The Lost Stories and how they do NOT compromise my challenge...ok!!

Over the last 30 years television archivists have been scouring the globe in attempt to hunt down copies of the missing episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s. As of the start of my quest there were 108 episodes still missing. The last episode to be recovered had been way back in 2004. As such, it was firmly believed that unfortunately there would be 108 missing episodes of Doctor Who forever. With regards to my quest this meant that when I got up to an episode that was missing, in order to "watch" it i would have to use one of the fan reconstructions. For the most part these are pretty good. All audio from all missing episodes does exist as fans recorded these on tape from the television upon first broadcast. These audios have then been combined with telesnaps, pictures, brief moments of existing footage, pictures of characters from other episodes, some CGI etc in order to make as complete an episode as possible. As I said these are pretty good for the most part but they could never compare to watching the real episode and its a crying shame that for these 108 episodes this joy would be denied me.

However...

My quest started in November 2011 and the news came through in December 2011 that 2 more episodes had been discovered. One from the first Doctor and one from the second Doctor. Unfortunately these were both from pretty rubbish stories but nevertheless this was amazing! It came completely out of the blue and I really thought that no more episodes would ever be found after the search had seemed to dry up in 2004. However it seems this was a taster of what was to come as in October 2013 the BBC announced the finding of 9 more! And not just any 9, but 9 episodes from two of the most wanted stories of all, The Web Of Fear and The Enemy Of The World!

 

It seems amazing to me now that after being missing for 45 years these lost classics are now safely stored on my iPad. I can't describe what a thrill that is. However the one question I find myself answering a lot now is this

"Don't you need to start over again now that they have found more?"

So let me answer this here....absolutely not!!!

I think people may have thought that as these episodes were missing that I may have just skipped them completely but I did no such thing. I got my hands on the best reconstructions I could find and watched them and as such each and every episode has been included in this quest. So there! I refuse to answer that question anymore! 

However what I thought I may do (assuming I don't fall any further behind with this blog!) is revisit these stories now that I can properly watch them and write up an updated blog entry for each of them. iWeb

I can't believe that having found nothing since 2004 that during the course of my quest a further 11 episodes have been restored to the BBC archives. As such there are now only 97 missing episodes and before this challenge ends in May 2014 that number could have dropped again! We can only hope..