Doctor Who : Animating Missing Episodes.

Years ago, it might well have been considered an impossibility to have a "complete" Doctor Who collection for good reason. The early black and white years of television as a whole were overlooked as not being profitable beyond their original transmission both at home in the UK and in overseas territories where Doctor Who was screened, having purchased several serials at once from the BBC. A lot of the tapes sent overseas were either destroyed or wiped after their use had expired, were lost in one way or another or were returned to the BBC where sadly, they also met their end.

It became standard practise in the 1970's to wipe programmes from the archives in which they were stored and it was unfortunately no different for the BBC who wiped a plethora of content, including a huge amount of Doctor Who from the 1960's and original master tapes of serials from the early 70's, leaving only tele-recordings for those wiped from the latter and telesnaps, clips and off air recordings for the former.

Over the years that passed, recoveries were made in a number of unexpected places that bought a whole heap of missing Doctor Who episodes back to life and thus, back into the archive for permanent preservation. Sadly though, some serials are still either partly or entirely missing and may well never be found, as the time between recoveries passes, the world moves on and the chances of finding those rare tapes and film reels decreases.

The last recovery effort bought home the full serial 'The Enemy Of The World' and five out of the six episodes of 'The Web Of Fear'. All six of the latter were found but during negotiations for the return of the film cans, the third episode mysteriously "went missing" and is believed to have been poached by a private collector who was aware of it being found by the restoration team which means sadly, another episode that was once thought lost is almost certainly lost to the general public and Doctor Who fans alike for the foreseeable future. 

Some serials, although returned in majority part have lacked an episode or two in order to stand as a complete set and some of those have received animation treatment over the years. 'The Reign Of Terror', 'The Tenth Planet', 'The Moonbase' and 'The Invasion' are examples of mostly existing serials, having had most episodes recovered but still missing at least one. These serials were completed via animation efforts from Planet 55 (Now Big Finish Creative) and released on DVD. However, in recent years, concentration has turned from completing partly existing serials to those that are completely missing. 

Through a collaboration between the BBC Studios animation team and Sun & Moon Studios, with use of original off air audio recordings, 2016 saw the release of the completely missing serial 'The Power Of The Daleks' which featured the debut of the Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton. This was the first time ever that a completely missing story was restored entirely through the efforts of extensive animation and set a new standard for just what can now be achieved in regards to finally bringing back television once thought lost forever. Since then, we've received a complete animation of another missing story in 'The Macra Terror' which was released on DVD back in March. 

2020 will see the release of TWO serials that until now have been mostly ('The Faceless Ones') and entirely ('Fury From The Deep') missing from the BBC Archive. Both of these releases will be worked on for the first time by two teams : Sun & Moon Studios with the BBC Studios Animation team and Big Finish Creative (formerly Planet 55). Despite the two existing episodes of 'The Faceless Ones', all episodes of both serials will be fully animated but will also feature reconstructions that will use the existing episodes.

So what can we expect going forward?

Well it's clear that the BBC is building its budget and confidence with these animations by having two being worked on at once, both for release in the same year. So whilst it may be futile to guess and make assumptions, i would imagine that we're potentially looking at potential double releases going forward, whether it be two releases a year or two releases every two year. Again, i imagine they'll plan to try and do two releases a year, starting with 2020. Given that Troughton's missing serials seems to be the current focus, i think its unlikely we'll see anymore Hartnell animations since the animation workload on his era would basically be double as he has six entirely missing serials yet to be done and four that are mostly missing. See here.

So if i had to guess something of a rough schedule for potential releases it would probably look like this :

The Faceless Ones - 2020

Fury From The Deep - 2020

The Evil Of The Daleks - 2021

The Highlanders - 2021

The Abominable Snowmen - 2022

The Wheel In Space - 2022

Should the schedule look anything like that, it would leave only 'The Space Pirates' to be animated in which case, it could get a 2023 release either by itself or very possibly, another Hartnell animation for which my guess would be The Smugglers but we're doing some serious hopeful guessing now. I could be entirely wrong and heck, we could even get some Hartnell goodness in 2021 but i do think Troughton's era will be the focus for now. Either way, the future looks bright for Doctor Who's missing episodes being given a new lease of life through the power of animation which i think we can all agree, is a positive.

Doctor Who - Series 12 : Everything We Know So Far.

It goes without saying that in this era of Doctor Who, secrecy is particularly abundant around pretty much everything when it comes to the show's production. Rumours rife and the occasional fragments of info scoured from sources close to set and articles related to bits of information coming from passersby whenever Doctor Who shoots on location in and around Cardiff, Sheffield or the city that I've called home for the last few years, Bristol.

So naturally, we simply don't know as much about the upcoming series as we would do if we were still in the Steven Moffat era of the show when secrecy was rather sparse compared to now. However, like any show that's in the public eye like Doctor Who has continued to be, not everything, much to Chris Chibnall's chagrin, can be kept totally secret. 

So what do we know about Series 12?

