Junk Explained: The Nine Recovered Episodes Of Doctor Who

In an age of torrenting and Netflix and whatever else it is you kids watch your stories on, it’s hard to comprehend episodes of a TV show simply no longer existing, but this is a reality Doctor Who fans have been living in for the last thirty years. And if you’ve been on the Internet at any time in the last week, you may have noticed a raft of articles about missing Doctor Who episodes being returned to the BBC.

All the press coverage and fan speculation came to a head in the early hours of the morning, when the BBC held a press conference about the missing episodes, and then promptly declared an embargo until midnight GMT — saying there are some things fans were not meant to know (for a few hours). But since this isn’t 1960 and there’s apparently this thing called the Internet, most of the information was leaked before the deadline…

So What’s Going On?

Over the last few months, there have been a lot of rumours bubbling under the surface of the internet concerning the number of episodes that had been recovered by film archivist Phil Morris. Estimates ranged from ONE BAJILLION episodes (source: some guy on the forums) to the slightly more conservative 106 (source: the famously reliable British tabloid press), to the slightly more realistic nine — which is a little bit less than a bajillion.

Why Is This Such A Big Deal?

Between 1972 and 1978, huge amounts of videotape and film were wiped or destroyed by the BBC. As a result, many episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s no longer exist in their original format, and have been passed down by the elders of the Doctor Who fan tribe in the form of oral folklore and wild exaggeration about how the kids of today will never get to experience the sheer thrill of being scared by some fuzzy black and white blobs on a tiny television screen.

This seems ridiculously short-sighted, but it made perfect sense at the time. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was no reason to keep old recordings of television programming. There was no home video market, and repeats were only used on very rare occasions. And all this damn Doctor Who was taking up shelf-space that could have been used for works of genius like The Black & White Minstrel Show, which is an actual (horrific) TV programme that only stopped being made in 1978.

According to uber-fan and caps-lock connoisseur Ian Levine, the BBC stopped junking old episodes of Dr Who after he kicked down the doors of the BBC and saved most of them from the clutches of the dastardly Pamela Nash, a BBC employee who thought she could hide behind the Nuremberg defence of “I don’t know who you are, please get out of my office”.

Since Ian Levine is also a man who smashed his television up when the BBC took Doctor Who off the air for a few months — and also figured that releasing a charity single with Hans Zimmer was the best way to bring it back — his recollection might not be entirely accurate.

What’s more likely is that, with the advent of VCRs and video cassettes, the BBC realised there was some moolah to be made out of flogging this Doctor Who thing to nerds with disposable income.

Have Other Missing Episodes Been Found Before?

Prior to this announcement, other missing episodes had been recovered in a variety of increasingly baffling places, including car boot sales and the basement of a Mormon temple. This hasn’t always helped the reputation of the rest of the missing loot. In 1992, for instance, a copy of The Tomb of the Cybermen was discovered in Hong Kong. Prior to its rediscovery, it was held to be the greatest piece of television ever produced, and probably had the power to transmute base metals into purest gold. After its rediscovery, it was held to be a bunch of confused actors wandering around while some robots kept getting in and out of their giant robot bed. Also, it features a mute black strongman called Toberman who is the slave of two vaguely ethnic-looking foreign types — so it’s preeeeetty racist.

But There Are Still A Bunch Of Episodes That Don’t Exist At All?

Actually, every lost episode of Doctor Who exists in the form of off-air audio recordings. These were made by geeky little kids back in the ’60s, pressing their reel-to-reel tape recorders right up against the television while the episode was being broadcast. They would then share the tapes among their friends, in an early, adorable form of torrenting. But it’s not the same as actually seeing the episodes on the television (they say that radio has the best pictures, but a slightly more accurate saying would be “literally anything other than radio has the best pictures”.)

So What’s All This Current Who-ha About?

That’s barely even a joke. After the British tabloid Sunday People “broke” the news of the missing episodes being recovered, the BBC was forced into damage control to try and regain control of the story. The initial press conference was supposed to have been held on Tuesday, but was delayed to give Ian Levine some more time to scream about how this is all some sort of big conspiracy.

After the press conference, an embargo lasting until 0000 GMT was announced by the BBC. But unofficial sources (a phrase which here means “literally all of the Internet”) confirmed that the final tally of recovered episodes was nine. This was backed up by the BBC’s official announcement at 0000 GMT, which was then presumably followed by the BBC sheepishly admitting “oh yeah, we forgot the Internet was a thing.”

Which Nine Episodes Have Been Recovered?

Episodes have been recovered from two Dr. Who stories: The Web of Fear and The Enemy of the World (both from 1968).

The Web of Fear is about robot Yeti in the London Underground, who have special guns that fire magical webs. It sees the first appearance of the beloved Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and was directed by Douglas Camfield, who is the only Doctor Who director that Stanley Kubrick ever asked for advice.

The Enemy of the World is a Bond-style thriller where the villain Salamander (not an actual salamander) is played by Patrick Troughton (the same actor who plays the Second Doctor) but with a Speedy Gonzales accent. Fan consensus has long held this to be one of the weaker stories of Season Five due to its lack of monsters, so perhaps the recovered episodes will go some way towards restoring its reputation.

How Can I Watch Them Immediately?

All the recovered episodes are now available on iTunes, with The Enemy of the World to be released on DVD on the 22nd November 2013, and The Web of Fear to follow in 2014.

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Patrick Magee is a Sydney-based writer and comedian. You can read more of his stuff here, follow him on Twitter @paddy_magee or buy his novel As Baile: A Story here.