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The missing episodes span 26 serials, including 10 full serials. Most of the gaps are from seasons 3, 4, and 5, which currently lack a total of 79 episodes across 21 (out of 26) serials. By contrast, seasons 1, 2, and 6 are missing just 18 episodes, across 5 (out of 26) serials.
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- Senior Staff Writer
- The Abominable Snowmen (Episodes 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6) The Abominable Snowmen was a six-part epic that took the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria (Deborah Watling) to Tibet via some mountains in Wales.
- The Evil of the Daleks (Episodes 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) There's a parallel world where The Evil of the Daleks was the final end for Terry Nation's creations as he tried to sell them to the American markets.
- The Faceless Ones (Episodes 2, 4, 5, and 6) The two episodes of The Faceless Ones that exist reveal a contemporary Doctor Who story that makes full use of its location at Gatwick Airport.
- The Macra Terror (All 4 Episodes) The Macra Terror got an animated reconstruction in 2019 and is largely accepted as the best example of the form in both its color and black and white formats.
Feb 22, 2024 · The appropriately dubbed Doctor Who Missing Episodes are a collection of 156 episodes of the British sci-fi television series that were wiped/junked by the BBC between 1967 and 1974, spanning the first eleven seasons of the show.
Find out which Doctor Who episodes from the classic series are currently missing from the archives. See the list of stories and episodes that are lost or partially missing for each Doctor.
- Overview
- History
- Recovery of full episodes
- Clip recovery
- List of missing episodes
- Nearly complete episodes
- External links
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A "missing episode" is generally considered to be a televised episode of Doctor Who which no longer exists in its entirety. It is distinct from an episode which was never made, such as those which would have comprised the original season 23, as well as from an episode which was partly produced but ultimately unfinished, i.e. the 1980 version of Shada.
Phillip Morris on recovering missing Doctor Who -
Philip Morris talks about the 2013 return of The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear
In the early days of British television, episodes were not generally repeated after their original broadcast. Contracts with various parties, in particular the musicians' and actors' unions, gave broadcasters a limited time frame in which their recorded material could be used. Most episodes of television programmes were therefore not re-broadcast. As the videotape was relatively costly at the time, the medium was actually more valuable than the content recorded on that medium. Since home video had not yet become a viable commercial product, there was thus no financial incentive to keep previously-broadcast material in the BBC Archives. It made more sense, at least in the short term, to wipe and reuse videotape than it did to pay to have the apparently useless episodes indefinitely stored.
What is perhaps unusual about Doctor Who is that there were in fact two purges. The first, involving the videotaped masters, was absolute, insofar as the 1960s episodes were concerned. All episodes were wiped, so that the videotape could be reused. The second was the junking of the filmed duplicates of the master. This second purge was much more haphazard. Why certain filmed prints were junked, while others remained, has no single answer. Episodes were junked at different times, for different reasons. The trashing of the filmed copies was clearly not carried out by persons familiar with Doctor Who, else certain key episodes — notably those in which the Doctor regenerated or companions came and went — would surely have been retained.
As new contracts were struck with performers' unions, and home video began to be seen as a viable commercial enterprise, the BBC established an Archive Department charged with recovering lost material. The BBC was particularly pressured to begin the recovery of Doctor Who episodes by Ian Levine, a "fan adviser" officially employed by the Doctor Who production office. The efforts he helped to start would eventually result in the recovery of several episodes.
One particularly rich vein of recovery was through BBC Enterprises, the arm of the BBC which sold BBC products outside the United Kingdom. Their own archives were in fact separate from those of the BBC, and no one had bothered to cross-check their holdings against those of the BBC proper. This simple check resulted in some of the earliest recoveries. At the same time, sales records held by Enterprises allowed investigators to trace filmed duplicates to various overseas broadcasters. A global hunt then began, which has resulted in several finds. One of the more notable was when the entirety of The Tomb of the Cybermen was found in Hong Kong in 1992.
At the same time, what emerged was the fact that the Troughton episodes had been significantly less popular overseas than the Hartnell ones. There were thus fewer possible locations for duplicates of Second Doctor episodes. Consequently, there are comparatively fewer remaining episodes of Troughton's Doctor.
