#Doctor who episodes series
This has left 97 episodes - one eighth of the total number of episodes of the entire series - officially missing. Between 19, 50 missing episodes of Doctor Who were recovered from these sources and returned to the archives. Since Doctor Who began in 1963, it had been sold widely abroad, particularly in the Commonwealth, and in many cases those countries had hung onto their copies of old episodes.
The most valuable resource, however, was the BBC's foreign sales department. In some cases BBC engineers had saved episodes and kept them safely at home, or sold them to private collectors. The advent of the home video format in the late 1970s and intervention from fans made the BBC change its mind quite rapidly and almost as soon as it stopped the purge of its archives in 1978 it began trying to reclaim the lost material. Some material from the Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, was also destroyed, but later recovered via black-and-white copies that were digitally re-colourised. These episodes consisted almost entirely of material from the First and Second Doctors (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton), the first six seasons of the show, aired from 1963 to 1969 and filmed in black-and-white, which was considered even less valuable in the colour era. Doctor Who was a victim of this process, with 147 episodes junked between 19. Once aired, it was common for the tapes containing TV shows to be wiped and re-used to save money. As was common at the time (from its inception until the 1970s), the BBC used to produce television programmes with no expectation that they would ever be repeated or commercially released.
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