"...wearing a bit thin..."

There was a time, back in the day, when I was fascinated by the rumours surrounding missing Doctor Who episodes. Heck, over a decade ago I wrote a splurging mess of an article about the topic. I'd always meant to update it, but other things got in the way, and eventually it fizzled out.

But I still kept  up with all the rumours...

Then, something changed, and I can pinpoint the exact moment it did so. 

It was the explosion of the so called "omnirumour". A big collation of a number of seemingly disparate rumours drawn together to form one mutant gestalt whole. A collation of rumours that made it impossible to get at the truth. to be fair, it did kind of creep up on me as I'd had my eye off the ball for a while. Other things getting in the way, see... 

And if it had just been the rumour, that would have been one thing, but the sheer amount of bile that's been spewed on internet forums has been overwhelming, and I've largely stopped looking at missing episode threads. I do occasionally dip a toe in the GallifreyBase thread, and then take the toe out again; and that's one of the saner places out there . The only place I look at regularly is the FaceBook group. But, I have dipped my toes in a couple of other places, and would have felt less unclean had I dipped said toe in to untreated sewage. 

The thing is, there was some truth to the omnirumour; nine episodes of Doctor Who were returned in 2013. The biggest recovery ever, as I recall. But hey, this isn't enough; the omnirumour says there's 90ish episodes recovered still to be announced. Never mind being grateful that these nine episodes are back, people are getting agitated that there was no announcement concerning the whole of this alleged haul.

Which, of course, presumes the whole of the omnirumour is true.

And there's the key thing... are there further elements of this that are true? Frankly, we just don't know. This rumour includes not only further recoveries by Mr Morris, the chap who found the nine episodes last year, but also from several private collectors who seen to have decided en masse to send in their episodes... What's true, what isn't? Who can tell.

The thing I'm sure you're all wondering is what I think; I just don't know. I hope there's more, but I'm certainly not going to get all stressed worrying about whether there are further episodes, or whether posts on the internet can be parsed to read in a different way to what they appear on face value. If there are people feeding deliberate misinformation in order to protect confidentialities, or because of contractual obligations, or non-disclosure agreements, or a pact with the Devil himself, then so be it. I just don't care. I genuinely wouldn't give two hoots if someone were to lie to my face. Right now, at this time, I just don't need to know; chances are all of you reading this also don't need to know. At least, not until the BBC decides that the time is right...

If there are any more, that is. 

It is worth remembering that when the nine episodes were announced, it was a matter of moments before we could download them from iTunes. If there are more episodes can you just imagine the excitement of the BBC announcing that The Underwater Menace is now complete, and if you head over to iTunes that you can buy it, now. That would be so exciting. I'd buy it in a shot.

Mind you, this alleged haul of missing TV supposedly contains something like 6,000 cans. Or is it 8,000? Or 64,000? Gah! I expect by the time I next summon up the strength to dip a toe in it'll be half a million cans... and it'll probably all be duplicate copies of The Space Pirates episode 2...