The BBC has revealed that two episodes of First Doctor classic, The Daleks’ Master Plan, have been found in a collector’s “ramshackle” bunch of vintage film reels!

A cardboard box contained two episodes of a missing Doctor Who story.

Yes, The Nightmare Begins and Devil’s Planet have been recovered!

These are, respectively, the first and third episodes of 1965 epic, The Daleks’ Master Plan. The third episode, Day of Armageddon, was found in 2004.

Restored versions of the episodes will be released on BBC iPlayer this Easter.

Peter Purves, who played the First Doctor’s companion, Steven Taylor, was invited to the Phoenix Cinema in Leicester on Wednesday under false pretenses to view the two episodes, and he said:

“My flabber has never been so gasted.”

The episodes were uncovered by Film is Fabulous!, to whom we all owe a massive “thank you!”

Censors in Australia and New Zealand thought The Daleks’ Master Plan too violent to air, so the story wasn’t sold abroad. Nonetheless, copies of some episodes were still made by technicians to check for problems which might need to be fixed ahead of pitching the episodes to other markets. These versions made their way to an amateur collection, largely otherwise comprised of home videos of trains and canals. After his passing, his collection was donated to Film is Fabulous!.

Justin Smith, chair of trustees at FIF, said:

“We travel all over the country to recover film collections from private hands.

“A lot of the films had suffered water damage and the cans had corroded.

“These are gems in what was an eclectic and ramshackle collection, a lot of which hadn’t been looked after as well as the Doctor Who had.

“The collector did recognise what he had, but how he acquired them has been lost to time.”

A special screening of the two episodes organised by FIF, with Purves as guest of honour, is being held in London on 4th April 2026.