“We're at the lost and found.”

The first time The Tomb of the Cybermen whizzed past on Twitch, a staggering five years ago now, it did so as one of around one hundred and twenty five Doctor Who stories to cycle through on the channel in a matter of days. Just one amongst the many. There was not much to suggest that this story had once been the holy grail of “lost” television Doctor Who, and that the return of film copies of all four episodes from Hong Kong in 1991 seemed something like a miracle to a much earlier iteration of Doctor Who fandom. 

First transmitted in 1967, as the first story of Doctor Who’s fifth run1 Tomb was the stuff of fan legend. One of a handful of Doctor Who stories to gain viewers between every instalment, and the recipient of positive comment from Sydney Newman, Doctor Who’s creator, shortly before he left BBC Television. It was so violent that its co-writer, Dr Kit Pedler had to go on television a few days after the transmission of Episode Four2 to defend it against shocked parents. Thrillingly novelised by its other co-writer Gerry Davis in 1978 with a legendarily ‘wrong’ (but completely brilliant)3 cover by Jeff Cummins, this was one of the Doctor Who serials on which the first generations of Doctor Who fandom were most keen to pin the word ‘Classic’ (a word they insisted on using not as an adjective but as a noun and perhaps a proper noun at that). 

Supposedly the story most requested to be the first commercial Doctor Who VHS in a questionnaire undertaken at the series’ twentieth anniversary bash at Longleat in 1983, it was also - presumably unbeknownst to those voting - one of the many black and white Doctor Who serials of which no copy was known to exist at the auditing of the BBC archive in 1978. This made it a Lost Classic, indeed THE Lost Classic. And all those capitals are deliberate, if not necessarily wholly mine.

A script book was produced in 1989. This was a transcript of poor quality audio recordings of the serial made during its single UK transmission, which were by that time circulating amongst fans. An official BBC audio cassette release, with narration supplied by Jon Pertwee, was scheduled for release in July 1992, and then cancelled when those four packages returned from Hong Kong.