Perhaps I can ask about improving YOUR chances of getting these discounted items? :)
You could go to my website (see the URL below) and click on and one of the Amazon links; you don't have to buy the item on display as you can remove it from your shopping basket. We get a tiny commission (about 10 cents or less) for each item sold while you are logged on.
Have a very Merry Christmas (and who knows, maybe next Christmas WE can afford to buy some of these wonderfully discounted items :)

It could be argued that complacency within the Space Shuttle design team engendered a feeling of "failure is never an option." Why else be so confident in a design that allowed them to remove crew escape contingencies and quote a 100,000 in 1 failure rate?

Oh yeah, I usually get drunk these days on Hallowe'en, as its also my birthday...

In the past, I used to go on Ghost Hunts. Yes, you read that right. But now its all heavily commercialized and genuine researchers are being forced out. Damn you "Most Haunted" and your cheque-book negotiation tactics; now placed don't allow access unless you wave a big cheque under the owner's nose!

Yes, thanks, I knew most of this.
Just a few points: It was actually BBC Enterprises in the 1960s and 1970s. TV shows were marketed under conditions but with one important addition; if the prints had exceeded their agreed sales target and weren't to be sent to another TV station, they were to be either sent back to the BBC or destroyed, and a certificate of destruction issued as proof. I suspect that many episodes were routinely destroyed as part of the sales agreement; it is cheaper to burn or thrown out than go to the hassle of shipping them back.
You're right about the Film Archive though. Only a random assortment of 16 and 35mm black and white episodes wound up there. I forget how many, possibly about 30 or so. Then when it was found that BBC Enterprises had made telerecordings/kinescopes of practically all the episodes, efforts were made to find out what they had. Unfortunately, they had been destroying episodes for about 5 years at that point so there were big gaps. The BBC Film Archives stopped the junking almost straight away and requisitioned the exisitng film prints from Ents. Later on, VT was also requisitioned, and it became the BBC Film and Videotape Library. By the time this had happened, a lot of colour video tape had already been wiped by the BBC Engineering Dept. for reuse.

One thing we must bear in mind is that this didn't just affect Dr.Who. Nearly all of the BBC output was affected. Some dramas have many hundreds of episodes missing. And it isn't just a BBC problem. Many Independant TV station in the UK have lost material. Its just that Dr.Who is soooooo high profile ;-)

Yes, they managed to get the colour information back from 11 episodes, but strangely it was rather weak and needed a fair amount of extra work to enhance it. Even so, the results, while usually good, are variable in places. At the start of episode 2 of the Mind of Evil, the flesh tones of Jo and The Doctor seemed to be "flashing" for want of a better word. And when people move, there is sometimes a trail of multicoloured mess left behind them. Still, some colour is better than no colour. If you don't like it, turn it off :)

And they din't use the sonic screwdriver as a deux es machina to get out of any tricky situation, rather than the Doctor using his intelligence and wits. Today, the screwdriver is a euphemism for lazy, sloppy writing. No wonder John Nathan-Turner got rid of it in 1982!

By "we" I was speaking collectively. I wasn't born until 1971, but the sentiment echoed time and again by hundreds of people is the same: we paid for those episodes, technicians, actors and other production staff slaved over them, and some bean counter years later decided they were worthless. No one stopped to think that some people might have wanted to see them again.

The gentlemen who found these episodes did so of his own remit. He told fans in 2005 his plan:

"'does anyone know,what ian levine,plans to do about the recovery of missing episodes,i myself have been considering,a little overseas travel, i work overseas and i think by traveling to some or even all countrys and searching ,is maybe the best way now,of finally putting the rumours,and stories to rest,if its there lets go there,and ask politely it can do no harm,who knows i might turn up a thing or two'

'yes i see your point,i have contacted the restoration team,and offered my services,free at no cost to them ,whatsoever,but i have had no reply.you are perfectly right the beeb themselves should do this,but they dont seem to want to know,official paperwork and authorisation,from the beeb would have been great,but if not forthcoming i will go it alone with whatever ,background information i can find and see were it leads me,any help from anyone interested will be much appreciated,to all fans i will give it my best shot for dr who'"

