10 Doctor Who Episodes That Were Banned Or Censored

During the 1960s and 1970s, episodes of Doctor Who were sent out to various countries for broadcast on their national networks. Australia and New Zealand were two of the countries in receipt of Hartnell and Troughton serials, but they were much stricter about what was deemed acceptable for broadcast.

It was standard practice for Australian and New Zealand censors to remove scenes or sequences that were deemed too offensive, violent, or graphic – sequences like the gassing of Maggie Harris in Fury from the Deep ended up on the cutting room floor, as did the brutal bit of knife-throwing in The Smugglers.

Bizarrely – and on the plus side – these offcuts are now some of the only bits of footage that remain from these missing serials.

While these censor clips are one of the only ways we can get a sense of Fury from the Deep or The Smugglers, The Time Meddler had the opposite thing happen. When the serial was fully recovered from Nigeria in the mid 1980s, it was discovered that a 12-second scene where the Vikings Ulf and Sven are killed was missing, due to it being deemed unsuitable for broadcast.

For completionists, these missing seconds were restaged and filmed for inclusion in the remastered version of The Time Meddler, released in the Doctor Who Season 2 Collection box-set. All's well that ends well!