Missing Doctor Who episodes found

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Two lost episodes of Doctor Who were found in a TV engineer's private collection. The episodes feature the first two Doctors, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. One episode, Airlock, was part of a four-parter titled Galaxy Four. The other is The Underwater Menace, about the rebirth of Atlantis. From BBC News:

The announcement was made on Sunday at Missing Believed Wiped, an event held at the British Film Institute (BFI)…
Former TV engineer, Terry Burnett… bought them at a school fete in Hampshire in the 1980s.
Mr Burnett had no idea the BBC did not have the recordings - it was only when he mentioned them casually in conversation to Ralph Montagu, head of heritage at Radio Times, that their significance was recognized…
The find makes only a modest dent in the number of missing episodes, with 106 installments broadcast between 1964 and 1969 still being sought.

"Missing Doctor Who episodes discovered"

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Paul Renault

So, who had them?
Paul Renault

Darn. That joke doesn’t work as typed… Try is:

Who had them?
- flowergardenslayer
  
  Some member of the 1% I’d guess…..
- http://profiles.google.com/mkjonese Emma Jones
  
  Actually, the answer to that joke-question is something even funnier, but true: space.
  
  http://www.rimmell.com/bbc/news.htm
http://www.theblacklaser.net/ Joe The Wizard

Aw man, this makes me feel all Timey-Wimey on the inside. Exciting!
http://twitter.com/Pen_Bird Phlip

The RIAA should hang that engineer up by his nuts for stealing IP.

> But he’s in England, not _A_merica.

So??
- Mister44
  
  Uh… because RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America – and has no power in the UK, especially over show made by the BBC.
  
  Anyway – awesome find! I still haven’t seen most of the older episodes. I wish BBC America would stop playing Star Trek: TNG o_O – and start showing old Dr Who shows and others like Blake’s 7 and Hitchhikers Guide.
  - oohShiny
    
    And Space 1999!
- AnamDuine
  
  Fitting to Doctor Who, the case of the missing episodes is not so simple as someone walking away with them. The BBC lost a number of episodes through complacency (writing over them, poor storage conditions), and discarded others. Copies have been been trickling back to them for years, once their value was realized.
- CountZero
  
  So, the BBC had a deliberate policy of wiping videotape and reusing it to save money. They saw no value in keeping copies of transmitted programmes and so destroyed them. IP didn’t exist in 1969 or whenever.
  It’s only now that the BBC sees the value in what it threw away, and is actively looking to find any copies of missing episodes of a great many iconic early TV series.
  So stop trying to crowbar 21st C attitudes into 20th C values; it just makes you look stupid.
strangefriend

“NOTHING CAN STOP ME NOW!!”
http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

As thrilled as I am with this news I also read about this in The Guardian. And I couldn’t help noticing that they have a side feature titled “The Top 10 Best Doctors”:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8463377/Doctor-Who-the-top-ten-best-Doctors.html

And I couldn’t help being extremely annoyed that Colin Baker was the one they cut. In addition to being a pretty cool guy I think he did a decent job as the Doctor. And hasn’t he been through enough without being cut?

Or maybe they were trying to say he’s the most awesome Doctor of all…because he goes to eleven.
semiotix

RE-DUP-LI-CATE! RE-DUP-LI-CATE! RE-DUP-LI-CAAAAAAATE!

…this rare Doctor Who footage, so that we don’t lose it again.
rabidpotatochip

Molto bene!

(What can I say? I’m a sucker for David Tennant.)
http://twitter.com/rvitelli Romeo Vitelli

Given the sheer volume of episodes that have been racked up over the decades, will there be enough room in the BBC archives by the time the show is done? (if it ever is)
http://oddboyout.blogspot.com/ oddboyout

I wish you would have put “two” in the title.
EeyoreX

Interesting co-incidence: some of the missing episodes of doctor Who have just returned from space to be recorded for prosperity after reflecting off a mysterious unidentified object. I kid you not:http://www.rimmell.com/bbc/news.htm
- rabidpotatochip
  
  An even more interesting coincidence is that the article you linked is from April 1. ;)
Bill Thompson

I’m working at the BBC at the moment, with the archive, and one of the problems is that people don’t know – and have no easy way to tell – whether the Beeb has a copy of something, as we see in this case. There’s a project to create a full list of all BBC radio and TV programmes, called Genome – see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/2010/08/bbc-genome-the-complete-broadc.shtml – and with that, and the catalogue of what is in the archive, it will be easy for someone to tell whether they have the only copy of an old show. Can’t wait to see what we find!
awjt

This news makes every day brighter, henceforth.
popvoid

I wish they’d find more Zoe episodes.