Doctor Who fans have been given renewed hope that another nine lost episodes from the 1960s could soon be returned to the BBC.
Archive TV hunter Philip Morris, who located and returned nine missing Patrick Troughto n episodes in 2013, has revealed he knows of four more missing episodes which exist in private hands in the UK, plus another two which he’s tracked down overseas.
Speaking at the Utopia fan convention in Bedfordshire he promised to try and retrieve the episodes so that they can be enjoyed by audiences once again.
A total of 97 episodes from the William Hartnell and Troughton years are missing. The story fans are most keen to track down is Marco Polo, which was told over seven episodes.
Morris’s previous find came as the show celebrated its 50th anniversary - it is now due to celebrate its 60th this autumn.
The recovered material included four episodes of six-parter The Web of Fear, in which the Time Lord battles robot Yetis spreading a poisonous fungus on the London Underground. It also featured the first appearance of popular recurring character Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart.
Morris, dubbed the “Indiana Jones of the film world” also found five episodes that complete the six-part 1967 story The Enemy of the World.
He said at the time they’d been “sitting on a shelf with a piece of masking tape that said ‘Doctor Who’”.
His new finds of as-yet-unspecified stories came as Paul Vanezis, who helps restore old episodes for blu-ray release by the BBC, confirmed he knew of two further episodes existing, with the possibility of a third.
One fan said: “Philip has scoured the archives of TV stations around the world looking for lost episodes from British TV, and has turned up gems such as missing episodes of Morecambe and Wise in Sierra Leone, Steptoe and Son and The Basil Brush Show, as well as nine episodes of Doctor Who in Nigeria.
“It sounds like he’s spoken with a few people along the way who have private collections, and hopefully their episodes will be returned to the BBC in due course.”
The BBC wiped thousands of old television shows during the 60s and 70s to save space, owing to a belief no one would want to watch black and white TV after the advent of colour programmes.
Thankfully, a number of copies were made on film, which were sold around the world to other TV stations.
Meanwhile, there’s further hope of more lost gems to be returned. Film collector Terry Burnett, who discovered a lost Hartnell episode and the earliest known-surviving Troughton episode in 2011, died earlier this year.
And his collection contained a large number of film cans which he hadn’t catalogued. Doctor Who fan Richard Latto has negotiated with Burnett’s estate to save his film collection.
It was previously discovered that Burnett unwittingly had two missing Doctor Who episodes which were returned to the BBC in 2011.
