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Another
lost Doctor Who
film found!
The Daleks' Master Plan,
episode
2 (1965)
17th
January 2004
Original
cover art
for The Daleks'
Master Plan book.
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Lost
without trace for over thirty years, an episode of the famous
TV science-fiction series Doctor Who has come to light
in England.
The
film is 'Day of Armageddon', the second episode of The
Daleks' Master Plan. This is a 12-episode story, originally
broadcast in 1965, but up to now, only episodes 5 and 10 had been
extant.
Steve
Roberts, head of the Doctor Who Restoration Team, tells how it
happened:
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was contacted on Tuesday via the RT
Website address by the former Head of Engineering at Yorkshire
Television, who told me that he thought that the time was right
to return two cans of Doctor Who film that he had "borrowed"
from a pile of junk he was asked to dispose of whilst a trainee
BBC engineer in the early seventies. The first was a copy of 'The
Expedition' from the first Dalek story... but the second was 'Day
of Armageddon', the second episode of 'The
Daleks' Master Plan'!
I've
just watched the episode and it's fantastic - you get to see Katarina,
more of Bret Vyon, the alien delegates (including, of course,
Celation, who we only ever had a single picture of!) and the Doctor
disguised as Zephon stealing the Taranium Core!
Only
another 108 to go!
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Kert Gantry is
exterminated by a dalek:
a scene from the epic 12-episode story
The Daleks' Master Plan (1965). |
Below:
some scenes from the epic Daleks' Master
Plan:
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Clearly
this is a tremendous find!
Steve's reference to "108 to go" refers to the number
of lost episodes of the Doctor Who adventures still to be found,
after originals and negatives were systematically dumped by the
BBC in a fit of bureaucratic ineptitude in the 1970s. With master
prints destroyed, the only hope of locating films today is to
find 16mm film prints
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Doctor
Who (William Hartnell), an eccentric time lord who travels
widely through time and space, seen here with his time-machine,
the tardis. |
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made
for foreign TV stations. New Zealand received a number of these films,
but The Daleks' Master Plan was never broadcast
here. A former TVNZ staffer recalls viewing the films, but says they
were felt to be too violent and were returned to the BBC in England.
With
the third film now having turned up, life looks much brighter on the
science-fiction front. In 1999, also in January, a lost episode from
The Crusade, an early Doctor Who adventure,
was located by Aucklander Bruce
Grenville.
Curiously,
the other two extant episodes of this adventure also turned up in strange
circumstances. They were found in 1983 in the basement of a Mormon temple
in London.
See
the discussion
about the new find.
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