Introduction

By Cuttings Archive Webmaster/Editor Roger Anderson.

One of the abiding obsessions of many Doctor Who fans, at least those who appreciate the early years of the programme, must be the loss of many episodes of Doctor Who from the BBC archives in the 1960's and 1970's. At the time of writing (January 2004, shortly after the return of Day of Armageddon, Episode Two of The Daleks' Masterplan) this stands at a total of 108 episodes that are completely missing and a number of other episodes, from the early 1970's, that are lost in their original colour form.

The aim of this section of The Cuttings Archive is to offer an insight into the history of this sad loss. These pages were originally created in response to the discovery of The Lion, Episode One of The Crusade, in January 1999.

As soon as I heard the news and had read the Press Release I created a temporary link on the main page to a copy of it. This, however, was only a short-term measure. I still wanted a permanent home for the page and decided to create a new section that would hold links to articles about this and other missing stories and tell a brief version of what happened in the first place, how these episodes were 'lost' by the BBC and how some have been recovered. I say brief because others have told this sorry tale before me and I don't want to repeat too much of what is on other sites.

Links to some excellent sites where more comprehensive details of the story can be found are in the Links section, look for The Missing Episodes links page. The Reconstructions links page is related and may also be of interest.

My interest in the missing episodes goes back a long way. If you've looked at the aptly titled My Obsession section of The Cuttings Archive you may have noticed that I held a yearning to see the very early stories ever since I first read about them in the 1973, Tenth Anniversary, Radio Times Special.

It came as quite a shock to me when I later learnt of the destruction of many of these stories by the BBC in the 1970's! This led, in more recent times, to my involvement, in a very minor role, with the fan projects to restore lost episodes of the series using a combination of soundtracks and off screen photo's.

The Missing Episodes Overview page contains brief details of the whole story, the Missing Episodes Cuttings page lists related newspaper and magazine articles and includes links to the scanned articles themselves.

Finally a full listing of the episodes currently missing from the BBC archives can be found here.