60 years later, two classic Doctor Who Dalek episodes have finally been found. It was 1965, and Britain was in the grip of “Dalekmania.” The malicious pepperpots had caught a nation’s imagination; there were Dalek toys, comics, games, even a Dalek breakfast cereal. Hammer horror star Peter Cushing played the Doctor in a film adaptation of The Daleks, and the BBC aired a new, 12-episode adventure – “The Daleks’ Master Plan” – that brought them back to the main show. And yet, as big a deal as the Daleks were, episodes of that specific adventure were lost in the mists of time. Only three episodes survived.
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Until today. The BBC has announced that, against all the odds, two lost episodes have now been found. Peter Purves, who played Doctor Who companion Steven Taylor, was invited to the Phoenix Cinema in Leicester on Wednesday under false pretenses to watch the episodes, and gave a very simple statement that certainly speaks for the entire fandom: “My flabber has never been so gasted.” The BBC will be releasing the two episodes (episodes 1 and 3, “The Nightmare Begins” and “Devil’s Planet”) on iPlayer in the U.K. over Easter after a special screening in London on April 4, with Purves as the guest of honor.
The episodes were recovered by the Leicester charitable trust Film is Fabulous! (FIF). Although international censors passed on the story, deeming it too violent, copies were still made by technicians to check for problems if they had been shipped to other markets. These versions somehow found their way into the hands of a private collector, whose films – which, according to the BBC, “largely focused on his love of trains and canals, including hundreds of home videos” – were left to FIF after his death.
How Did the BBC Lose the Biggest Dalek Story Every Made?
“The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley wrote. “They do things differently there.” As hard as it is for modern viewers to understand, nobody in the 1960s ever imagined Doctor Who episodes would be worth much. Forget Blu-rays and DVDs; this was before home video, meaning you only rewatched something if a broadcaster decided to show it again. “The Daleks’ Master Plan” was a mammoth undertaking, a 12-episode story with an episode airing on Christmas Day, and it was simply too vast. It was also too violent for international markets, meaning no copies had previously were thought to have been made.
We now know that wasn’t the case, of course, which raises the prospect that other episodes were copied as well – meaning some could have made their ways to collectors. There are particularly high hopes for episode 4, which was loaned to the children’s show Blue Peter as part of Doctor Who‘s 10th anniversary in 1973. Clips were shown on Blue Peter, but the tape was never returned, and this was spared when the BBC wiped a lot of old tapes in the 1970s to reuse them. It was presumably thrown away at the time, but there’s a vague possibility it survived.
“The Daleks’ Master Plan” may not have had a great reputation at the time, but it has become something of a holy grail among Doctor Who fans. It was the first Doctor Who Christmas Special; episode 7, “The Feast of Steven,” with the Doctor wishing viewers a happy Christmas. The story was unusually bold, killing two Doctor Who‘s companions in a controversial decision that wouldn’t be repeated until 1982. Even better, “The Daleks’ Master Plan” episode 1 features the Doctor Who debut of Nicholas Courtney, who would later play long-running character Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, originally cast as a galactic spy Bret Vyon.
We’re a long way from being able to watch the full story. Still, a piece of Doctor Who history has been rediscovered – a vitally important piece, one nobody had ever really expected to turn up. Even more excitingly, the mere existence of these copies is a hint that others may be out there, also in the hands of aging collectors. Doctor Who fans suddenly have hope once again.
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