BBC to release animated Doctor Who story
The BBC is to release an animation of a Doctor Who story that was lost eight years after its one airing in 1966.
The Power of the Daleks, a story with six episodes from the fourth season of Doctor Who, featured Patrick Troughton as the Doctor.
A handful of clips have been salvaged and posted online but no complete recording is known to have survived a purge of the master negatives from the BBC’s archive in 1974.
BBC Worldwide said it has commissioned an animation studio to recreate the episodes. They will be released on the BBC Store at 5.50pm on 5 November – exactly 50 years since it was first transmitted on BBC1.
Animated Daleks. Photograph: BBC Worldwide/PA
Charles Norton, a producer and director, and the comic book artists Martin Geraghty and Adrian Salmon, who teamed up to make a cartoon of a lost Dad’s Army episode, will turn their hands to the Doctor Who project. The Power of the Daleks will be developed referring to audio recordings of the show, stills and film clips.
Norton described the animation as the most ambitious Doctor Who archive restoration yet attempted. “The Power of the Daleks is one of the great lost classics of 1960s television and a superb example of the black-and-white era at its finest,” he said.
Paul Hembury, BBC Worldwide producer, said: “We are thrilled that fans will soon be able to enjoy this rather sinister but wonderful, classic story.”