Colour Restoration of The Original Television Recording
This episode of Dad's Army, after its original broadcast on BBC1 in October 1969 and repeat in 1970, had only survived as a 16mm black-and-white film telerecording which had been transferred from the original colour videotape before that tape was wiped and reused for reasons of cost. In 2007 James Insell, a preservation specialist at the BBC Archive, established the Colour Recovery Working Group and in 2008 a new technique developed by member Richard Russell was used to restore the episode back to colour.
The technique relies on the fact that some black-and-white film recordings contain the original PAL colour sub-carrier recorded on each film frame as a pattern of fine "chroma dots" and the software is able to decode these back to colour. This process is completely different from the artificial colouring technique that was applied to some black-and-white films during the 1980s — with The Guardian describing the group's new descrambling process as "akin to turning an omelette back into an egg".
After being re-mastered with a high quality audio soundtrack, the resulting restored copy was a true representation of the episode as originally recorded and is now kept as the BBC Archive copy — this was broadcast again in colour for the first time since 1970 on Saturday 13 December 2008 on BBC Two, but has so far not been included in the DVD release of the complete collection.
Read more about this topic: Room At The Bottom
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