Two missing DOCTOR WHO episodes recovered

As had been hoped for a while, the BBC has announced the safe return of two previously missing episodes of Doctor Who to their archive. "The Nightmare Begins" and "Devil's Planet" are the first and third episodes of the epic Daleks' Master Plan arc, both written by Dalek creator Terry Nation and originally airing in 1965. The episodes had been missing since the BBC junked a large number of episodes to make space in their archives.

The two episodes were recovered by the Film is Fabulous charity. The episodes had been in the hands of a private collector for some years, who had recently passed away. The Doctor Who episodes are part of a larger haul of vintage film. Film is Fabulous is assessing the rest of the collection to see if there are any more rare gems.

The find is quite significant. It's the first time any missing Doctor Who episodes have been found since nine episodes were located in 2013. The gap without any missing episodes being recovered was the longest since the hunt began in 1978, leading some to fear that no more episodes would be ever be found.

The episodes are quite significant. The Daleks' Master Plan is - arguably - Doctor Who's longest single story (The Trial of a Time Lord from 1985 is two episodes longer but is also sometimes counted as four stories combined into one) and one of its most epic, pitching the First Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companions Steven Taylor (Peter Purves) and Katarina (Adrienne Hill) against the Daleks in the year 4000. Selling the story overseas was problematic due to its length, meaning only a few copies were made and none distributed abroad, making the recovery of further episodes doubtful. However, the new discovery means that five episodes from the serial now exist in the archive, including the first three in a row. The find means that fans can also see more of Katarina, previously the companion with the least-surviving number of episodes in the archive. The find is also historic because it features, in "The Nightmare Begins," the very first appearance in Who of fan-favourite actor Nicholas Courtney. Courtney is better known for playing Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the franchise's most enduring recurring character, but in this story he plays space agent Brett Vyon.

Peter Purves, now 87, was treated to a special screening of the two episodes out of the blue and was reportedly flabbergasted by their return.

The episodes will be made available on the BBC iPlayer at Easter, and will be included when Season 3 eventually hits Blu-Ray (although that's a way off at the moment).

The Film is Fabulous initiative is pursuing several further leads which hopefully will turn up further missing episodes. This discovery drops the number of missing Doctor Who episodes to 95, all from the first six seasons of the show.

UPDATE: It's now been suggested that these two recovered episodes were not part of any previously known initiative, and are not the episodes Film is Fabulous have been trying to recover since last October. That initiative remains ongoing. This makes it more likely that at least one more missing episode could be recovered in the near future.

RUMOUR: One missing DOCTOR WHO episode has been located

The saga of Doctor Who's missing episodes has seen unexpected developments this week, with the Film is Fabulous charity confirming it is pursuing multiple leads. They believe the recovery of one episode in the near future is possible, and "several more" are known to exist in private collections (previous rumours have suggested that may only be two).

As previously noted, Doctor Who has a frustrating problem for people wanting to sit down and watch the entire franchise from start to finish: you can't. Ninety-seven episodes from the show's first six seasons, spanning the first two Doctors (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton), are missing. These are episodes that were junked by the BBC to free up space in their archives, in the mistaken belief nobody would be interested in watching them after their initial release. The practice halted in 1978, and in 1983 the show started being released on VHS video. The series has subsequently been released on DVD and Blu-Ray, as well as on streaming, with the missing episodes variously filed in with animation, audio tracks (the audio for all episodes has survived) and telesnaps.

Almost immediately upon halting the destruction of episodes, the BBC launched a campaign to recover the missing episodes. In some cases, episodes had been taken home by employees, or found their way into collectors' hands. In many cases, the BBC was able to recover episodes from foreign sales, with numerous episodes located in African film archives, in some cases decades later. Since 1978, fifty-five missing episodes have been recovered in this way, with the last find being in 2013 when the recovery of nine episodes from a Nigerian TV station was confirmed. Two episodes had just been recovered in 2011, sparking hopes of momentum building for more episodes to be recovered, but in the twelve years since 2013, there have been no further episodes found, the longest "barren stretch" since the search began.

