Why You Shouldn't Get Excited About The "Found Episodes" Rumour

The Mirror has today been reporting that 106 missing episodes of Doctor Who have been found in Ethiopia. You can read their report here.

Done? Good.

Exciting, isn't it?

Unfortunately, it's utter bullshit.

For a start, it's physically impossible for them to find 106 missing episodes - 106 would mean every single missing episode ever being recovered, which is flat out not possible since The Feast Of Steven was never sold abroad: literally the only ever copy of the film was wiped by the BBC - it just does not exist any more.

Also, the missing episodes in Ethiopia rumour is one that has been going around for months and months and months - usually the number of episodes is between 40 and 90, although occasionally it is just "every Hartnell ep" (literally impossible, as I said) - and all this news story is really saying is that some guy told them that he heard this rumour at a party. People across the Internet have been hearing - and largely debunking - this rumour for much of the last year, so one guy going to the papers about it doesn't really ramp up the credibility of it at all. Hell, a lot of the speculation was confirmed to be people just trolling Ian Levine. It's also worth noting that the BBC keep records of where they sold all episodes of all shows to, and no Who was ever sold to Ethiopia, which flat out kills this rumour straight away.

I wouldn't be surprised if something had been found somewhere, to fuel this rumour in the first place - there is after all still "something exciting" to be announced for airing during the anniversary weekend - but I would seriously doubt it was a whole serial, possibly not even a whole episode. The number of people that would need to be involved in verifying the episode, restoring it to TV quality, buying it from the current owner etc. would all have to be foced into silence, which is a massive effort to go to for something that would amount to the Beeb wanting to "announce it nearer to the 50th" - a daft thing to do because past missing episode discoveries have shown that the public at large simply don't care too much when an episode of Classic Who is discovered (and some of the DVDs that contain newly found episodes, like the recent Aztecs Special Edition, don't even sell as well as many other Classic DVD releases) - the BBC would essentially be initiating a large conspiracy of silence that could fall apart at any moment for no reason at all.

Like I said, some clips may have shown up, or somebody may have thought they'd found a missing episode but it turned out to be an existing one, which started this rumour, but 106 episodes, or 90, or 40... Sorry, but it's not going to happen all in one go like this.

Hopefully somewhere along the way, there will be more Doctor Who episodes uncovered.

But this isn't it. And it pains me to say it.