For those not in the know, Ian Levine is a superfan, who saved many of the early episodes from destruction and found many others. The above appeared on a forum dedicated to discussing missing episodes, and is partially run by BBC staff members some of whom restore the old episodes for DVD release. Apart from Ian Levine, everyone wrote him off. The BBC didn't seem to want to know. But if the story is right, he must have managed to acquire some paperwork to show how the episodes had been cycled round the world; when one TV station had finished with them, they would be sent to another one to reduce costs of producing new episodes from the negatives.

Another thing I'd like to mention. In 1984 the BBC and Levine contacted old foreign TV markets who had bought the early years of the show to find lost episodes. Most stations didn't bother to reply; 6 did come back from Nigeria (the newly found episodes were from a relay station so its not surprising they were missed) and one from Australia. Iran said "Who in the name of Allah are you talking about?" But as Phillip Morris has shown, you need to go over there and physically sift through the paperwork and film cans. Expecting an overworked archivist to do it isn't going to work, especially if the documentation of what they have is fragmentary. But I do wonder what other "lost" TV shows were found sitting on the shelf. When Dr.Who has been found in the past, other TV has usually come back, but it is rarely, if ever reported. This makes TV historians fury with despair, as the archival side of things is so Dr.Who-centric.

Normally, the episodes should have been returned to England when they had been shown an agreed number of times, or destroyed. Happily this isn't the case. I'm not too surprised that they were overlooked. My dad worked in Nigeria from about 1968-72 and I was born there. He says they are slovenly and corrupt. That's not being racist, that is what they are like over there, from his personal experience (like one local member of the Lagos glitterati who paid off the police to stop criminal proceedings after he nearly killed my mum in a speedboat accident). And yes my dad does recall Dr.Who being shown in Nigeria!

I'm glad that this got accepted! Apologies for the slightly garbled last sentence; I typed that at about 2am and was extremely tired. The reporting embargo was due to be lifted at midnight, but two papers had prematurely reported the news on their websites. These news items were pulled; an irate BBC contacted one of them and read them the riot act (mind you, it was the Northern Echo, my home newspaper which has a murky reputation, so what do you expect?)

By about 11.50pm GMT the news had broken and links to iTunes gone up. Amazon links a short time later and then YouTube material. I put the iTunes and Amazon pre-order links on my website (see link in my signature)

Sadly, I think the following quote from the BBC shows their contempt for us. This is from one of the papers that broke the embargo:

"Asked whether viewers might also see the recovered episodes, without having to pay Apple £1.89 per episode or £9.99 to download the complete stories, BBC Worldwide said licence-fee payers had already enjoyed a chance to watch the programmes in the late 60s"

Don't they realise that WE might have wanted to watch this stuff again at some point?

The Radio Times, the BBC's listing magazine, has run an article saying that two "episodes" have been found, but when a BBC spokesman was asked for details, they were blanked. It looks like the BBC aren't talking to the BBC ... again! Now the Mirror newspaper is weighing in again, saying that there will be a big press conference in a London hotel on Tuesday evening, and the material will be made available to buy on iPlayer on Wednesday. A couple of friends have said its two Troughton "stories" but no one in the BBC is saying anything official. Make of that what you will :(

Twenty odd missing episodes held by Sierra Leone were destroyed in the civil war there in 1999.

Can you give examples of when the word "nigger" was used or is this a case of "the memory cheats"? I don't think the word has been said once in the whole of the series.

Its because the different departments of the BBC didn't speak to each other. Occasional filmed episodes of many TV shows wound up at the BBC Film Archives, but BBC Enterprises held just about all the original kinescopes/films for overseas sales. When BBC Ents decided it didn't want their episodes, they didn't bother to check with the archives whether they would want them instead of ditching them. BBC Ents held videotape copies of the original shows, but the master tapes were held by the Engineering Department who would wipe and reused the tapes after a number of years.