I was lucky enough to be at the BFI's 'Missing Believed Wiped' event when 'Galaxy Four' 3 and 'The Underwater Menace' 2 were announced discovered. It's a very odd feeling watching something which, thanks to soundtracks and reconstructions, you know so well and yet have never seen before. It makes you notice the surprisingly little touches to almost the exclusion of the actual narrative.
I'm old enough to have also experienced this with 'The Tomb of the Cybermen', episodes of 'The Crusade' and 'The Dalek Masterplan' and probably other episodes I'm now so blase about I forget they were ever missing, plus of course 'The Enemy of the World' and most of 'The Web of Fear'.
Less obviously, I'm old enough to have had this experience with almost every episode of Old Who. I'm not quite old enough to have never expected to have seen them - though I am old enough that recordings of BSB's Who weekend were mindblowing and copies of UK Gold's repeats were an all-consuming quest - but I am old enough to have blithely read endless synopses via The Programme Guide, Doctor Who Magazine and assorted other sources before I'd actually seen most episodes, which made the experience of watching them not dissimilar.
It's been pointed out several times that Doctor Who garners a disproportionate amount of critical attention, even compared with other shows that attract similar levels of obsession. It's easy to put this down to the early existence of The Making of Doctor Who (1972), or the fact that the mechanics of the scripting and production of Doctor Who are unusually transparent (as Peter Davison puts it in The Doctors: it's 'crap'), but perhaps it's because so many fans' first experience of viewing many of the episodes was an oddly analytical one already.
Yes, I am running out of things to say. Anyway, Doctor Who and the Enemy of the World...
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