Rejoice Doctor Who fans.

By Chris Tyler.

As Professor Farnsworth would say “Good news everyone!”

Two previously lost episodes of Doctor Who have been found.

As you may or may not know, well over 100 episodes of the classic series are missing from the BBC archives, the product of a purge that happened in the mid 70’s because the BBC were running out of space in their archive, this combined with the fact that Tape was expensive meant that many programs were either junked of taped over. Yes the BBC is just like that flat mate you had during Uni who would  throw any old tape into the VCR to record X-files. (I’m old, ok?)

The missing episodes constitute a large proportion of William Hartnell’s episodes (The First Doctor) and Most of Patrick Troughton’s run (The Second Doctor).  Whilst episodes have trickled in since 1978 when the BBC started calling out for them no full episodes have been recovered since 2004 when an episode from The Daleks Master Plan (1965) was recovered. Since then it’s been judged increasingly unlikely that more full episodes will be recovered but this discovery proves that there could easily still be some out there, hidden in boxes in attics, probably on film with people not even realizing what they have got.

The two episodes that have turned up are:

1. The third episode of 1965 tale Galaxy 4 a William Hartnell story that was thought to be completely missing. 
2. The second installment of 1967’s The Underwater Menace this is now the earliest surviving episode to star Patrick Troughton.

Both episodes were purchased by film collector Terry Burnett at a village fete near Southampton with the copies believed to have originated from the ABC in Australia since the Underwater Menace has edits consistent with the Edits that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation did at the time. The good news is that the ABC returned these cuts to the BBC in the late 90’s and they can now be restored.

There is no news yet as to what the BBC or 2Entertain plan to do with the episodes but if they follow past form they will probably turn up on some random DVD release as an extra and then get a proper release as other episodes turn up down the line like 2004’s Lost in Time box set that was a repository for orphan episodes. I think the best we can hope for is some kind of concerted restoration program that animates lost episodes like 2009’s The Invasion.