BritBox subscribers will be able to enjoy additional episodes of Doctor Who from next month, with the announcement that the streaming service is adding the animated versions of The Faceless Ones and Fury From the Deep.

Just two episodes of The Faceless Ones (Parts 1 and 3) still exist in the archives, whilst Fury From the Deep is missing in its entirety. The two Patrick Troughton stories were both given the animation treatment for DVD and Blu-ray release last year but now BritBox will be including them in its already comprehensive Doctor Who back catalogue from 23rd December 2021.

Doctor Who has formed an important element of the service’s marketing, with ads boasting that BritBox is the place to ‘stream over 600 episodes of the classic series all in one place’. All of the complete classic era stories from 1963 to 1989 can be viewed, along with a number of ‘orphan’ episodes from otherwise missing stories such as Air Lock from Galaxy Four and The Final Test from The Celestial Toymaker. The two Peter Cushing movies from the 1960s are also present.

BritBox doesn’t have the resources of the streaming giants and can’t boast anything like the breadth and depth of content available from the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime but, particularly for fans of archive television, it has an impressive array of shows including Blakes 7, The Avengers, The Prisoner, Survivors, Sapphire & Steel, and numerous Gerry Anderson series.

Earlier this year BritBox reported that it had hit 500,000 UK subscribers. The service, a joint venture between ITV and the BBC, is adding new shows all the time, with December also seeing the addition of A Very Peculiar Practice, a surreal black comedy set in a university written by Andrew Davies, which gave Peter Davison one of his best post-Doctor Who roles.

Are you a BritBox subscriber? Will having animated Doctor Who episodes available to stream make you less likely to buy the DVDs or Blu-rays? Let us know in the comments below!