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The World of Hoaxes in Doctor Who
There are currently 108 episodes of Doctor Who that are missing. They do not exist in the BBC archives – they video tape masters were burned nearly 30 to 40 years ago, with the initial culling of the archives taking place in 1967 – but Doctor Who is not alone in this loss as many shows are lost from the archives.Entire seasons of Dad’s Army, Dixon of Dock Green, A for Andromeda and Z-Cars are all gone with no footage, audio or pictures to represent them and in the case of the mid-1960’s football drama United, absolutely nothing at all is present.
For those of you wondering how exactly this happened, let me explain. Basically Doctor Who was made on video tape, it had to be transferred to 16mm film so that it could accommodate many of the television stations around the world that were still utilising that format. Once the copies were made, the masters were stored away – later to be incinerated when the archives became overly full – and the copies floated to various destinations around the world.
Some of the 16mm copies were destroyed as per contract agreement, while some kept going to different countries. Others simply got lost, stored and forgotten or mislabeled and some ended up in the basement of a Morman Church (true story – episodes 5 and 10 of the Dalek Master Plan were discovered this way).
There are still active searches in a number of African territories, specifically Zambia, although there were a number sent to Zimbabwe, Iraq and a number of other countries that are simply inaccessible at the moment due to political tensions (that have been heavily publisized on other publications).
Hoaxes
Last year, an uproar in the science fiction community was created when a rumour reporting the discovery of the Patrick Troughton serial, “The Web of Fear”, was given free reign when it was published on Doctor Who online’s news page. This might all seem very silly – that is of course you learn about some of the money involved.
A hoax that took place about 8 or 9 years ago saw episode 4 of Marco Polo (“the Wall of Lies”) on eBay getting bids of more than ₤10,000 (about €13,500) within a week of its announcement and it is thought that its worth has skyrocketed since then, as every year the film is missing increases its chance of deteriorating beyond repair.
However, two weeks ago a new rumour surfaced from the BBC Restoration website. Apparently a gentleman has found several episodes in his father’s collection including The Tenth Planet; Episode 4 and an unspecified number of episodes from the Galaxy 4 serial. While fans will undoubtedly be delighted to see Galaxy 4 returned, it is not a serial that ever ranks that highly in annals of Doctor Who, however there are many that consider The Tenth Planet; Episode 4 the holy grail of missing episodes as it is the final episode starring William Hartnell – the end of the story sees the Doctor regenerate for the first time.
There are plenty of concerns and scepticism from fandom about revelations of Hartnell’s last episode being discovered and it often brings out cries of “hoax”. Only time will tell and apparently the world will know for sure by Tuesday evening, Wednesday morning.
There is one episode that we are certain will never be found and that is episode 7 of the Dalek Master Plan – otherwise known as “the Feast of Steven”. The episode was broadcast on Christmas Day 1965 and was for the most part superfluous to the plot and even features the Doctor (played at the time by William Hartnell) toasting the viewers and wishing them a Happy Christmas. As a result of this, the episode was not copied (that we know of) and released to other territories.
Of course fans of the show do their best to fill the gap, with homemade recons (reconstructed episodes created by mixing the existing audio soundtrack with still photographs of the characters and scenes) with the main producers being a company called Loose Canon, that create recons for the price of a videotape and postage. Of course there was the animation of two episodes of the 1968 Patrick Troughton story, “The Invasion”, but unfortunately further animated episodes have currently been ruled out due to the hefty finances involved.
The reality is that there will always be missing episodes of Doctor Who and other shows and lots of clips that come back from here on in may be of too low quality to repair.
Mini People in Coney Island “Nara Dreamland”
Until later,
Leigh
