Dad's Army Missing Episodes - Recovery

Recovery

The colour episodes in series 3-9 have been remarkably fortunate compared with many of their contemporaries. Episodes were returned from overseas broadcasters, mainly from those in Europe, New Zealand and Australia, with the result that all episodes now exist in the original 625 line colour format.

By the 1990s the only exception was the third series episode "Room at the Bottom" which survived only as a 16mm black-and-white film recording. Due to the way in which the original black & white telerecordings were made, colour information was sometimes inadvertently preserved in them even though it could not be displayed. In 2008 a computer technique was developed to recover the information from telerecordings to create a usable colour signal. One of the first telerecordings to undergo the process was the Dad's Army episode "Room at the Bottom". It was transmitted in colour for the first time in almost forty years on 13 December 2008. This technique has since been used on other programmes that were produced in colour but only have black-and-white copies surviving, such as the 1972 pilot episode of Are You Being Served? which has now been restored and broadcast in colour for the first time since 1973.

The first series survives in its entirety, though the 1968 Christmas insert "Present Arms", which was broadcast between the first and second series, remains missing.

Series 2 remains incomplete. In 2001 the two episodes "Operation Kilt" and "The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage" were returned as 16mm film recordings, to much surprise as it was assumed that very few copies had been made of the second series episodes. It has since been established that the two episodes were film recorded to show to executives at Columbia Pictures during discussions on the structure of the Dad's Army feature film. In 2008 the soundtracks of the episode "A Stripe for Frazer" and the 1968 Christmas insert "Present Arms" were returned as off-air copies. Another Christmas episode, "The Cornish Floral Dance" which aired as part of Christmas Night with the Stars in 1970, is the only colour episode still missing.

The other three second series episodes "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker", "A Stripe for Frazer" and "Under Fire", are still missing and were possibly lost for ever once the original broadcast videotapes were wiped. The only currently remaining hope for recovery is that the lost episodes may have been recorded during their original UK broadcasts by a person wealthy enough to afford an early videotape recorder such as a Shibaden or Sony CV-2000 machine, and also of sufficient means to be able to afford new tapes rather than wiping and reusing their existing recordings. It should be noted that these three episodes were among the 67 adapted for BBC Radio in the 1970s and that recordings of the radio episodes still exist.

In 2001 the BBC launched the BBC Archive Treasure Hunt, a public appeal for the wiped episodes, encouraging anyone with copies to contact them.