Searching for television's missing gems: Doctor Who, Woody Allen, Ridley Scott and Dennis Potter The most charismatic and mysterious among them is Phillip Morris, a former oil industry worker who now runs Television International Enterprises Archive, a company specialising in the recovery of archive television. Tall, redhaired, intense, he is a man on a mission. "If you went down to the British Library and asked for a classic novel and were told, 'sorry, we burned it', you'd be pretty shocked," he says. But that's what happened to our classic television. I won't rest until I've filled as many of those gaps as possible. It was Morris who found the missing Doctor Who episodes at a television facility in Nigeria, a country he knows well - but which he'd be forgiven for never wanting to visit again. In 2006, he and six of his colleagues were kidnapped from an oil rig in the Niger Delta and spent four days held captive by gunmen who seemed quite capable of ending the adventure with an execution. Morris survived the ordeal, he says, by playing the clown. He asked for HP sauce on his ration of noodles. He offered around the sweets in his pocket. "It sounds odd," he says, "but, in a way, acting like Tom Baker saved my life that day." Returning to Nigeria in search of lost television is his way of repaying a debt to his favourite show and, he says, to do something to support the culture of public service broadcasting that shaped him. It's also a way to demonstrate that those kidnappers didn't rob him of his nerve, although he does take precautions. "I have armed people with me," he says. It's very dangerous. I wouldn't like anybody to get the idea that this was easy work. Morris is convinced that much more lost British television remains to be discovered in Africa and the Middle East. He's heard accounts of shows missing from the archives of British broadcasters being transmitted on overseas stations as late as the Eighties. Bizarrely, David Frost's topical satire show That Was the Week That Was seems to have enjoyed a long afterlife, far from home. He has already recovered more material - a favourite among which is a 1960s Basil Brush Show featuring an early appearance by the Kinks. His success is the result of thousands of air miles and an unerringly empirical attitude to the evidence. "If you're just calling someone up and asking what they've got, it's easy for them to say they don't have it," he says. I won't accept it's gone until I see the hole in the ground where they buried it. In one West African archive he pulled up the carpet and found a lost edition of The Sky at Night that featured a conversation between Patrick Moore and Arthur C Clarke, the visionary science-fiction writer and one of the astronomer's oldest friends. Moore, nearing the end of his life, was delighted to see the return of the material. There's a Wild West quality to Morris's enterprise - but freelancers like him may have an advantage over the broadcasters. Paul Vanezis - coincidentally, a former producer of The Sky at Night - has been hunting for lost television programmes for 30 years. In 1989 he visited the offices of the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation in pursuit of the thousands of telerecorded plays and serials mentioned in their records. "They're in the grave," he was told - which turned out not to be a euphemism for the furnace or the skip, but a basement room stacked with rotting material. "The smell down there wasn't very pleasant," he recalls. Vinegary would be the best way of putting it. Among the debris he found a good haul of lost material: a 1962 adaptation of Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did, starring Susan Hampshire; The Desperate People (1963), a thriller featuring a young Nigel Hawthorne; and early episodes of Z-Cars, which scrubbed up nicely once the mould had been removed. One find, though, never made it back home - 60 film prints of Armchair Theatre, the ITV single-play strand that first brought the work of Harold Pinter and Clive Exton into British living rooms. The television station, he suspects, fearing they would be prosecuted for having retained the material without permission, junked it - as their original contract had required them to do. "Perhaps," he says, ruefully, "I should have just bribed them." We're apt to moralise about broadcasters' destruction of their own history, and sometimes rightly so. