Whos in Brief

So, in the last week, the American government broke, the Gambia withdrew from the Commonwealth because the president is scared of gays or something, and scientists finally cracked nuclear fusion for power, but at least there was some important news.

Because, yes, it's true, the BBC really have secured some lost sixties Doctor Who episodes. After all the rumours and vague reports, they finally went and released an official statement. I was quite happily poo-pooing all suggestion of missing episode recovery, and then it goes ahead and becomes true. We've even been promised that we'll be able to buy and download the things soon. We used to have to wait years for episodes to make it onto scratchy old video. We still don;t know how many episodes have been found, although the Radio Times suggested two before amending this to 'some.' They are believed to be Patrick Troughton episodes, although, as yet, this is still rumour.

UPDATE: The nine episodes discovered are confirmed as the five missing episodes of The Enemy of the World and four of the missing episodes of The Web of Fear (ep 3 remains lost).

Still, that's quite a few runaway rumours that have been proven true this year: Tennant is back for the special, Matt Smith is leaving, Peter Capaldi is his replacement. One person who won't be in the anniversary is Karen Gillan, though. From the Radio Times, again:

"I’m not in it, just to put that out there. I think I’m going to be in America, so I’ll probably round up all the people who like to watch Doctor Who in the area. We’ll probably watch it and drink PG Tips and eat Jammy Dodgers, if I can get them."

One person who is desperate to return is Kate O'Mara, who played the Rani in 1985's The Mark of the Rani, 1987's Time and the Rani and the 1993 crossover classic Dimensions in Time. From Sci-Fi Now:

"I would love to come back. I have white hair now, but a lot of it, and I’m still very glamorous and so I won’t disappoint, I hope! I’ll still be wearing the tight leather trousers and high-heel boots, regardless of what age! That’s what the fans are expecting, so that’s what you’ve got to give them."

Beyond television, other exciting news includes:

Honest-to-goodness classic serial City of Death by the late Douglas Adams and Graham Williams is to be novelised. This 1979 serial is quite simply Doctor Who at its finest. It's to be novelised by Gareth Roberts, who previously did the same for Adams's aborted serial Shada,. It will be released next year, as will a second eleventh Doctor novel by Jenny Colgan, Into the Nowhere.

Radiostatic, creators of the Parsec Award-winning audio series The Minister of Chance, are well into the process of making their new cinematic version of the story. As well as reuniting their principle cast, that includes Julian Wadham, Lauren Crace, Paul McGann and Jenny Agutter, they've only gone and cast Tim McInnerny as the king. This promises to be something very special indeed. Radiostatic productions are funded entirely by fans, and they are currently halfway towards their goal for raising £30,000 to produce the first part of the movie. If you want to help out, click this link here. You can also find out more about the production, and download the original audio series for free.

And did I mention that you can still buy the Doctor Who Information Network's new short fiction anthology? Myth Makers: Golden Years features stories by such talented folks as Blair Bidmead, Kelly Hale, Cody Quijiano-Schell and, um, me. Plus it has some cracking artwork and extra contributions by all manner of wonderful people. You can order it here.

Two lost Doctor Who episodes - FOUND!

The BBC announced last night that two of the many missing episodes of Doctor Who have been recovered, and returned to the BBC archives in their entirety. Well, we call them 'lost' or 'missing,' but destroyed is a better term - the BBC committed wanton acts of vandalism against its own product throughout the Sixties and Seventies, wiping, and sometimes even incinerating, old video stock. The list of lost Doctor Who eps tallied a whopping 108, until two more were recovered recently. Staggeringly, according to the news story, both episodes were bought at a school fete in the Eighties, and have been kept pristine since then, with the owner unaware that they were missing from the archives. These aren't the original transmission tapes, which have all invariably been destroyed. However, film transfers for overseas sales resurface from time to time, very often having been sold on by foreign television stations and now residing in private collections.

Doctor Who isn't the only series to have suffered such a fate - Dad's Army, Hancock's Half Hour, Softly Softly, Not in Front of the Children, Adam Adamant Lives! - dozens of series are missing episodes. There's a list in this wiki entry, and we can see that cop shows were hit particularly badly - Dixon of Dock Green is missing 381 episodes, and Z-Cars a whopping 466! Although this does show just how prolific the creators of these series were, to have made so many episodes in the first case. Monty Python's Flying Circus almost lost its entire first series, according to the tales, but the engineer charged with the task of wiping it decided to pinch it, and took it home instead. Good forward thinking, that man. Emergency Ward 9 also turned up in this latest haul, along with a Pete and Dud sketch - slowly, the BBC is getting its goods back.

So, Doctor Who is missing over a hundred episodes from the Sixties, featuring the original Doctor, William Hartnell, and his successor, Patrick Troughton. Thankfully, one episode for each has just been discovered. For Hartnell fans, we have Air Lock, the third episode of Galaxy Four - a major find, as this was one of the truly lost stories, with only tiny fragments of film remaining as a visual record. Troughton lovers can look forward to seeing Episode Two of The Underwater Menace, which joins the third episode in the archives, leaving episodes one, four, five and six still unaccounted for. Menace is widely considered one of the worst stories of the Sixties, but still, it's a laugh, and it's great to be able to actually see the lunacy again. Clips from both shows can be seen at the Doctor Who News Page.

So, this leaves 106 episodes still missing from the archives. It's unlikely there are many more out there - not all can be as fortunate as these, and been saved from a second act of destruction and acquired by collectors. Still, they do turn up from time to time - the last time this happened was back in 2004, when the Dalek episode Day of Armageddon surfaced. Until the next lucky find, we can make do with the off-air soundtracks - fortuitously recorded by industrious fans during the original broadcasts.

Best have a quick check in the loft though, just in case Grandad hid the complete Marco Polo up there. You never know.