On November 23, 1963, a new children’s television program first appeared on the BBC called Doctor Who. Set in outer space, and with a time-traveling alien for a protagonist, the show was largely unlike anything people had seen on their televisions to that point. Since that first episode, over 810 more have aired, and Doctor Who has become one of the longest running television shows of all time.
One of the reasons that Doctor Who has been able to last so long is also one of the key plot points in the series, and one of its most defining characteristics. The show began in 1963 with William Hartnell in the starring role, but by 1966 things weren’t going well for him. His degrading health made it increasingly difficult to stay on the shooting schedule as he often had trouble learning his lines. Faced with this difficult situation, the writers generated a creative solution that would save the show and allow them to replace Hartnell without pulling a fast-one on the audience. Given that the Doctor was an alien, it wasn’t such an outlandish notion that he should be able to change his appearance from time to time. Using this device, the show has regularly introduced new actors to portray the title role when things got a little stale, meaning the single role has been portrayed by 12 different men over the years.
When a show runs for so long, you encounter unusual problems as well. While there have been over 810 episodes of Doctor Who broadcast since 1963, only around 700 of them are still available to be viewed. This is due to lax treatment of film archives at the BBC in the 1960’s, meaning that some of the original film sets of episodes were recycled, destroyed through negligence, and even thrown away to make more space. In the era before digital storage, this storage space was valuable, but not so valuable that the BBC wouldn’t come to regret their shortsighted decision. Given the continued and growing popularity of the show, and the obvious commercial boon of having a complete set of episodes, the BBC has begun efforts to locate and restore as many of the lost episodes as possible. And should they ever recover those lost episodes, they’ll have a huge number of fans interested in viewing them, those who have been watching as children from day one, and those who continue to discover this offbeat sci-fi story as new episodes are produced every year.