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, it's said, offered to pay for the preservation of tapes of their BBC show Not Only... But Also. The offer was declined, and a generation was robbed of the sight of Pete and Dud dropping Alan Bennett into a tank of sludge for failing to improvise a rhyming couplet with sufficient speed. But Dick Fiddy, television consultant to the British Film Institute, takes a more nuanced view. "The BBC constantly faces a hostile press who are desperate to point the finger at any perceived waste," he says, "and that's one of the reasons why they were so diligent in wiping this material. It's seen as cultural vandalism now but at the time it was seen as good financial housekeeping. If the press had found out that the BBC was sitting on 67,000 tapes that it no longer had the rights to broadcast, but that the tapes themselves were perfectly reusable, how long would that have gone uncriticised? Dick Fiddy coordinates the BFI's project 'Missing Believed Wiped' For the past two decades, Fiddy has been coordinating the BFI's attempts to bring lost gems back to the light. Each year he hosts a screening of the best material under the banner "Missing Believed Wiped": a 1966 variety show in which Woody Allen fights a kangaroo; a TV play by a young Ridley Scott; Emergency Ward 9, a satire on hospital drama by Dennis Potter. Some returns have been made by peculiar routes. A missing Doctor Who was bought for eight quid at a car boot sale. Episodes of the insanely complicated ITV quiz show Masterspy were returned to the archives because its presenter, William Franklyn, had taped them with an early domestic video recorder. In 2011, 100-odd hours of lost British drama were unearthed at the Library of Congress in Washington, among them a 1957 version of Ibsen's The Wild Duck directed by Charles Crichton, the man who called the shots on The Lavender Hill Mob and A Fish Called Wanda. The greatest hair's-breadth escape, however, was performed by a television production of Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn Of the Screw, made for Associated-Rediffusion in 1959. Its producer, Peter Morley, never expected to see it again, as Britten's publishers had demanded the destruction of the recording two years after its first broadcast. Morley attended a ceremonial wiping of the master tape. "It was," he told me, "like attending a wake." A film duplicate, however, was made for the chair of the Arts Council, Lord Cottesloe, who wanted to screen it to his friends. This, too, was destroyed. But in 2000, some rusty tins turned up containing an imperfect film of the production. The engineer assigned to produce the copy had messed it up the first time, and, unwilling to deliver dodgy goods to Lord Cottesloe, had made a second attempt. The first had escaped the fire. Since the Fifties, television has made radical revisions to its relationship with time. Drama and comedy shows used to take their leads from live theatre, down to the structure of the working day. Actors rehearsed in the afternoon and went before the cameras just as their West End compatriots were walking out into the footlights. Even when recorded material began to dominate its output, television was still regarded as a live medium - and the practice of genuinely live drama might have lasted a lot longer, had actor Gareth Jones not suffered a fatal heart attack on a live 1958 edition of Armchair Theatre. Television will always lose something of itself to the ether. Many live broadcasts are not kept, even today - and the practice of junking didn't end in the Seventies. There are, for example, big gaps in the record of children's television of the Nineties. That missing episodes of Doctor Who are still being recovered is a measure of the preoccupations of the present day, in which Doctor Who is highly valued. But, as Phillip Morris continues to scour Africa, other treasures may arrive in their wake. And if the history of television preservation tells us anything, it's that it's hard to second guess the cultural priorities of the future. When the wheel turns again, who knows what we will mourn the most? It might even be the Terry Scott thing with the gnomes. Fred Emney Picks a Pop, 1960 Satire on the music business by the mountainous, monocled, shambling, comedian - much of whose TV work has been lost to posterity. The Adventures of Francie and Josie, 1962 Early work of the magnificently strange Glaswegian double-act of Rikki Fulton and Jack Milroy - the original tapes were destroyed by fire in 1969. The Road, 1963 A medieval village is haunted by roaring visions from the present day - a time-bending supernatural drama by Nigel Kneale, creator of Quatermass. Madhouse on Castle Street, 1963 David Warner stars in Evan Jones's boarding house drama - alongside Bob Dylan, who gives the first-ever performance of Blowin' in the Wind. The Confidence Course, 1965 Dennis Potter's first TV play is about a group of mild-mannered people on a self-assertiveness course - among them a rebel played by Stanley Baxter. Missing Believed Wiped is at the BFI Southbank on December 21; southbankcentre.co.uk