A film collector recently discovered two Doctor Who episodes not seen in over forty years. How on Gallifrey could the BBC have lost episodes of science fiction's longest-running television program, eh, programme? In this preservation tale, the villains appear more ominous, and the heroes more colorful, than those on Doctor Who. The amazing story of Doctor Who v. the BBC--involving the perils of government enterprise, the power of unions, and tomorrow's technology fostering a cult of yesterday--speak profoundly to the here and now. Read my article @ the American Conservative on how Doctor Who's greatest foes aren't the Daleks, the Cybermen, or the Master, but state television and closed-shop labor guilds.

Horizontal hostility is to typical and boring. The first sign of a peasant is union bashing.

So typical, even. Also, that only applies to poor people. If you're rich and you bash unions, you're just an asshole.

I don't really know this show. I tried to watch it a couple of times, but it didn't strike me as something I'd be interested in tracking regularly. May have been an acquired taste but will never know. In general, I find English art to be schlocky.

So I'm guessing when I say that maybe the powers that be at the time felt somewhat the same way and that they deemed the earlier episodes to be less valuable than freeing up storage needed for newer programming?