From Desert Island Discs to Doctor Who: the amateur sleuths searching for Britain’s lost gems

In 1983, episodes five and ten from the 1960s Doctor Who series The Daleks’ Master Plan were discovered in the basement of a Mormon church in south west London. No one knows if members of the congregation had nursed an illicit obsession with the adventures of the Time Lord, but for Doctor Who fanatics the fact of their discovery far outweighed the question of what the tapes were doing there in the first place.

Both episodes featured on a long list of Doctor Who episodes missing since the 1960s. All of those that are still absent date from the sci-fi series’ first six years – the number currently stands at around 100.

“When, as a teenager in the late 1980s, I heard about how many episodes were missing,  I was horrified,”  says Richard Harrison, summing up the feelings of Doctor Who obsessives the world over. “I realised I probably wouldn’t be able to find many of them in rural Norfolk where I lived, but I was determined to do what I could to help.”

Harrison, 49, is one of countless enthusiasts devoting their spare time to unearthing Britain’s lost heritage of TV and radio shows. Besides Doctor Who, the project encompasses family favourites such as Steptoe and Son, Hancock’s Half Hour and Dad’s Army, not to mention reams of children’s programmes and documentaries, all of which fell victim to a six-year purge by the BBC in the 1970s when executives, faced with a storage crisis, decided to delete or destroy videotapes in order to make shelf space for newer programmes. Anything more than three years old and considered of minimal historical value, was wiped; an act of cultural – if understandable – vandalism that allegedly only stopped when Doctor Who fans got wind of what was happening and made clear their dismay.

That many missing episodes still turn up – episodes of Morecambe and Wise were recently found in an attic – is down both to people like Harrison, and to the unsung members of the public who would make their own recordings of favourite TV and radio shows at home. (Unfortunately, in the absence of a VCR – which only became available to ordinary householders in the late 1970s – the homemade TV recordings that turn up tend to be sound only, although many of the “found” Doctor Who episodes are original BBC film.)

When not lecturing in film studies at the University of Kent, Harrison has made it his mission to track down those radio recordings in particular, trawling car boot sales, auctions and, less romantically, eBay, with the dogged enthusiasm of a beagle following a scent. He’s struck gold several times: this week a lost radio episode he found of Hancock’s Half Hour from 1955 and featuring Peter Sellers, was broadcast on Radio 4.

Meanwhile, over the last decade, he’s found more than 90 “lost” recordings of Desert Island Discs dating from the 1960s and 1970s – broadcasting gems that summon up a bygone era of A-list celebrity, from Margot Fonteyn to James Stewart. These episodes, all presented by the programme’s creator Roy Plomley, and newly remastered, are currently available on BBC Sounds; Harrison’s favourite is a 1974 interview with David Dimbleby, whose choices include a recording of his father reporting on King George VI’s lying in state.

The moment of discovery can be sweet. “I came across Dirk Bogarde’s 1964 Desert Island Disc interview by accident,” Harrison tells me over Zoom from his house in Lowestoft, visibly overflowing with boxes full of reels. “I’d picked up an unlabelled reel from an auction with no idea what was on it. Then I heard the Desert Island Disc theme tune kick in, and Roy Plomley introduce his guest as a young British actor. I was on the edge of my seat. When he announced Dirk Bogarde I let out a yell so loud I’m amazed the neighbours didn’t complain. That recording had been a holy grail for several years.”

What’s more, given the high cost of reels, people tended to fill them as tightly as they could: Harrison has in his possession a 7in reel on which a Dudley Moore Desert Island Discs interview is crammed alongside a Debussy concert and a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.

Harrison is a member of the fabulously titled Radio Circle, a group of fellow audio enthusiasts and experts from all over the world (whom Harrison ruefully admits are largely men of a certain age) who work closely with the BBC. This month, they have paired-up with Radio Times magazine to launch The Radio Times Treasure Hunt, encouraging members of the public to check cassettes and reels of tape lying around their house, or gathering dust in their attic, for old recordings (anything from the earliest days of broadcasting to the 1980s.)

They are interested in anything from classic programmes to news broadcasts and continuity announcements - and the aim is to fill in the gaps in the archives.

Meanwhile the BFI continues its project “Missing, Believed Wiped”, which seeks to discover “lost” gems from the screen, and which, each year, stages an event to showcase the latest spoils. Recent discoveries have included a previously unseen interview with Dennis Potter and lost footage from the earliest recorded episode of Morecambe and Wise.

Furthermore, such is the passion held for Doctor Who, that tracking down lost episodes of that particular programme has become, for many, almost a full-time occupation: episodes have been found as far away as Hong Kong, Australia and Nigeria.

Those who devote their time to this endeavour are motivated not just by the thrill of uncovering a lost gem and restoring it to the archive, but the part they play in constructing a history of British listening habits and memorialising an era when a certain radio programme, concert or TV show was an unmissable event.

They are also driven by the curious emotional attachment with which we tend to view things that are missing. “A collector I know, who is now in his 80s, has been searching for years for a radio adaptation of a Georges Arnaud novel called The Wages of Fear which was broadcast in 1961,” says Harrison. “Finding that recording is now top of my list, if only to see his face. It would give me the most colossal joy.”

So if you have any mystery cardboard boxes in your attic, please go and have a look. You could be sitting on a lost gem.