List of Doctor Who Serials

List Of Doctor Who Serials

Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. As of 29 September 2012, 789 individual episodes, including one television movie of Doctor Who, have been aired, encompassing 229 stories. Additionally, four charity specials and two animated serials have been aired, and two short sequences—"A Fix with Sontarans" and "Attack of the Graske"—were produced and involved the interaction of a viewer; the former was a segment of Jim'll Fix It and the latter was a fully interactive adventure. The show's high episode count resulted in Doctor Who holding the world record for the highest number of episodes for a science-fiction programme. For comparison, the Guinness World Record holder for the highest number of consecutive episodes, Smallville, aired 218 episodes.

Doctor Who ceased airing in 1989 and began again in 2005. Each story in the original series (1963–1989) is a multi-episode serial, with two exceptions: the 1965 cutaway episode "Mission to the Unknown"; and the 20th anniversary story The Five Doctors. The characters in the column after the serial titles indicate the code used by the production team to designate the serial, where applicable, and are followed either by the titles of the individual episodes where given or by the number of episodes otherwise. Unless otherwise noted, episodes in this period are 25 minutes long. During the early seasons of the programme most serials were linked together and one would usually lead directly into the next. Starting with the 2005 revival, the production team abandoned the traditional serial format for a largely self-contained episodic format with occasional multi-part stories and loose story arcs. Unless otherwise noted, the new episodes are 45 minutes long.

Due to the BBC's 1970s junking policy, 106 episodes from the 1960s are missing, with the result that 27 serials are incomplete, although all of these still exist as audio recordings, and some have been reconstructed. In the first two seasons and most of the third, each episode of a serial had an individual title; no serial had an overall on-screen title until The Savages. The serial titles given below are the most common title for the serials as a whole, used in sources such as the Doctor Who Reference Guide and the BBC's classic episode guide, and are generally those used for commercial release. The practice of individually titled episodes resurfaced with the show's 2005 revival, when Doctor Who's serial nature was abandoned in favour of an episodic format.

The three-digit story numbers are not official designations but are merely to serve as a guide to where the story stands in the overall context of the programme. There is some dispute about, for example, whether to count Season 23's The Trial of a Time Lord as one or four serials, and whether the uncompleted Shada should be included. The numbering scheme used here reflects the current internal practice of describing "Planet of the Dead" (2009) as the 200th story, used in the official magazine's 407th issue. Other sources, such as the Region 1 DVDs of classic Doctor Who serials, use different numbering schemes which diverge after the 108th story, The Horns of Nimon (1979/80).