Why are episodes of ‘Doctor Who’ missing and will they ever be recovered?

The world’s longest-running science fiction show is 60 years old this fall, and shows no signs of stopping. Doctor Who’s central premise is simple: a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey known only as the Doctor ventures through the universe doing good in a stolen time machine, the TARDIS, regenerating into a new guise every so often as his old body wears out (a nifty way of changing the lead actor without disturbing the continuity). In 2005 the BBC took the decision to recommission the show, and a whole new generation of Whovians got the chance to watch the Doctor zipping through time and space in his TARDIS, armed with their trusty sonic screwdriver. Doctor Who is now a global brand, with audiences in over 100 countries.

But it’s the show’s remarkable format – there has never been a reboot or a remake; the Doctor on our screens now is the same character audiences were introduced to back in 1963 – that has led fans to take an especial interest in the show’s past. Episodes from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s are available for streaming, and DVDs of serials made more than half a century ago still sell. For completists, the episodes – all 871 of them – are there to watch and rewatch to their hearts’ content…

…except, they aren’t. At the time of writing, no less than 97 episodes filmed in the 1960s are AWOL. So what happened?

Throwaway TV?

Back in the 1960s, making television was a fraught business. Actors and crew alike were under pressure to get it right the first time. If someone fluffed their lines, they corrected themselves and kept going; if the camera bumped into the studio set, no-one blinked an eye. The emphasis was on getting the material completed and on air. This free-and-easy approach reflected contemporary attitudes towards TV as throwaway entertainment.

Unfortunately, this translated into a less than fastidious attitude towards archiving. Simply put, TV companies mostly failed to see the utility in keeping copies of programs that had already been transmitted. Also, because the videotape often used for transmission could be taped over and used again, there was a great incentive to reuse tapes of old programs as a cost-cutting measure.

The result was the loss of hundreds of thousands of hours of programming in dozens of countries across the globe – a huge loss of cultural heritage. Moreover, this was largely unknown until years later. It was only in 1978 that a Doctor Who fan curious about old serials enquired with the BBC, and was horrified to find that large swathes of the show’s old episodes were not in the Corporation’s catalog. An audit revealed the worst: no fewer than 152 episodes featuring the First (William Hartnell), Second (Patrick Troughton) and Third (Jon Pertwee) Doctors had been wiped, lost, or simply thrown away.

A global search begins

As scifi fans know, no fan is quite as obsessive as a Doctor Who fan. Once the news of the missing episodes broke in fandom, a massive search began – and before long, episodes began to turn up, some in the most unlikely places. In 1988, four episodes from the 1968 serial The Ice Warriors – the first story to feature the eponymous villains – were found in a cupboard in an old BBC building; a few more episodes were returned by film collectors who had bought copies at film fairs, unaware that they were lost.

But the biggest sources of missing episodes were found not in the United Kingdom, but the rest of the world. Doctor Who was a money-spinner for the BBC, who often sold stories to broadcasters in Europe, Africa, Asia, and beyond. Enquiries to TV companies yielded the return of dozens of episodes from countries as diverse as Cyprus, Australia, and Hong Kong.

By the 1990s, however, this stream of recovered episodes was beginning to dry up. Fans became dismayed as the return of complete serials stopped, and even recovery of single episodes became an occasional recurrence. Fans rejoiced when, in 2004, a retired BBC engineer, Francis Watson, returned an episode from the highly-regarded 1965 serial The Daleks’ Master Plan to the archives.

As it turned out, however, Watson’s discovery was to be the last recovered missing episode – or so it seemed.

An unexpected surprise

Step forward, Philip Morris. The former oil rig worker has made it his business to travel the world looking for missing episodes, and in the early 2010s, his search brought him to Nigeria. The broadcasters in the West African country had already been approached on the question of missing Doctor Who episodes, and it was assumed they had none.

Morris was determined to know for sure. His search brought him to a TV relay station where, to his astonishment, he found no less than nine episodes of Doctor Who – five episodes of The Enemy of the World and four episodes of The Web of Fear. Both serials dated from 1968, and starred Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor. The discovery was announced in October 2013, merely weeks before the show’s 50^th anniversary celebrations.

That leaves just 97 episodes still unaccounted for.

When will we find more?

But don’t hold your breath, for it seems unlikely that we’ll get to see these any time soon. The search for missing episodes is now more than 40 years old, and the sad truth is that more or less every broadcaster who purchased copies back in the 1960s has now confirmed they hold no more copies. It’s no wonder that the BBC decided long ago that animation was the way to go, and have begun commissioning black-and-white animated versions of the missing serials using surviving copies of the audio tracks.

However, there is one final, tantalizing possibility. TV producer and Doctor Who fan Paul Vanezis recovered several episodes in the 1980s, and maintains regular contact with private film collectors across the world. In a 2018 interview with the Daily Mirror, Vanezis speculated that a few episodes remained in private collections, and that collectors might part with them when the time is right. If only TV executives knew what they were losing back in the 1960s…