In 1978, the BBC ended its “junking” policy (whereby it destroyed old videotapes that it deemed to be without value) and finally began cataloguing and preserving old broadcasts. At the time, only 47 of the 253 Doctor Who episodes broadcast in the 1960’s were held in the BBC archives, but quick action and hard work brought that number up to 118 episodes by the end of the ‘70s. During the ‘80s, another 21 missing episodes were located, bringing the total in the archives to 139. And during the ‘90s, another 5 missing episodes were added to the cache, so that the BBC started the 21st Century with 144 Doctor Who episodes from the ‘60s. However, that meant that 109 of those 253 episodes were still missing … and so the search continued. As far as the first decade of the 21st Century is concerned, I’ll cut right to the chase: only ONE missing episode turned up during the entire decade. On January 15th, 2004, Francis Watson, the former Head of Engineering at Yorkshire Television in Leeds returned a copy of episode 2 of The Daleks’ Master Plan that he had knowingly held onto for almost 40 years. He also returned a badly-damaged copy of episode 5 of The Daleks, but that had long been recovered by the BBC archives, so it didn’t mean much. To be sure, additional film clips were found, but no other complete episodes other than the one mentioned above turned up. Fans were left wondering: had the search for missing episodes finally come to an end? Here is a decade-by-decade breakdown of the episode finds: ‘70s = 47 in the archives; 71 missing episodes recovered ‘80s = 21 missing episodes recovered ‘90s = 5 missing episodes recovered ‘00s = 1 missing episode recovered As you can see, there is a clear pattern of diminishing returns, so it should come as no surprise that many began speculating that the 108 episodes that were still missing by the end of 2009 would remain forever lost. The film clips that were recovered between 2000 and 2010 included: 1) censored clips from The Web of Fear and The Wheel in Space (November, 2002); 2) 3 minutes and 32 seconds of deleted footage from episode 6 of Fury from the Deep (July, 2003); 3) a trailer for episode 1 of The Power of the Daleks (November, 2003); 4) one minute and 35 seconds of film inserts from episode 1 of The Space Pirates (August, 2004); and 5) 20 seconds of footage from episode 4 of The Power of the Daleks (August, 2005). [There have been additional film clips found since 2005; however, the websites I have been using to collect all this information stopped updating after 2005 – presumably because there were no more full episode discoveries in the years immediately following.] Having said all that, let’s not forget that the decade in question was a GREAT decade for Doctor Who. The show returned to television with all new episodes! And the BBC began releasing EVERYTHING it had on DVD so that all Whovians could finally have access to everything that still existed – both from the classic series and the new series. And to be sure, Doctor Who was more popular than ever by the end of 2009 – not just in the U.K., but all around the world. As I am sure EVERYONE knows, there have been missing episodes recovered very recently, but you’ll have to check my posting tomorrow to learn about those … :-) For the sake of completeness, here is the same summary of missing episode finds during this decade as I have included in previous postings: 2000 = (none) 2001 = (none) 2002 = (none) 2003 = (none) 2004 = 1 episode recovered 2005 = (none) 2006 = (none) 2007 = (none) 2008 = (none) 2009 = (none) And again for the sake of completeness, here is an updated breakdown – both by Doctor and by season – of what was held in the BBC archives at the end of 2009: First Doctor = 89 of 134 episodes held (66.4%) Second Doctor = 56 of 119 episodes held (47.1%) Season 1 = 33 of 42 episodes held (78.6%) Season 2 = 37 of 39 episodes held (94.9%) Season 3 = 16 of 45 episodes held (35.6%) Season 4 = 9 of 43 episodes held (20.9%) Season 5 = 13 of 40 episodes held (32.5%) Season 6 = 37 of 44 episodes held (84.1%) Tomorrow I’ll take a look at the missing episode recovery process from 2010 to the present. ~ CL
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 16:23:21 +0000
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