Two rediscovered episodes from the show's Patrick Troughton era offer fans a welcome chance to see more of the Time Lord's underrated second incarnation
For us Doctor Who geeks, this is our royal-baby moment – even better, actually, because it's so unexpected. After so many years, with so many sources exhausted, most fans would have been happy for a couple of random, unrelated lost episodes to turn up and remind us of what disappeared in the BBC's mass junking of supposedly worthless TV between 1967 and 1978. Complete stories? Don't be ridiculous.
Few seriously believed the rumour that all 106 lost episodes of the world's longest-running science fiction series had been discovered (in Ethiopia of all places ). But the truth, announced at a press conference in London's Soho Hotel yesterday, is almost as surprising. Semi-official "raiders of the lost archive" turned up nine whole programmes at a TV station in Nigeria, a rich seam of material that completes (mostly) two entire serials that have never been seen since 1968. It's especially pleasing that they're both Patrick Troughton stories, bringing us more of the actor who suffered most heavily from the philistine archive purge of the 60s and 70s. A total of 62 (now 53) of his 119 episodes are lost, compared with 44 of original Doctor William Hartnell's 134.
One of the rediscovered serials, The Enemy of the World, is a very 1960s political thriller in the vein of The Prisoner, in which the Doctor discovers he is the exact double of the most powerful and hated man on Earth, the dictator Salamander. The other, The Web of Fear, is renowned as one of the best Who stories ever. Known even to people who weren't born when it was broadcast as "the one where the Yeti invade the Underground", it features the first appearance of the beloved Nicholas Courtney as Colonel (later Brigadier) Lethbridge-Stewart, and the Doctor's second bout with the shaggy Himalayan monsters and their controlling Great Intelligence – which, fittingly, itself returned in the guise of Richard E Grant for this year's 50th Anniversary series.
"I find it unbelievable that we can stand here in 2013 with two newly discovered Doctor Who stories to enjoy," says Mark Gatiss, actor/scriptwriter on the revived Doctor Who and co-creator of Sherlock, who introduced The Web of Fear to an invited audience. "I never thought a day like this would come. They're both fantastic stories for different reasons … I've been waiting all my life to see The Web of Fear in its complete form. This story is almost the quintessential Doctor Who – the Yeti invading an everyday environment; the familiar made alien. I think younger fans of the current series will love them both, actually. They'll see how much of Troughton there is in Matt Smith. They share the same surface vulnerability and clownishness that masks quite a ruthless, hard, moral character that comes out when it needs to."
On Thursday, the BBC showed a sample episode from both stories, each unseen for 45 years. Rather than provoking the traditional terrors of Saturday teatime, they now summon up the wistful emotions of old holiday movies – lost loved ones, forgotten places, different times. In the first episode of The Enemy of the World, Troughton strips down to his combination undies and capers into the sea (Climping Beach in Littlehampton doubling for Australia), then flirts outrageously with a pop-art clad political factotum Astrid. "Are you a doctor of law or philosophy?" she asks him. "Whose law? Whose philosophy?" he replies.
The Web of Fear was co-written by Henry Lincoln who later authored the influential pseudo-historical book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail about the Knights Templar, and is thus partly to blame for The Da Vinci Code. There is a beautiful scene in The Web of Fear which prefigures the current show's interest in the emotional cost of time travel. In the late 1960s, Yeti expert (yes, Yeti expert) Professor Travers encounters the Doctor's companions Jamie and Victoria whom he'd last seen in 1935 – decades ago for him, weeks ago for them. They're young and full of life; he's old and failing. The story doesn't dwell on this moment, because TV didn't back then, but it's there and it matters. The actor Deborah Watling, who played Victoria and spoke at the press conference, certainly noticed it. Her father, the late Jack Watling, played Professor Travers.
"The return of these episodes mean I got to see my dad onscreen again," she told the press conference simply. "That's beautiful."
Time travel: it does exist.
• Both rediscovered stories are available on iTunes from Friday 11 October. The Enemy of the World is out on DVD on 25 November and The Web of Fear in early 2014.
Doctor Who
Television
Fantasy
BBC
Andrew Harrison
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