Christmas In Whoville: Previously Lost Doctor Who Episodes To Be Released

Update, 10/7/2013: The BBC has announced that the press conference has been delayed until “the end of the week.” Which day exactly? You got me. This is one of those… yeah: still not gonna write that phrase that starts with “time” and has too many “-ey”s in it.

—————————

So apparently it’s official: there will be some new Doctor Who episodes released. Or actually, make that old ones. New old episodes? I dunno; fucker’s a time traveler, isn’t he? You figure it out.

Okay, here’s the deal: for years, a lot of the earliest episodes of Doctor Who featuring the first and second Doctors (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, respectively) have been considered “lost,” due to the BBC’s forward-thinking practice, until 1978, of bulk-wiping their old videotapes to save money on having to buy new tapes with which to capture Jimmy Saville finger-blasting prepubescent girls on Top of The Pops.

In total, 106 episodes from the early years of Doctor Who have been missing and unseen for years, although every once in a while rumors pop up saying that some episodes have been found in some musty basement in some Third World toilet somewhere, and they almost always turn out to be nothing. But today, however, the BBC has officially announced that they have recovered, and will be screening and making available for digital purchase, some previously lost episodes as soon as this coming Wednesday.

How many episodes? Well, actually that’s a good question.

Officially, the BBC will be holding a press conference Tuesday to announce which episodes they’ve recovered, but they’re not saying how many. The current reports indicate that the episodes will cover two stories from the second Doctor’s run, which could mean either two episodes or something like a dozen. However, the first story that indicated that newly-released episodes were imminent reported that the BBC had recovered all 106 missing episodes from the Ethiopian Radio and Television Agency, who allegedly kept the films or tapes after they bought the episodes for syndication years ago.

The problem with that rumor about the full episode backlog recovery is that the Stuart Kelly, the “Doctor Who expert” the Daily Mirror used as a source for the story, said that he’d been told by “a friend” that the episodes had been found. And for the purposes of objective journalism, an unfamiliar source repeating a story he was told by an unnamed third party is just about the definition of quoting that font of wisdom: “some dude.” If Woodward and Bernstein had sourced their shit similarly, Nixon would have been President until 1992, but hey, you can only expect so much from a journal of record that made its bones featuring a daily set of tits on its third page.

But one way or another, it looks like, by the end of this week, we will be able to see at least a couple of episodes of Doctor Who that we here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office have never had the opportunity to see before. And since Amanda is the real Who-head here, the only question is whether it will be two or 106 hours before I get to hear an American accent on my television again.

(via Bleeding Cool)