“In the meadow, we can build a snowman…”

In the 1980s more of Doctor Who was missing than is the case today. Not just in that nearly two dozen episodes have been returned since 1990, but also in how most episodes that did exist in, say, 1988, were essentially inaccessible to almost everyone. That was beginning to turn around at the beginning of the 1990s, as if it took the show no longer having a present to permit us to investigate its past. But while whole stories were coming out on VHS at a reasonable rate¹ there was still the question of those surviving episodes of otherwise missing stories. Those, which it seems, we are now condemned to refer to by the unpardonably horrid neologism of “orphan episodes”. (Yeah, I know.)

These were even harder to get hold of in fan circles than complete stories. Presumably because they’d not been repeated anywhere in the world in the era of the video home system. Worse, there did not seem to be a plausible commercial or on-air vehicle for them to be made available to Doctor Who’s fans. It was basically a distinction without a difference that while The Evil of the Daleks Episode One did not (and does not) exist, Episode Two had been recovered the year before and was on a shelf somewhere at the BBC where it could be seen by statistically no one. After all, the mass audience who needed to served, even if they were not at all engaged, would not understand why BBC 2 could show The Evil of the Daleks Episode 2 but not any of the others. That would be above their pay grade. Or beneath their dignity. (Reader, delete as you feel is appropriate.)