Some Doctor Who missing episodes have been found in the strangest of places. Sometimes, the stories of their recoveries are more bizarre than the series itself…
“We found them in the back of a cupboard…”
In the 70s and 80s, fans the world over were on the hunt for Doctor Who missing episodes, led by superfan and official series consultant Ian Levine, who had personally returned a number of films to the BBC archive.
Sometimes, though, you can miss what’s immediately in front of you. In 1988, BBC Enterprises was in the process of moving buildings, and the team was clearing out all the offices and cupboards. It was during this ‘spring clean’ that someone stumbled upon four instalments of ‘The Ice Warriors‘ which, prior to this, had been missing in its entirety from the BBC archive. These were episodes one, four, five and six, and they were literally sitting in the back of a cupboard, having been dumped there and forgotten about.
Presumably, these Doctor Who missing episodes has been returned from overseas so that the BBC could burn them but, for whatever reason, they had been abandoned at BBC Enterprises. It would be some 10 years before these missing episodes were finally made available on VHS… Perhaps the BBC was checking the remaining offices and / or filing cabinets for episodes two and three…
The race across London
The full extent of the BBC’s Doctor Who cull was discovered by Ian Levine when he went to the BBC with the intention of buying some prints for himself. He had his hopes set on ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan,’ and even though this was listed as being present in the film library, it had already been sent to the great archive in the sky.
And there were some other films that were on the cusp of becoming Doctor Who missing episodes. Levine stumbled upon 28 film cans, all wrapped up in gaffer tape with the ominous words ‘withdrawn,’ ‘de-accessioned’ and ‘junked,’ meaning that they were literally sitting on death row. Levine pleaded with the woman who was in charge of the BBC’s film library, the infamous Pamela Nash, to halt the prints’ destruction as he wanted to buy them, but according to Levine, Nash was indignant. Moreover, Levine said that he was afraid she would burn the prints out of pure spite if he riled her too much.
This resulted in a hair-raising dash across London, with Levine racing to see the BBC’s archive selector Sue Malden to get the authority to halt the films’ destruction. Thankfully, she was able to do so, and this must go down in history as one of the most dramatic and heart-stopping Doctor Who missing episode recoveries of all time.
The episodes in question were all seven parts of the very first Dalek story: all seven negatives and all seven positives in English, and their counterparts in Arabic, totalling 28 cans.
The Mormon church
Doctor Who missing episodes have been found in attics, archives and ‘car boot’ sales, but the recovery of episodes five and 10 of ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan‘ remains something of a head-scratcher. These were unearthed in the basement of a Mormon church in South London, along with several other BBC films – and nobody knows why they were there.
The story behind these Doctor Who missing episodes is even more strange when one remembers that ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ was not widely copied. Indeed, according to legend, there was only one set of copies of this story, which was sent Down Under as an ‘audition’ set to see if the Australians wanted to screen them. Ultimately, they passed, and these prints were returned to the BBC for incineration.
Presumably, the copies that were found in the Mormon church were the same ones that has been sent to Australia, which still doesn’t explain how they wound up in a basement in South London.
It is remarkable, though, that so much of ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ has survived. It is one of the least-copied Doctor Who adventures, so to have three of its 12 episodes in our collections is nothing short of a miracle. ‘Marco Polo,’ by comparison, is one of the most-copied stories, and we currently have nothing – so start checking those Mormon churches…
“THEY ARE NOT MISSING BUT DESTROYED THE END.”
The Doctor Who missing episodes saga turned into something of a Dan Brown novel in 2013 when rumours abounded that the film archivist Philip Morris had uncovered 90 lost prints in Africa. The internet detectives quickly got to work and began hounding his company TIEA for information about potential discoveries, and rumour has it that some fans were even telephoning foreign archives, desperate to glean information about Doctor Who missing episodes.
Eventually, the TIEA Facebook page released a statement: “TIEA does not hold any missing episodes of the long-running Doctor Who series,” it said. “The original videotapes were wiped [and] subsequent film copies were either returned to the BBC [or] sent to landfill. Odd fragments have surfaced – two episodes on 16mm film – but that’s it. The programmes in question, like many others, were destroyed as they had no further commercial value. They are not missing but destroyed. The end.
“I am sorry if this upsets some people but these are the facts.”
These weren’t quite the facts, though, as a few months later TIEA announced that it had indeed found some Doctor Who missing episodes (nine, in fact) at a TV station in Jos. But it later emerged that there had been 10 in the original haul, until some unscrupulous person pilfered it for themselves. This may have been why TIEA was so keen to downplay its activities, lest any other Doctor Who missing episodes did a moonlight flit.
This event also highlighted how cloak-and-dagger the business of Doctor Who missing episodes had become. Back in the day, whenever a Doctor Who missing episode discovery was made, it was announced almost instantly. But the 2011 recovery of ‘Galaxy Four‘ part three and ‘The Underwater Menace‘ part two changed all this, with the announcement being withheld for several months so that the news could be broken exclusively at the BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped event. This opened the door to a world of lies and misinformation, and it’s no surprise, therefore, that certain conspiracy theories started to emerge.
So who knows what bizarre Doctor Who missing episode stories will emerge in the next few years. Some of them may even be stranger than fiction…
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