Lost & Found?

You may have seen some on-line traffic recently regarding the potential return of missing episodes. It's now 12 years since the nine Season 5 Troughton episodes were found, coinciding with the 50th Anniversary. A lot of people hoped that a similar announcement might be made in 2023, but the 60th passed without any news.

In the early 1980's a more concerted effort was made to locate missing episodes and have them returned to the archives, fronted by Sue Malden of the BBC's film and video library. This year she confirmed what everyone knew / suspected - that some episodes existed in the hands of film collectors. Sadly, a minority of fans went on-line threatening to hunt these people down to do them harm - antagonising them rather than making them more likely to co-operate. Indeed, there was story doing the rounds that one collector would rather burn his collection than see it handed over to such people.

Malden stated that she was aware of "one or two" episodes in private hands. Not wishing to get too deeply into semantics, but that phrase always refers to more than one - so let's say at least two.

An outfit called 'Film Is Fabulous' have been beavering away behind the scenes for some time building positive relationships with collectors, primarily to have their collections catalogued but also to agree on their preservation for the future. The group have organised events at which newly rediscovered shows are shown to the public, and at one of these the other week they intimated that they were also aware of missing Doctor Who amongst the collections they were working on. Semantics again, but they seemed to imply that this was more than what Malden had suggested. They said that they hoped to have an announcement soon.

Even if they only meant one more than Malden, that might make three potential rediscoveries.

Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that these are Hartnell / Troughton episodes. Technically there are missing Pertwee episodes as well, as you'll know from the colourisation process which has had to be employed to release them on DVD or Blu-ray.

If this turns out to be more than rumour - and that is all it should be treated as for now - then we obviously want to see episodes from Seasons 3 and 4, which suffered the most from the mass junkings. I'm sure most of us would like to see Dalek or Cyberman episodes, or key episodes such as the currently AWOL The Web of Fear (3) or The Tenth Planet (4).

Personally, if it was Galaxy Four (2) or The Space Pirates (3), I'd be just as happy.