Two missing episodes from early in the run of the original Doctor Who have been rediscovered.
The BBC has announced that episodes one and three of the serial “The Dalek Master Plan” have recently been returned to the BBC, who will make them available to British fans via their online BBC iPlayer on April 4.
The newly rediscovered episodes, from the show’s third season, have not been seen since they originally aired at the end of 1965. This now makes five of the story’s twelve episodes that have been recovered.
The episodes are from Doctor Who‘s earliest period, in which William Hartnell played the alien time-traveler known only as the the Doctor. “The Dalek’s Master Plan” was considered one of the most ambitious story of the Hartnell era and featured the Doctor and his companions his traveling companions Steven Taylor (Peter Purves) and Katarina (Adrienne Hill) squaring off against his eternal enemy, the robotic, galaxy-conquering Daleks. The story also featured actor Nicholas Courtney in a guest starring role, years before he would return to the show to play the fan favorite character Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.
Infamously, a large chunk of the show’s first seven years were erased by the BBC, mostly because it was thought that there was no further value to them after the shows’ original airings. In 1978, the BBC did an inventory and discovered that 152 half-hour episodes were no longer held by the broadcaster. A worldwide search of archives and the holdings of the various international broadcasters to whom the series was syndicated during the 1960s was launched, with random episodes being discovered intermittently over the decades.
The most recent discovery brings down the total of episodes still missing to 95. The last time missing episodes were announced as having been rediscovered was in 2013.
Up until now, installments of “The Dalek’s Master Plan” had eluded these archive searches as that particular story had never been included in syndication packages abroad. The reason given for its exclusion were concerns over supposed violent content.
Prior to the announcement of their rediscovery, the two episodes were screened for actor Purvis, who stated “I’m speechless, knocked out… My flabber has never been so gasted.”
The episodes were recovered through the work of the charitable trust organization Film Is Fabulous. The group takes in the private film collections of collectors, often after they have died. They then catalog the holdings to see if there are any episodes that are missing from the BBC archives.
Doctor Who was not the only BBC series to have had episodes purged by the broadcaster. A number of classic British series such as Z Cars, Dixon Of Dock Green, Hancock’s Half-Hour, The Likely Lads, Adam Adamant Lives!, Top Of The Pops and more are still incomplete in the BBC’s archives.