Truthfully, we still don't know very much, certainly not as much as we did about Series 11 when it had wrapped principal photography. By that time, there'd been huge leaks involving its premiere episode having a fifty-two second clip from the post production office shared around the internet which caused something of a meltdown from the BBC. On top of that, there'd been a fair amount of low quality photos taken inside Roath Lock Studios that were incredibly spoilery, including the first and incredibly bad look at the Arwel Jones TARDIS interior that lacked any of the finesse provided by the full lighting in the show as well as various recording & sound equipment which provided slight looks at monsters and various characters.

Series 12 has been without anything quite as bad as that. Our first official look at the upcoming series came with the announcement that the Judoon would be returning to do battle with the Thirteenth Doctor and Team Tardis, a little over five months ago. Since then we've had no more official announcements of any kind from official figures involved with the show. However, unofficially, there's a few things we do know. Thanks to the CV's of selected writers, we know that the Series 12 writers room will be made up of Chris Chibnall, Ed Hime, Prasanna Puwanarajah, Victoria Asare-Archer and Maxine Alderton. Vinay Patel is also rumoured to return for an episode but this hasn't been confirmed yet.

The list of this series' directors also seems to be confirmed with Jamie Stone helming Blocks 1 and 5, Lee Haven-Jones on Block 2, Nida Manzoor on Block 3 and Emma Sullivan on Block 4. Lee Haven-Jones is also credited for a sixth block which is rumoured to be two additional special episodes to be broadcast in the festive 2019 and 2020 slot respectively. 

We know very little about the cast for the upcoming series with the only cast members actually confirmed being Jodie Whittaker as The Doctor with Bradley Walsh, Mandip Gill and Tosin Cole reprising their roles as Graham, Yasmin and Ryan. Guest stars for this series (again, thanks to online CV's) include Stephen Fry, Maxim Baldry, James Buckley, Jo Martin and Neil Stuke. Also said to be appearing in Series 12 are Shobna Gulati and Daniel Adeboyega as Najia Khan and Aaron Sinclair respectively. A recent rumour however has suggested quite the casting for a big character as Line Of Duty & Marvel's Iron Fist actor Sacha Dhawan is reportedly taking on the role of The Master, taking over the role from both John Simm and Michelle Gomez who played the last incarnations of the character and as yet, we've seen no regeneration for either of them. 

SPOILER WARNING

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD - DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WISH TO BE SPOILED.

Series 12 will feature two more big monster returns as revealed by leaked photos from location shooting, the latest of which has revealed that one of the specials that was filmed as part of Block 6 will see the return of the Daleks in their instantly recognisable Russell T Davies bronze design along with what appears to be a full scale, black battle armoured version of the Reconnaissance Scout Dalek in a story that i'm told is written as a direct sequel to 'Resolution' and will reveal that the new black Dalek is in fact engineered by MDZ research and will face off against the bronze Skaro Daleks akin to 1988's 'Remembrance Of The Daleks'. This episode is believed to air in the 2020 Christmas/New Year 2021 slot.

Seemingly destined to also return to face the Thirteenth Doctor this series is none other the silver handle head foes, The Cybermen. Originally suspected to just be actors in knights armour, as more set photos came out (it was a closed set but filming on a mountain will attract some attention), we learned that the "knights" were in fact Cybermen with something of a redesign for the first time since 2013. The new design as you can see appears to be a unique mashup of models from 'The Invasion', 'Earthshock' and 'Rise Of The Cybermen' to create a new variant that seems to borrow a steampunk-esque aesthetic. It should be noted however that there WERE actors on location that were dressed as knights with swords, horses and such alike which suggests this episode does take place in the 1400-1600's.

The Sea Devils

This feels like an opportune time to address the elephant in the room as it were. There's been rumours for months that the Sea Devils would be returning for the first time since 1984. I unintentionally started this rumour when i was asked by somebody on Twitter to disclose spoilers about Series 12 and i knew this person wouldn't keep it to themselves as they'd previously mass shared the leaked clip to their friends after i told that person to not send it to anybody else and so gave them a completely false spoiler stating that The Sea Devils would appear in the fifth episode of Series 12. 

The same person then listed a random actor as being a Sea Devil in that episode on the Internet Movie Database. Any rumours of Sea Devils that you see should be treated as absolutely false and i apologise that its gotten so out of whack but it proves that people will believe anything without a shred of actual evidence.

The Sea Devils aren't in Series 12, sorry. 

What Next?

We still know very little given how close we potentially are to the premiere of Series 12. Doctor Who opted to skip SDCC this year as well as NYCC and didn't bother to utilise the opportunity of BAFTA Cymru to launch a trailer or any kind of actual marketing. However there is Children In Need coming up in a few weeks time which given its a BBC event that broadcasts live to millions of people, would be a perfect time for the BBC to launch a trailer for a festive special for either Christmas Day or New Years Day and it in turn could carry the full series 12 trailer at the end of it (see : 'The Return Of Doctor Mysterio') and an official series premiere date with it. We'll see what happens!

If there's any news in the coming weeks, i'll be sure to leave an update!

Update : Doctor Who will have a presence at Children In Need and a Series trailer will premiere on November 23rd 2019.