Doctor Who and the hole at the centre of everything

The single greatest magazine ever is obviously the Radio Times Doctor Who 20th anniversary special, because it came out in 1983 when I was eight years old and absolutely obsessed with all things Doctor Who, and this was my first great guidebook to that strange and sprawling universe.

I devoured that magazine, (well, a local version of it anyway, which didn't mention the Radio Times but was otherwise identical), and literally read it to pieces. I still have it today, but it's missing the first four pages and the last four pages, which disintegrated in my hands over the years. It had an episode guide running to the end of the Fifth Doctor era in the last dozen or so pages, and whenever I think about particular eras of classic Doctor Who, I think about how they were laid out on the particular page in that guide.

It was also the first place I ever heard about the missing episodes - the ones that got junked by the BBC in one of the most short-sighted decisions in the history of entertainment media. Crucial episodes in the history of the show, starring the first two Doctors, wiped from history because nobody in the 1970s thought anybody would ever want to see them again.

The list was well over 100 episodes long in 1983, and has been slowly whittled down to 97 over the years, as some surprising finds have been made. But there is still a hole and the very centre of this 60+ year saga, one that is very, very likely to always remain unfilled.

Of course, nerds fucking abhor a vacuum, so they have filled in these gaps with recreations and animated versions of the missing television. The soundtracks are still out there, voices and sound effects disembodied from the images they should be welded to, and there are hoards of tele-snaps that give an idea of how it looked. And, of course, the scripts survive, and all the lost serials have been novelized  into much-loved Target books decades ago.

But the weird thing is that while I celebrate the finding of any new footage - getting to see the fight  in the TARDIS between the Doctor and his doppelganger at the end of Enemy of the World was truly thrilling - I somehow like the incompleteness of it all. T the idea that it's a collection that will never be completed, always out of reach, always not quite there.

If they found all missing 97 episodes in a defunct TV station in Nigeria tomorrow, I'll be the first to sit down and glory in the Power of The Daleks, or the fun of the Myth-Makers, or even the stodginess of the Savages. But I also don't mind this void at the centre, it's part of the long and weird story of Doctor Who, as much as knowing the production codes or who played all the companions. 

It's something that has always been there as long as I've known the names of each storyline, a constant nothing.

I do feel that part of the reason I'm not bothered is that I grew up reading comic books in bits and pieces - I would never get whole runs of things, and even comics I was getting on regular basis would constantly miss issues, so you fill in the gaps as best you can, with whatever you can.

And seeing the Tomb of the Cybermen for the first time when it unexpectedly turned up in the 90s, the version I had in my head after reading the Target book was more grandiose and slick than the thing we got. I certainly don't regret the opportunity to see it, or any lost episodes, but it's not the end of the world. The Doctor wouldn't let that happen.