Why We'll Never Be Able To Watch Every Doctor Who Episode

The celebrated nine recovered episodes were found in a storeroom, but that's not the case for all of the missing stories. While some may be in the hands of broadcasters who received them from the BBC ages ago, more were likely destroyed. 

A lot of the missing content is from the First and Second Doctor eras, with 58 out of the Second Doctor's total 127 episodes still lost. It's believed that most of these fell victim to the British broadcaster's poor archiving habits. Back in the '60s and '70s, before film went digital and there were backup hard drives, the BBC routinely erased old tapes to make way for new recordings. That was due in part to broadcast filming being treated more like a production tool, and less as an archiving mechanism. Plus, many areas lacked rebroadcasting rights or the storage space to keep old tapes, not to mention the general scarcity and costly nature of tape back then.

"I think a really important point to remember is that videotape was not seen as an archive medium, not as a long-term carrier for the television picture," BBC archivist Adam Lee told Today I Found Out. "They saw it as something that was transmitted, went out live, and was finished."

Much of what got "deleted" was believed then to have little to no value going forward, with shows filmed in black and white — which included 253 Doctor Who episodes — becoming regular targets. With Doctor Who being such a cultural touchstone, the erasure of so many episodes seems particularly egregious, but the decision wasn't made with malice. NASA and the BBC also famously erased the Apollo 11 moon landing footage for the same reasons.