Doctor Who missing episodes

Other affected BBC series include Hancock's Half Hour, Dad's Army, Z-Cars, The Likely Lads, The Wednesday Play, Till Death Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son, Dixon of Dock Green and Not Only...

Before workable television recording was developed, if a broadcaster wished to repeat a programme (usually a one-off play), they had to re-hire the actors to perform it again, live, for additional fees.

Equity's concern was that if broadcasters kept recordings of the original performances, they would be able to re-broadcast them indefinitely, which would reduce the amount of new production and threaten the livelihoods of its members.

Patrick Troughton's era as the Second Doctor is particularly affected; of the 14 stories comprising his first two seasons, only The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Enemy of the World are complete, and these only exist due to telerecordings later returned from Hong Kong[1] and Nigeria, respectively.

[16] Internally, the wiping policy officially came to an end in 1978, when the means to further exploit programmes by taking advantage of the new market for home videocassette recordings started to become apparent.

Serials that are over 50% complete (e.g., The Reign of Terror, The Tenth Planet) have been issued as standalone releases, with the missing episodes bridged using animation, visual reconstructions, or narration to the camera.

At some point after the recording, it was discovered that a technical problem had caused backstage voices to be heard on the resulting videotape; in early December 1963, the episode was remounted with a different costume for Susan.

[73] This decision, made by then-Head of Drama Sydney Newman, resulted in a gap at the end of the second production block, which led to the creation of Mission to the Unknown.

The production rebuilds the deleted scenes using CGI, footage from elsewhere in the serial, and re-recorded dialogue from Carole Ann Ford, William Russell, and actors impersonating the rest of the cast.

[9] Most surprisingly of all, they also retained a 16 mm telerecording copy of the original untransmitted pilot, presumably a viewing print made in 1963 and subsequently lodged at the Library.

[1] Other junked sequences were mistakenly entered into a film library computer system, leading to an impression that they had existed for some years afterward, and inaccurate speculation that the BBC was still destroying clips well into the early 1980s.

In August 1988, 10 years after Levine's and Malden's visits, Episodes 1 and 4–6 of the six-part Troughton story The Ice Warriors were discovered in a cupboard at Villiers House when the Corporation was in the process of moving out of the building.

Episodes 4 and 5 of The Dominators originated from a foreign broadcaster, and had been slightly edited; the missing footage was restored later, through a mix of censor clips from Australia and more complete prints held by private collectors.

[1] An appeal to broadcasters in other countries who had shown the programme (notably Canada and African nations such as Nigeria) produced "lost" episodes from the archives of their television companies.

Following months of rumours,[87][88][89] in October 2013 a BBC press conference announced the return of 11 episodes (including two previously existing) from a television relay station in the city of Jos, Nigeria.

In 1985, a cinema owner in Brighton persuaded Hendry to lend him the films, so as to screen the episodes for profit while the Panopticon VI convention was being held in the town.

The Daleks' Master Plan was never sold abroad;[1] only Australia requested viewing copies (excepting Episode 7, "The Feast of Steven"), and eventually declined to purchase the serial.

Additionally, episodes might occasionally receive minor edits for timing reasons as well, in order to fill their allocated broadcast slot along with advertising.

[1] In 2005, two further short clips from The Power of the Daleks – along with a higher-quality version of one of the extant scenes – were discovered in a 1966 episode of the BBC science series Tomorrow's World.

Between 2010 and 2013, BBC Audiobooks collected the individual narrated soundtracks in a series of five CD box sets, entitled "Doctor Who: The Lost TV Episodes".

In addition to the soundtracks, the sets include special features such as the Archive on 4 documentary, "Doctor Who – The Lost Episodes"[129] and high-quality scans of the original camera/rehearsal scripts in PDF format.

In its original form, the videotape used to record Doctor Who captures images at 50 interlaced fields per second, resulting in a smooth, "live" feel to motion.

To recreate the original "live" video feel, early telerecorded episodes are processed through a digital tool known as VidFIRE, which approximates the missing motion between film frames.

In 2008, Reverse Standards Conversion inventor Richard Russell developed a technique involving the use of chroma dots embedded in the black-and-white signal to recreate the missing colour.

[140] Since the late 1990s, fan groups such as Loose Cannon Productions have reconstructed the missing episodes, using original camera scripts to match Cura's tele-snaps and other visual material to the surviving audio tracks.

In 2008, after future collaboration with Cosgrove Hall had been rejected due to expense, 2 Entertain was approached by David Busch of US animation studio Titmouse, Inc., who offered to do the work more cheaply as a result of the favourable exchange rate between the UK and the US, and put together a test trailer of scenes animated from various missing serials, including The Power of the Daleks, The Moonbase, The Macra Terror, The Web of Fear, and Fury from the Deep.

[163] While 2 Entertain decided not to commission anything from Titmouse, the trailer was eventually seen by Ian Levine, who offered to try and raise the money for a full episode reconstruction to serve as a prototype.

[164] With the advent of ever-more-powerful home computers and more specialist programs for them, many fans are also working on unofficial animations of the missing episodes, with many clips being shown online.

For their VHS releases, The Reign of Terror and The Crusade were presented by actors Carole Ann Ford and William Russell – while Episodes 1 and 4 of The Invasion were bridged by Nicholas Courtney.

[168] In addition, the BBC has invested in the reconstruction of episodes using animation and the recreation of parts of various serials, including the completely missing Marco Polo, in the docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time produced for the 50th anniversary in 2013.