Found!

They've found them! All but one episode of The Web of Fear and all the missing episodes of The End of the World. I got up this morning, turned on the TV and that was the first report I saw.

It's impossible to express just how happy this makes me. I've heard what I think are fairly reliable reports of a large cache of missing episodes, but when I asked was told that The Web of Fear was not among them.

The Web of Fear is one of my favourite ever episodes of Doctor Who. Despite never having seen it. The copy of the book I had as a child is just about falling out of it's cover from being read so much. The audio recordings of the story that exist are the most listened to story on my iPod. It's frightening, exciting and is the first story to feature The Brig (though at the time he is still Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart). It will be wonderful to finally see if it lives up to my imagination.

And they're downloading onto my laptop NOW! 

The Beeb have really done their job this time. The episodes are already available officially on iTunes with DVD releases promised for next year. But making them available to fans now is a fantastic move on their part. Though I am tempted to skip work to watch them. For the still missing episode of Web they've synched the audio files with the telesnaps they have of the episode, in a similar way to what they did with Marco Polo for the In the Beginning box set - though with a whole episode rather than a condensed version of the whole story. I do hope that they animate it for DVD in the way they did with The Reign of Terror and The Invasion.

Now, this is not what I've heard about a find of missing episodes. What I have heard was that an extremely large find had been made completing a large number of stories with missing episodes and an official announcement would be made in the anniversary week. I think my source is reliable. It's the same one that I heard about the Galaxy 4 and The Underwater Menace find before the official announcement.

My hope is that the source I heard from is not mistaken. Rather, the BBC have been unable to suppress the rumours that have been sweeping through fan circles and this is a way to excite the fans while quieting the rumours. They may hope that people will think this is all the rumours were talking about. But I, for one, will continue to hope for an announcement closer to the anniversary of more finds.

But, for now, I know how I'll be spending my Friday night.