Doctor Who missing episodes
Several portions of the long-running British science-fiction television programme Doctor Who are no longer held by the BBC. Between 1967 and 1978, the BBC routinely deleted archive programmes for various practical reasons—lack of space, scarcity of materials, and a lack of rebroadcast rights. As a result, 97 of 253 episodes from the programme's first six years are currently missing, primarily from seasons 3, 4 and 5, leaving 26 serials incomplete. Many more were considered lost until recovered from various sources, mostly overseas broadcasters.
Doctor Who is not unique in its losses, as many broadcasters routinely cleared their archives in this manner. Until the BBC changed its archiving policy in 1978, thousands of hours of programming in all genres were deleted. Other affected BBC series include Hancock's Half Hour, Dad's Army, Z-Cars, The Likely Lads, The Wednesday Play, Till Death Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son, Dixon of Dock Green and Not Only... But Also. ITV regional franchisees, such as Rediffusion Television and Associated Television, also deleted many programmes, including early videotaped episodes of The Avengers.
Doctor Who is unusual in that each of its 97 missing episodes survives in audio form, recorded off-air by fans at home. Most episodes are also represented by production stills, tele-snaps, or short video clips. Furthermore, after careful restoration, all 1970s episodes are available in full colour.
Efforts to locate the missing episodes have continued, both by the BBC and by fans of the series. The recovered episodes have been extensively restored for release on VHS and DVD; surviving soundtracks have been released on cassette and compact disc. Many missing episodes have had their visuals reconstructed, either through specially commissioned animation or use of surviving footage and photographs.
Background
Between approximately 1967 and 1978, large quantities of videotape and film stored in the BBC's Engineering department and film libraries were wiped or destroyed to make way for newer programmes. This happened for several reasons, primarily the belief that there was no practical value to its retention.The actors' union Equity had actively fought against the introduction of TV recording since the 1950s, when it first became a practical proposition. Before workable television recording was developed, if a broadcaster wished to repeat a programme, they had to re-hire the actors to perform it again, live, for additional fees. Equity's concern was that if broadcasters kept recordings of the original performances, they would be able to re-broadcast them indefinitely, which would reduce the amount of new production and threaten the livelihoods of its members. Although Equity could not prevent recording altogether, it added standard clauses to its members' contracts that stipulated that recordings could only be repeated a limited number of times within a specific timeframe, and deliberately set the fees for further use so high that broadcasters would consider it unjustifiable to spend so much money repeating an old programme rather than making a new one. Consequently, recordings whose repeat rights had expired were considered to be of no further domestic use to the broadcasters.
Most Doctor Who episodes were made on two-inch videotape for initial broadcast and then telerecorded onto 16 mm film by BBC Enterprises for further commercial use. Enterprises used 16 mm for overseas sales as it was considerably cheaper to buy and easier to transport than videotape. It also circumvented the problem of different countries' incompatible video standards, as film was a universal medium whereas videotape was not. The BBC had no central archive at the time; the Film Library kept programmes that had been made on film, while the Engineering Department was responsible for storing videotapes. BBC Enterprises only kept copies of programmes that they deemed commercially valuable. They had little dedicated storage space, and tended to place piles of film canisters wherever they could find space for them at their Villiers House property.
The Engineering Department had no mandate to archive the programme videotapes they held, although typically they would not be wiped or junked until the relevant production department or BBC Enterprises indicated that they had no further use for the tapes. The first Doctor Who master videotapes to be wiped were those for the serial The Highlanders, which were erased on 9 March 1967, a mere two months after Episode 4's original transmission. Episode seven of The Daleks' Master Plan was cleared for wiping on 17 August 1967; it is considered the first Doctor Who episode to be permanently lost, as no telerecordings of that episode were ever made. Further erasing of Doctor Who master videotapes by the Engineering Department continued into the 1970s. Eventually, every master videotape of the programme's first 253 episodes was destroyed or wiped. The final 1960s master tapes to be erased were those for the 1968 serial Fury from the Deep, in late 1974.
Despite the destruction of these masters, BBC Enterprises held an almost complete archive of the series in the form of their 16 mm film telerecording copies until approximately 1972. From around 1972 to 1978, BBC Enterprises also disposed of much of their older material, including many episodes of Doctor Who. The final 1960s telerecordings to be junked were those for the 1966 serial The War Machines, in early 1978, shortly before the junking of material was halted by the intervention of fan Ian Levine.
