A Doctor Who archive expert has shared a fresh update on the continuing hunt for missing episodes, while also revealing plans to catalogue vast private film collections that could contain lost treasures.
John Franklin, an established film collector and trustee of Film is Fabulous!, was speaking at the Recovered: The Daleks’ Master Plan comes HOME event at HOME Manchester on Saturday 23 May, following the recent recovery of two missing episodes from the classic William Hartnell serial.
Film is Fabulous! is a charitable trust dedicated to preserving film collections across the UK, with its work having already led to missing episodes of vintage television and a lost silent feature film being recovered and returned to copyright holders for preservation.
Speaking at the event, Franklin said: “We are fully committed to this, and we are going to do everything we can to save film and preserve film collections and their legacies.”
However, he was also clear about where things currently stand with Doctor Who specifically.
“If you want to know about Doctor Who, I will say two things: at the moment, we categorically do not have any missing episodes of Doctor Who,” he said.
The BBC sci-fi series famously still has 95 episodes missing from its 1960s run, after many early instalments were wiped or junked as part of archive practices between 1967 and 1978, when broadcasters routinely cleared programmes because of storage issues, material costs and rights limitations.
The total was reduced earlier this year when Film is Fabulous! announced the recovery of two episodes from 1965 serial The Daleks’ Master Plan – The Nightmare Begins and Devil’s Planet – from a private collection, marking the first major Doctor Who episode recovery since episodes were found in Nigeria in 2013.
Franklin suggested that further recoveries could yet be possible, but explained that the scale of some private collections makes the process extremely time-consuming.
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“We are aware of some collections in which… the thing is, some of these collections are so large it’s not even necessarily what the individuals might want to do, it’s how we can actually align with their ideas and thoughts as well,” he said.
“Taking a collection where there’s 16,000 films would currently take us two years to catalogue. I mean, it’s a lot of work.
“So we work on the basis that as long as we know things are safe […] And we can come back to them when it’s right for the collector and it’s right for us.”
He continued: “It’s my hope, my expectation that we will be in a position soon to take some of those collections, to identify some of the missing items that those people have, to return them to the BBC.”
The recent return of material from The Daleks’ Master Plan has already reignited hopes that more lost episodes could still be sitting in private collections, uncatalogued archives or film libraries around the world – and Franklin’s comments make clear that, even if there is no immediate breakthrough to announce, the search is far from over…
Read more:
- Doctor Who’s 30 best classic stories ranked – from William Hartnell to Sylvester McCoy
- Inside the incredible recovery of two missing Doctor Who episodes – archive expert “optimistic” more will be found
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