FREE: Doctor Who: Daleks - The Early Years (VHS)

The listing, Doctor Who: Daleks - The Early Years (VHS) has ended.

In a change from my usual listing of 'Doctor Who' stories, I am listing a special VHS release, 'Daleks - The Early Years'. The tape is in excellent condition, being watch only once.

This is a VHS tape released in 1993, that shows a lot of old clips of the Doctors' deadly foes, along with a couple of episodes.

The program is introduced by Peter Davison (Doctor # 5), and runs about 106 minutes. And has clips from the following stories:
The Daleks
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
The Chase
The Dalek Master Plan
The Power Of The Daleks
The Evil Of The Daleks
The Five Doctors

The tape also includes 2 full episodes from 'The Dalek Master Plan'. Of the 12 episodes of this story, only 3 currently reside in the BBC archives.

Between 1968 and 1978, as a way to reduce costs, the BBC purged old B&W programs that it thought it would never use again. In all, there are 27 stories that are incomplete, with about 106 episodes being lost. Each of the first 3 Doctors have missing episodes, but with Patrick Troughton being hurt the most, having only 1 show still intact from his first 2 seasons. From time to time episodes do turn up from the hands of collectors, garage sales, countries that aired the episodes, even from a Church basements with 2 episodes were recently discovered

So in hindsight the BBC did save money in the short run, but look at all the money that they lost in the long haul from VHS releases, and then DVD releases. This practice was not limited to just 'Doctor Who', many other shows were junked too. With only 2 episodes existing from the first season of 'The Avengers'.

More can be read about this practice on the wikipedia site at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

If there are any questions, please feel free to email me.