However, whilst no further episodes have been returned to the BBC, several initiatives have reportedly located the existence of missing episodes in private hands, with one Troughton and one Hartnell episode currently missing believed to have been identified. Why they have not been returned is unclear, with some of the collectors believed to have been wary of possible legal action (despite the BBC having never pursued legal action against anyone who has returned a missing episode). More likely are concerns over publicity: almost everyone who has returned a missing episode has been eventually identified by fans, leading to concerns over harassment.

One collector has passed away recently, and Film is Fabulous is pursuing ways of acquiring the collection, which is believed to include one missing Doctor Who episode. Whether this is one of the previously-reported two episodes is unknown. Negotiations and legal avenues are infamously long-winded processes which may take many months to several years to resolve. So whilst the potential recovery of an episode is good news, it will not be released tomorrow, and may not see the light for several more years. Of course, ninety-six episodes would still be missing after that, so whilst the recovery of one episode is a great thing (especially if it completes a serial, or makes completing a serial in another way more viable), it will not be a huge game-changer.

Still, after such a long, barren period, even the chance of finding 1-3 episodes is a good thing.

The episodes still missing are as follows:

Season 1

• Marco Polo - all 7 episodes
• The Reign of Terror - episodes 4 and 5

Season 2

• The Crusade -  episodes 2 and 4

Season 3

• Galaxy Four - episodes 1, 2 and 4
• Mission to the Unknown - 1 episode (the entire serial)
• The Myth Makers - all 4 episodes
• The Daleks' Master Plan - episodes 1, 3-4, 6-9, 11-12
• The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve - all 4 episodes
• The Celestial Toymaker - episodes 1, 2 and 3
• The Savages - all 4 episodes

Season 4

• The Smugglers - all 4 episodes
• The Tenth Planet - episode 4
• The Power of the Daleks - all 6 episodes
• The Highlanders - all 4 episodes
• The Underwater Menace - episodes 1 and 4
• The Moonbase - episodes 1 and 3
• The Macra Terror - all 4 episodes
• The Faceless Ones - episodes 2, 4-6
• The Evil of the Daleks - episodes 1, 3-7

Season 5

• The Abominable Snowmen - episodes 1, 3-6
• The Ice Warriors - episodes 2 and 3
• The Web of Fear - episode 3
• Fury from the Deep - all 6 episodes
• The Wheel in Space - episodes 1-2, 4-5

Season 6

• The Invasion - episodes 1 and 4
• The Space Pirates - episodes 1, 3-6

Particularly notable about any returns is the impact on the release of Doctor Who on Blu-Ray. So far, only Season 2 has been released from the early years, with The Crusade completed through animation. The more episodes that are recovered, the more likely it is those seasons will be bumped up the release order.

Seven missing DOCTOR WHO episodes identified

The location of seven currently-officially-missing episodes of Doctor Who has been confirmed by episode hunter Philip Morris, currently leading efforts to recover the missing material. Negotiations are underway to get the missing material returned to the BBC.

Update: Morris has - somewhat confusingly - suggested on Twitter that this interpretation is incorrect, although - on video - he said outright that the locations of these episodes have been identified and he is confident of their eventual return. I suspect based on his comments that the "negotiations are underway" bit is what is under contention, due to his statement elsewhere that his approach is "letting things lie" until the episodes are returned in their own time. So, to be more accurate, the continued existence of seven missing Doctor Who episodes has been confirmed, with the hope that one day they will be returned to the BBC.

The rest of my original report follows:

As was common at the time (from its inception until the 1970s), the BBC used to produce television programmes with no expectation that they would ever be repeated or commercially released. Once aired, it was common for the tapes containing TV shows to be wiped and re-used to save money. Doctor Who was a victim of this process, with 147 episodes junked between 1967 and 1978. These episodes consisted almost entirely of material from the First and Second Doctors (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton), the first six seasons of the show, aired from 1963 to 1969 and filmed in black-and-white, which was considered even less valuable in the colour era. Some material from the Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, was also destroyed, but later recovered via black-and-white copies that were digitally re-colourised.

