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| Trade paperback, 480 pages Published 2010 Acquired August 2012 Read April 2017 |
by Richard Molesworth
If you ever wanted to know how so many episodes of Doctor Who ended up missing, presumed wiped, then this is the book for you. Molesworth covers both the processes and procedures that led to the wiping of most episodes of Doctor Who from 1963 to 1974 from the BBC archives, as well as the slow and difficult details of their gradual recovery. Reading this book, it turns out that what's strange isn't that so many stories were wiped, but that we have as many of the episodes as we do. The strange anecdotes that surround almost every recovery make for good reading.
I appreciate Molesworth's thoroughness, but the book could sometimes be hard going-- there's a lot of detail that's difficult to read, about certain technical processes, and about what film trims ended up where when and stuff like that. But I suspect those parts were more intended as reference than as something you should read narratively.
(I read the first edition of 2010, but there was an updated edition that came out in 2013, adding details about the recovery of episodes from Galaxy 4 and The Underwater Menace in 2011. Alas, it was announced just after I bought the first edition, and I wasn't about to turn around and buy it again. Even more alas, a couple months after the second edition came out, the recovery of two almost-complete serials was announced, rendering the second edition out of date almost immediately! I don't know if there are plans for a third, but I feel like if it was published, the recovery of more episodes would be almost guaranteed, so that Molesworth can never be done with his work.)
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