Outside of the "official" paper trail, episodes have sometimes turned up in the hands of private collectors. Because the owners have a legal right to own the physical prints, the BBC has offered to let the collectors retain their copies, after making a duplicate for the BBC Archives.
In July 2011, film collector Terry Burnett returned "Air Lock", the third episode of Galaxy 4 and The Underwater Menace episode two to the BBC after discovering that these two episodes were missing from the BBC Archive through a chance meeting with Ralph Montagu, the head of heritage at Radio Times. However, the recovery was not announced to the public until later in December. These were the first full episodes to be recovered since "Day of Armageddon", the second episode of The Daleks' Master Plan, in 2004.
In October 2013, it was announced that nine complete episodes of Doctor Who had been found at a TV relay station in Nigeria. The episodes in question were found by archive television recovery expert Phillip Morris. Five of the episodes were from The Enemy of the World; episode three already existed in the BBC Archives — therefore making The Enemy of the World a complete story. The other four episodes were from The Web of Fear, which up until then had only episode one existing in the BBC Archives. Episodes two, four, five and six are now back in the BBC Archives; however, episode three is still missing. (Notably, episode three of The Web of Fear is the only missing episode known to definitively have an existing copy not in the BBC Archives; it was found with the others in Nigeria, but during negotiations for their return to the UK it was apparently stolen and sold to a private collector. It was likely valuable because of its important first appearance of the Brigadier. )
For many of the missing episodes, short clips exist. These come from several sources:
•clips used in contemporaneous television programmes which exist — for example, editions of Blue Peter;
•clips used as flashbacks in other episodes of Doctor Who;
•the censor clips: material physically cut from episodes by the censors in Australia and New Zealand, as they deemed it unsuitable for family viewing;
•the 6-minute-long clip from "Four Hundred Dawns", the first episode of Galaxy 4, given to Jan Vincent-Rudzki as a thank-you for his help on the 1977 documentary Whose Doctor Who; and
•the 8mm cine reel filmed during the 1960s by an unknown fan in Australia, by pointing a film camera at the television screen
First Doctor television storiesSecond Doctor television storiesTotal of missing episodesThird Doctor television storiesAll episodes of the Jon Pertwee era exist in the BBC Archive. However, some of the episodes only existed as black-and-white film prints, mostly recovered from overseas broadcasters. Though filmed in colour, most of the world's broadcasters did not then transmit in this format, requiring BBC Enterprises to provide 16mm black-and-white film prints for overseas sales. Improvements in colourisation technology resulted in all of Jon Pertwee's episodes being for all practical purposes "recovered", unlike the 1960s missing episodes. However, they ended up being the most complicated to outline, as there have been many versions of some of them, since the colour restoration process began in the early 1990s. Note, too, that some of these recolourised episodes have actually been broadcast, giving some of the restored episodes original transmission dates of their own. As of the DVD release of The Mind of Evil in June 2013, all of the Pertwee-era stories are now available in colour.Recolourised television storiesSome of the episodes held by the BBC are not, in fact, complete. Perhaps they have massive physical damage across a few frames, or maybe they were recovered from copies that had frames removed by overseas censors. In this latter case, the missing material has also been recovered as a separate clip. Sometimes, it has been re-integrated in to a home video release. However, a few remain minimally incomplete:
•The Keys of Marinus ("The Velvet Web", "The Screaming Jungle")
•The Time Meddler ("Checkmate")
•Galaxy 4 ("Air Lock")
•The Celestial Toymaker ("The Final Test")
•The War Machines episodes three and four
•The Doctor Who Clips List
•A Complete List of missing stories with extensive details
Jun 20, 2019 · Here’s the breakdown: “Marco Polo” – 7 episodes of 7 missing. “The Reign of Terror” – 2 episodes of 6 missing. “The Crusade” – 2 episodes of 4 missing. “Galaxy 4” – 3 ...
The following 97 episodes of Doctor Who are currently missing from the BBC Archives: Doctor Who News.