The advent of the home video format in the late 1970s and intervention from fans made the BBC change its mind quite rapidly and almost as soon as it stopped the purge of its archives in 1978 it began trying to reclaim the lost material. In some cases BBC engineers had saved episodes and kept them safely at home, or sold them to private collectors. The most valuable resource, however, was the BBC's foreign sales department. Since Doctor Who began in 1963, it had been sold widely abroad, particularly in the Commonwealth, and in many cases those countries had hung onto their copies of old episodes. Between 1978 and 2013, 50 missing episodes of Doctor Who were recovered from these sources and returned to the archives.

This has left 97 episodes - one eighth of the total number of episodes of the entire series - officially missing. 26 serials are affected, with 10 serials completely missing altogether.

The last time missing material was returned to the archive was in 2013, when Philip Morris recovered nine missing episodes from a TV station in Nigeria. These episodes constituted all of the missing material from the serial The Enemy of the World and four of the five missing episodes from the immediately succeeding serial, The Web of Fear. In the case of The Web of Fear, it was revealed that the remaining missing episode (the third) had also been identified, but had been removed from the station by persons unknown before the rest of the serial was sent back to the UK.

Morris has since confirmed that the identity of the people who took the episode has become known and very delicate negotiations undertaken to hopefully return the episode.

Five additional episodes were recovered by Doctor Who fan Ian Levine the same year from Taiwan, but these were additional copies of episodes already in the archives. Nevertheless, the discovery promoted renewed interest in Taiwan as a location of interest to episode hunters, although some questions were raised about the find.

During the Time Space Visualiser 2 online event earlier this year, Morris confirmed that "at least" six more episodes currently officially listed as missing have been identified in the hands of private collectors. The principle block to them being secured is not money, but rather the fear of the collectors that fans might learn their identities and berate or harass them (as has happened, to some degree, in the past, even to Morris himself despite his success in recovering episodes from overseas). Even more delicate negotiations to secure the anonymity of these collectors are required before they can be returned to the BBC archives.

The hunt for the missing episodes has gained some urgency in recent years. 1960s BBC film stock is fairly durable, but after being left in tin cans in dusty back shelves of basements in places like Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Nigeria, it's possible that some old stock will have become unusable: some reports have surfaced of promising leads ending only in old warped cans filled with unidentifiable goop that may have once been film stock. It is also already known that at least one TV station in Sierra Leone had a very large stock of the missing episodes (almost all of them, according to some records) before being levelled to the ground in the civil war in that country in the late 1990s. Time is not on the hunters' side here, but it is good to know at least some more missing episodes from the show have survived.

'Thousands' of cans of missing TV episodes returned to the BBC and ITV

The British Film Institute hosted one of its Missing: Believed Wiped events today, in which British television programmes and films that were believed lost are discussed and celebrated. A few weeks ago they announced the successful return of nine missing episodes of Doctor Who, amidst heavy rumours of additional finds.

Tonight, the event organisers confirmed (following reports on Twitter) what had been speculated for months: that 'thousands' of cans of material had been recovered, mostly from Africa where copies had been sent for broadcast in the 1960s. The figure 10,000 cans was at one point mentioned, though later the organisers stressed they did not have a confirmed figure and that was speculative. However, it is clear that a substantial amount of material has been found.

What this material consists of and how much of it is of missing material and how much extra copies of episodes that already exist in the BBC and ITV archives is unknown at the moment. Apparently the BBC and ITV are assessing the material and will make further announcements in due course. However, it is rumoured that the three missing episodes of classic British sitcom Dad's Army are among the find, alongside possible episodes of Steptoe and Son and Hancock's Half Hour.

The holy grail for fans of British cult TV would be the 24 missing episodes of The Avengers and of course more missing episodes of Doctor Who. Following the find a few weeks ago, 97 episodes of the series remain missing. The most extravagant rumour - and sadly already reported to be wildly optimistic - was that 81 of these episodes had been recovered. The true figure is reportedly significantly lower, but would still comprise a number of eagerly-missed episodes. It is believed that the BBC will only confirm recovered episodes once they have been fully checked and are ready to be released to the public via iTunes and DVD.

In a separate development, Doctor Who 'superfan' Ian Levine has recovered five episodes from Taiwan. However, these were additional copies of already-extant episodes. Whilst it is disappointing not to find lost episodes, this discovery, hot on the heels of the announcement of the find of nine episodes in October, gives further hope that there is more material out there to be discovered.