In the late 1960s and throughout the 70s, the BBC routinely wiped programmes to reuse the tape or just to clear storage space — but in July this year, Andrew Martin (right) of the BBC archives discovered a few minutes of a long-lost serial. It was from Fury from the Deep, one of Patrick Troughton's best stories, which was shown in 1968 and destroyed soon after.
"We've got something like over a million individual items in the archives:' says Martin. "I'd been aware there were possibly some items of film we didn't know we had, because sometimes programme-makers use waste film, and in a few cases they've used bits of old programmes!"
Three minutes and 32 seconds of silent footage were found, showing the Doctor (left) struggling with a device he's built to defeat a seaweed creature while his companions recoil and possibly scream a bit. But what makes the find so exciting is that they're not from the finished programme. "It's pretty much as it would have been on the screen, but it's different takes and trims, the bits they threw away," says Martin.
"It's really nice, though: Patrick Troughton and characters emoting away. And it's particularly interesting because it's from a story where we have no complete episodes, just short excerpts. Fury from the Deep is probably the second most sought-after missing story, next to 1967's Evil of the Daleks."
The footage, which is likely to turn up on a Doctor Who DVD, can be seen online at www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho.
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