I know you think I’m a Doctor Who fanatic but in fact there are 23 televised Doctor Who stories out of about 264* I’ve never seen. This is partly because lots of the first six years of the show has been destroyed due to BBC archival practices in the 60s.

Of that number, barring some miraculous discovery or more work by the animation team, I will never be able to see 8 of them. Marco Polo, The Myth Makers, The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve, The Savages, The Smugglers, The Highlanders, The Macra Terror, and Fury From the Deep are entirely missing and no episodes from those stories are known to exist. I can read some of them as novels, or listen to the audio tracks, or suffer through fan reconstructions using still photographs, but that’s it. I think the only one I’m really bummed about is The Macra Terror. Marco Polo is supposed to be fantastic, but it sounds pretty dull.

I own DVD versions of 5 stories (maybe 6, I have to check) I haven’t watched in their entirety, some a mix of live-action video and animated reconstructions. I need to finish The Ice Warriors, and then I can watch The Romans, The Gunfighters, The War Machines, The Underwater Menace, and The Dominators.

That leaves 10, most of which I’ve either seen in part (the episodes that remain), or heard as audios, or read as novelisations, or all of the above. They are The Crusade, Galaxy Four, The Daleks’ Master Plan, The Celestial Toymaker, The Faceless Ones, The Evil of the Daleks, The Abominable Snowmen, Fury From the Deep, The Wheel in Space, and The Space Pirates.

And you thought I didn’t have a life!

*I’m not counting the original spin-off novels, the cartoons (including Scream of the Shalka), or the endless parade of Big Finish audio plays. Or the comic books. There are only so many hours in the day and a nerd has to draw the line somewhere.