Wiped! – Doctor Who’s Missing Episodes

By Richard Molesworth

        These days we all know what a classic series Dr Who is, but back in the 60s and 70s, TV shows would be recorded and then wiped. Sometimes copies were sold to other countries, but even these are now mostly missing. For years fans have been hunting the world over for these absent episodes, and now a few more have been found. This book tells the story of that search.

If you want to know why the episodes went missing in the first place and how some of them were found, you could find out about it in this book. It is fascinating to read about all this TV (and social) history in such exhaustive detail; I can remember myself when nearly all TV series were sold abroad or deleted after a single showing. It is hard to think of it happening now, when series are often available to buy on DVD even before they are shown, and repeats are frequently aired on satellite channels. If you read this book you enter a world where TV was seen as ephemera, and the stage was still regarded as the “real thing”. Each series is listed, although if you want to discover what the shows were all about you will have to look elsewhere. There are lists of which countries showed what when, where those few precious episodes were found and how, and all sorts of other interesting facts. There is so much in here it will take anybody a long time to read it, but it just goes to show that history and all that about the past being a different country does not have to describe events very long ago. A worthy addition to any library of Dr Who or TV history memorabilia.