Did the need for missing episode soundtracks help to create a market for Doctor Who on audio?
(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.
Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)
Almost a hundred episodes of Doctor Who are missing from the BBC archive. But did this significant gap end up creating a major market for the series on audio?
You’ve probably noticed that at Doctor Who Watch, we aim to cover the audio stories of the Doctor Who universe as much as we cover the TV series. Probably more, especially if there’s very little to cover as far as TV series news is concerned.
I once asked what was it that made Doctor Who so perfect for the audio medium? There were a few key reasons I suggested for this: a decreased reliance on visual effects; being able to use the same actors from the original era decades later; crossovers between Classic and New Who etc.
But there’s one more additional reason that’s only just occurred to me: could the missing stories have also helped to establish an audience for Doctor Who on audio?
For those of you who don’t know, there are a huge number of missing episodes from the Sixties. One reason for this was the BBC deliberately junking their episodes to make room for new and fresh recordings. It’s a terrible reason, but unfortunately, the BBC didn’t have the foresight to realize how badly fans would want to see these stories in later years.
To the BBC, television was just a temporary thing, something that came and went, never to be watched again. They certainly didn’t conceive of the idea of “home media” existing within a couple of decades. Repeats were very, very rare.
Thankfully, stories have been recovered over the decades, but relatively very slowly. Even now, there are still 97 episodes missing from the BBC archives.
In recent years, we’ve seen many missing stories animated, such as The Power of the Daleks. But how did fans experience these lost episodes before then?
(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.
Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)
Restorations and animations
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. While the original video recordings of these episodes no longer exist visually, fans were able to record these stories on audio format. Thanks to the dedication of the fans, even during the early years of the series, we have something substantial left from these stories. Every single one of these missing episodes still exists in audio format.
To be honest, it’s only recently that I’ve realized just how lucky we are to have even this much. For example, many of the earliest episodes of Sixties spy drama The Avengers are also missing. However, unlike Doctor Who‘s many lost stories, hardly anything exists at all of the original productions of these episodes, even on audio. I only realized this after listening to Big Finish Productions’s audio recreations of all these missing stories.
Going back to Doctor Who, many of the audio recordings have been used to help recreate some of the lost episodes in some visual form. Some of these have been through photo reconstructions, but animation has slowly been becoming more of a popular option.
However, even today, there are a lot of episodes that could still benefit from the animated treatment. We’ve had The Macra Terror this year, and we’ll eventually get The Faceless Ones next year. (Who knows how long we’ll have to wait for The Evil of the Daleks.)
This was even more true around twenty years ago. As a Doctor Who fan, it was very difficult to get all of the episodes visually, especially when it came to the lost ones. Official reconstructions were rare, and none of the episodes had been properly animated. So if you wanted to get a missing story, there was usually only one way to do it – through a CD release of the story’s soundtrack.
Stories like The Daleks’ Master Plan would be discovered by new fans only in the audio medium.
(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.
Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)
From missing stories to original audios
In my experience, audio isn’t exactly a popular medium, at least for major sci-fi properties. If you look at others like Star Trek and Star Wars, while you’ll always see a lot of expanded media – books, comics, video games etc – very rarely will you see anything for audio beyond audio book readings.
Doctor Who is one of the few major properties out there that has a major market for audio, thanks to Big Finish Productions. Every single month, we’re seeing several brand new releases, including spin-offs. You don’t get that with any other series.
But, while a great deal of Big Finish’s success does come from the fact that their releases are consistently brilliant, I do think Doctor Who‘s missing episodes did help to create, or at least develop a significant market for the series on audio.
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Looking back, this was certainly true in my case. As someone who wanted some way of experiencing every Doctor Who story out there, I got quite a few soundtracks on CD back in the day. The Daleks’ Master Plan was a story that I was especially keen to listen to – a huge twelve-part story, plus the prelude Mission to the Unknown, made for quite the epic listen.
Aside from novelizations – many of which were long out of print – the soundtracks were the easiest way for me to discover missing stories. And the more missing stories I listened to, the more I got used to the audio format. So that, by the time I started hearing about Big Finish and their original stories, it really wasn’t that big of a jump for me to go from the soundtracks of missing stories to completely original stories specifically made for the audio format.
I’m sure this isn’t true for everyone. And I’m certainly not saying that I’m grateful so many episodes are missing. But it is interesting looking back and realizing how audio became a key medium for Doctor Who fans to experience something lost, before gaining something new with Big Finish.
What do you think? Do you think the soundtracks for missing episodes helped to create a market for Doctor Who in the audio medium? Or do you think the series would’ve been big in the format regardless? Let us know in the comments below.