For most of its existence, people considered television disposable. Film reels were junked to free up storage space, broadcasters recorded over old cassettes to save money, and no one at the BBC in the 1960s could have predicted that the broadcasts they were casually erasing would eventually be regarded as cultural treasures. Because of this shortsighted tendency, a large portion of early British television has simply vanished, and its eventual resuscitation usually makes news decades later. This technique particularly affected Doctor Who. Of the 253 episodes of Doctor Who produced between 1963 and 1969, more than 100 were missing from the BBC archives by the time the worldwide search for surviving copies began.
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