I wonder what the release schedule would be like should there really be a large number of shows. Are the restoration team even capable of tackling that much work in a reasonable time ?
I imagine we'd just continue to see stories trickle out at a rate of a few per year, just as they've been doing to varying degrees since they started the DVD releases in 2001.
So now we're shifting from Zambia to Sierra Leone, which we all know lost it's archive in 2001 during the civil war.
And it's a TIE archive? That would make the most sense as it would be likely to have MOST of the serials ever sold around the world.
The rumour keeps shifting too much for my liking...
Or more likely Radio Times got their facts mixed up in regards to Sierra Leone.
We know the archive in Sierra Leone was lost but do we know that the
Doctor Who episodes in question were there at the time? Lots of weird stuff has happened in the long saga of missing episodes. The reason why we have most of the episodes that we still have is because people were too negligent to return the prints to the BBC where they could be disposed of in an orderly fashion. Didn't Hong Kong swear up & down back in the '80s that they didn't have any missing
Doctor Who, only to suddenly come up with all 4 parts of "The Tomb of the Cybermen" in 1992?
I'm always dubious about rumors of recovered episodes.
But considering how evasive some of the involved parties have been and how the rumor just won't go away, I'm starting to think that they've found SOMETHING. Now, maybe it's not 90 episodes like some of the rumors are suggesting. But ever since we learned about Sierra Leone, the notion of a large number of episodes being recovered in Africa has at least had the ring of plausibility to it. Even if they've only found 1 missing episode, that would be a miracle and well worth celebrating.
I just think it's funny that, at one point, Ian Levine was saying that there will always be 106 missing episodes. Didn't he say the exact same thing about 108 episodes a few years ago before the 2011 rediscoveries of "Air Lock" & "The Underwater Menace, Part 2"?
Didn't know he was so loaded. But, if he's so rich, why does he need free video tapes?!
These were tapes of unedited Studio Sessions and the like.
He also appointed himself "Official Continuity Advisor" to the series back in the 1980's (and still managed not to point out to anyone what the Silurian's third eye was used for.)
His actual job is a Music Producer and that's where he made all his money.
Doctor Who in the '80s seemed to attract eccentric rich folk. From what I've heard, Anthony Ainley was independently wealthy, didn't need to work, and the only time he ever did work was when he played the Master.