The purge of the archives
Enterprises' episodes were usually junked because their rights agreements with the actors and writers to sell the programmes abroad had expired. With many broadcasters around the world now switching to colour transmission, it was not deemed worthwhile extending agreements to sell the older black-and-white material.The BBC Film Library, meanwhile, had no responsibility for storing programmes that had not originated on film, and there were conflicting views between the Film Library and BBC Enterprises over which party held the responsibility for archiving programmes. As each body believed it the other's responsibility to archive the material, each thought nothing of destroying its own copies as necessary. This lack of communication contributed to the erasure of much of the Corporation's film archive of older black-and-white programming. While thousands of other programmes have been destroyed in this way around the world, the missing Doctor Who episodes are probably the best-known example of how the lack of a consistent programme archiving policy risks permanent loss.
Following the purges and subsequent recoveries, gaps in the Doctor Who archive were spread unevenly through its first 11 seasons. Major losses mostly affected First and Second Doctor serials; although two stories are missing just one episode each, other stories are lost altogether. Patrick Troughton's era as the Second Doctor is particularly affected; of the 14 stories comprising his first two seasons, only The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Enemy of the World are complete, and these only exist due to telerecordings later returned from Hong Kong and Nigeria, respectively.
All stories starring Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor are complete, though many episodes no longer survive on their original videotapes and were only available from black-and-white overseas prints upon recovery; these episodes have subsequently been restored to colour using a variety of methods. In order of original transmissions, the very last Doctor Who master videotapes to be wiped were the first episodes of the 1974 serials Invasion of the Dinosaurs and Death to the Daleks. The latter was recovered from overseas, initially from a tape in the NTSC format, and later in the original PAL format on a tape returned from Dubai.
For four years, Episode 1 of Invasion of the Dinosaurs was the only Pertwee episode to be entirely missing from the archives, until a black-and-white 16 mm copy was returned to the BBC in June 1983. The story was released on DVD with a partially recolourised version of Episode 1, alongside a higher-quality monochrome transfer of the episode, in The UNIT Files box set. With the exception of the final shot of episode 3 of The Deadly Assassin and the credits of Parts One and Two of Ghost Light, archival holdings from Death to the Daleks Episode 2 onwards are complete on the original broadcast videotapes.
Unrelated to the regular archive purges, the final shot of The Deadly Assassin Episode 3 has been excised from the master copy. The shot was removed after its initial UK transmission, following complaints from Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association. Subsequent repeats and commercial releases have restored the shot from off-air video copies. Similarly, the master tapes for Parts One and Two of Ghost Light were changed after broadcast to correct a spelling error in the credits, Katharine Schlesinger originally being misspelt as Katherine Schlesinger.
The end of the junkings
Internally, the wiping policy officially came to an end in 1978, when the means to further exploit programmes by taking advantage of the new market for home videocassette recordings started to become apparent. The prevailing view had also begun to shift toward the attitude that archive programmes should, in any case, be preserved for posterity and historical and cultural reasons.The BBC Film Library was turned into a combined Film & Videotape Library for the preservation of both media. The Film Library at the time held only 47 episodes of 1960s Doctor Who; they had once held 53, but six episodes had either been junked or gone missing. Junkings at BBC Enterprises, however, continued until the intervention of Ian Levine, a record producer and fan of the programme. Following the transfer of episodes still held by Enterprises, there were 152 episodes of Doctor Who no longer held by the BBC, although subsequent efforts have reduced that number to 97.
Among the most sought-after lost episodes is Episode 4 of the final William Hartnell serial, The Tenth Planet, which ends with the First Doctor's regeneration into the Second. The only portion of the episode still in existence, bar a few poor-quality silent 8mm clips, is the final 27 seconds, comprising the regeneration itself and a few seconds leading up to it. The sequence had been shown in a 1973 episode of Blue Peter and was retained in that show's archive.
Even after the end of the purge, other archive issues persist. Serials from Seasons 22–26 were shown in Germany, with soundtracks dubbed into the German language; some of these episodes no longer exist in German television archives.