you how great he was; it's another thing entirely to see it for yourself. Hence my hope that more of his episodes will one day resurface.

One last aside: It's possible that my memory is playing tricks on me, but I could swear that WLIW, some time back in the 1980s, aired The Tenth Planet. It was listed in the TV guide as part of an all-day marathon of the Doctor Who regeneration stories. I really wanted to see it, but there was some family event that day, and my father absolutely insisted I had to go to it. So I was not at home to watch the marathon. I think by the time we got back, Jon Pertwee's last story, Planet of the Spiders was already on. Or maybe they were up to Tom Baker's swan song Logopolis. I don't remember exactly.

Anyway, I cannot imagine WLIW would have only shown the first three episodes of The Tenth Planet. I keep wondering if somewhere out there, buried in the archives of some American PBS station, there just might be a copy of the long sought after episode four. Whatever the case, I hope it shows up one of these days.