You head out to help out Wales for a few days and new Doctor Who news starts happening!




More annoyingly, the BBC had a complete run of Doctor Who until 1974 when some idiot woman in archives decided nobody would ever want to watch these programmes again and began tossing them in skips.She did that with a great deal of irreplaceable early BBC material to save valuable shelf space.

About fifty or so of the episodes she trashed have been recovered from elsewhere, mostly from overseas stations that bought rights to show the series and never returned the tapes. The most recent find came from Nigeria a couple of years ago (although one episode was stolen from the cache before it could be returned).

The fan who first discovered that the episodes were gone from the archive (The Doctor Who production team allegedly didn't know) found out when he finally got permission to take personal copies of some stories for his own use (in a pre-VCR era). He particularly wanted a copy of the first Daleks story from 1963, but found out it had been thrown out that very day! He went to the bins outside BBC centre and retrieved it!

There are also clips from some of those episodes still available. A BBC children's magazine programme called Blue Peter regularly did Doctor Who features and tended to hold on to clips it borrowed; hence we have a copy of the Hartnell to Trougton regeneration scene that would otherwise be lost, for example. Australian TV edited some episodes for disturbing content. Most of the edited episodes are lost; the edited-out bits have survived!

Another useful source was dug up by Doctor Who Magazine. Back in the 60s, the BBC employed a photographer to take still shots of programmes during broadcast (yes, from the TV screen), to be used for overseals sales promotions and as a record of designs etc. The magazine tracked down the widow of the guy who had done this work and managed to get his complete collection of screenshots for 85% of the episodes from the 60s, probably 100 pictures an episode. This collection has been the basis for storyboarding the animated episodes so far.




A splendid idea, and much welcomed.




There have been some attempts before, but on stories where one or two out of six or seven episodes were missing. Three dirrerent animation companies have made the attempt so far, with differing degrees of success (and different strengths and weaknesses). "The Power of the Daleks" is almost entirely missing, but if they were going to pick just one story to revive through animation this is the one!

It is also the first Doctor Who story I remember watching, when I was four.