Two lost 1965 Doctor Who episodes released after being found in private collection | Doctor Who
Two episodes of William Hartnell-era Doctor Who, not seen since 1965, have been released after being discovered in a private film collection.
The two episodes broadcast on Friday, starring the Doctor’s companion Peter Purves, are the first and third parts of a mostly lost 12-part adventure called The Daleks’ Master Plan, written by Dalek creator Terry Nation and broadcast as part of the third series of Doctor Who in November 1965.
Two episodes – The Nightmare Begins and Devil’s Planet – were rescued by Film is Fabulous, a charity run by film collectors with the aim of securing and preserving private collections. The estate of the late owner of parts of his collection containing the film prints wishes to remain anonymous, and so details about the circumstances of the find are scarce.
There were four more Doctor Who episodes among his collection, but these were all already in the possession of the BBC. The original 16mm telerecordings of the two Dalek episodes have been restored and made available on iPlayer in the UK on Friday morning. They will also be shown at a sold-out event at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, west London, on Saturday afternoon.
The announcement that the episodes were available came as a surprise to Purves at a private screening held for him in mid-March. The actor, who would later become the presenter of Blue Peter, plays the Doctor’s friend Stephen in the episodes. He was invited to a London cinema under false pretenses and then shown salvaged programmes, which he described as “beautifully directed” by Douglas Camfield.
The episodes mark a major turning point for Whovians; He first appeared when Nicholas Courtney played Bret Vyon in the series. He would later play Unit Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, a regular foil for Jon Pertwee’s Doctor and a character who has appeared in every Doctor’s stories, from Patrick Troughton’s second to Sylvester McCoy’s seventh.
Ninety-five episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s remain missing from the archives after being deleted or scrapped by the BBC in the 1970s. This was done to save space or to reuse expensive video tapes, when television was seen as a temporary product and before the development of the home media market gave them any resale value. This is the first time the episodes have been found since 2013, when a small TV facility in Jos, Nigeria, found nine Troughton-era episodes sold for broadcast abroad.
