The ''Dad's Army'' missing episodes are
lost episodes
Episodes may refer to:
* Episode, a part of a dramatic work
* Episodes (TV series), ''Episodes'' (TV series), a British/American television sitcom which premiered in 2011
* Episodes (journal), ''Episodes'' (journal), a geological science journal
...
and
sketches of the British
television sitcom ''
Dad's Army
''Dad's Army'' is a British television British sitcom, sitcom about the United Kingdom's Home Guard (United Kingdom), Home Guard during the World War II, Second World War. It was written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft (TV producer), David Crof ...
''. The programme ran for nine
series
Series may refer to:
People with the name
* Caroline Series (born 1951), English mathematician, daughter of George Series
* George Series (1920–1995), English physicist
Arts, entertainment, and media
Music
* Series, the ordered sets used i ...
from 31 July 1968 to 13 November 1977. Three out of six episodes from the second series and two of the four Christmas
sketches are missing because, at that time, the
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
routinely reused videotape as a cost-saving measure.
Background
Until 1978, when the
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
Film and Videotape Library was created as a permanent archive for all its television programmes, the BBC had no central archive. The
videotapes and
film recordings stored in the BBC's various libraries were often either
wiped or discarded for recording new programmes and to free storage space to reduce costs.
[ The BBC Film Library kept only some programmes that were made on film, whilst the Engineering Department handled videotape but had no mandate to retain material. Some shows were kept by ]BBC Enterprises
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
, but they too had limited storage space and only kept material that was considered commercially exploitable. In the mid-1970s, BBC Enterprises disposed of much older material for which the rights to sell the programmes had expired, and the Engineering Department routinely wiped videotapes in an era when rescreening potential was limited.
The first two series (12 episodes) of ''Dad's Army
''Dad's Army'' is a British television British sitcom, sitcom about the United Kingdom's Home Guard (United Kingdom), Home Guard during the World War II, Second World War. It was written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft (TV producer), David Crof ...
'' were made in black-and-white, with almost all episodes made on two-inch quad videotape for initial broadcast. The first series was thought to have commercial potential overseas, and was offered for sale to foreign broadcasters by BBC Enterprises
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
. To this end, 16mm film copies were made of the first six episodes by the BBC Engineering Department before the master videotapes were wiped, and these were retained by the Film Unit.
In the event, the first series sold very poorly and so BBC Enterprises did not express any interest in selling Series 2 abroad. Thus very few film copies of episodes from series 2 were made. ''Dad's Army'' was made in colour from series 3 onwards; overseas interest in the series picked up, and BBC Enterprises resumed offering the episodes for sale in film and video format; this meant they were more likely to be permanently retained.
Recovery
In 1998, David Croft, one of the co-creators of ''Dad's Army'', made an appeal on BBC Two
BBC Two is a British free-to-air Public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's second flagship channel, and it covers a wide range of subject matte ...
asking people if they held copies of the missing episodes. At the time, five of the six episodes of series 2 were missing; " Sgt. Wilson's Little Secret" had survived the cull as it was recorded onto 35 mm film instead of videotape, either because it required additional editing (which was easier with film before electronic timecode editing) or because no videotape recording facilities were available in the recording period. The fact that the copy was on film rather than videotape ensured the episode's survival, as it fell within the BBC Film Library's remit of retaining filmed productions.[Documentary: ]
Dad's Army: Missing Presumed Wiped
', BBC, 2001
In 2001, three years after Croft's appeal, 16 mm film recordings of " Operation Kilt" and " The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage" were returned to the BBC archive. It has since been established that the two episodes were film recorded to show to executives at Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Trade name, doing business as Columbia Pictures, is an American film Production company, production and Film distributor, distribution company that is the flagship unit of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group ...
during discussions on the structure of the ''Dad's Army'' feature film. The film copies were then junked and retrieved from a skip
Skip or Skips may refer to:
Acronyms
* SKIP (Skeletal muscle and kidney enriched inositol phosphatase), a human gene
* Simple Key-Management for Internet Protocol
* SKIP of New York (Sick Kids need Involved People), a non-profit agency aiding ...
by an opportunistic collector and stored in a garden shed for 30 years until returned to the BBC. When returned, the film cans were in a poor condition and the films themselves had seriously deteriorated. Following restoration by BBC technicians, both episodes were broadcast repeatedly on air.
The three episodes from series 2 that remain missing are " The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker", " A Stripe for Frazer" and " Under Fire". There are three likely sources for recovering these episodes, if they are still in existence:
# The episodes were recorded off-air during their original UK broadcasts by using an early videotape recorder such as a Shibaden or Sony CV-2000
CV-2000 was one of the world's first home video tape recorders (VTR), introduced by Sony in August 1965. The 'CV' in the model name stood for . This was Sony's domestic format throughout the 1960s. It was the first fully transistorized VCR.
The ...
machine
# The episodes were recorded off-air during their original UK broadcasts by having a 8 mm or 16mm camera pointed at the television screen
# The episodes were copied as 16 mm tele-recordings, which were subsequently saved from being junked
However these three episodes were among the 67 adapted for BBC Radio
BBC Radio is an operational business division and service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a royal charter since 1927. The service provides national radio stations cove ...
in the 1970s, and recordings of the radio episodes still exist.
On October 17th, 2024, the Film Is Fabulous project returned a print of the already existing episode ''The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage'' to the BBC Archives. This particular copy was higher quality than the copy that was returned in 2001, as well as confirming the episode had no missing minutes, the only difference being a characteristic of the editing.
Christmas sketches
Two of the four Christmas sketches which aired as part of '' Christmas Night with the Stars'' — " Santa On Patrol" from 1968 and the " Cornish Floral Dance" from 1970, both of which were made in colour — remain missing, though audio recordings of both have been recovered. The " Cornish Floral Dance" was also performed at the Royal Variety Performance
The ''Royal Variety Performance'' is a televised variety show held annually in the United Kingdom to raise money for the Royal Variety Charity (of which King Charles III is life-patron). It is attended by senior members of the British royal ...
of 1975. This second version is still extant.
Colour episodes
The colour episodes in series 3–9 have been remarkably fortunate compared with many of their contemporaries. Missing episodes were returned from overseas broadcasters, mainly from those in Europe, New Zealand and Australia, with the result that all full-length episodes now exist in the original colour format.
Compared with other series
Compared with other BBC series broadcast in the 1960s, ''Dad's Army'' is comparatively rare amongst contemporaries in that it's one of the few BBC series (along with ''Doctor Who
''Doctor Who'' is a British science fiction television series broadcast by the BBC since 1963. The series, created by Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber and Donald Wilson (writer and producer), Donald Wilson, depicts the adventures of an extraterre ...
'') to have all of its 1970s episodes exist as masters or telerecordings, while other series such as ''Z-Cars
''Z-Cars'' or ''Z Cars'' (pronounced "zed cars") is a British television police procedural series centred on the work of mobile uniformed police and CID detectives in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby, near Liverpool. Produced by ...
'' and ''Dixon of Dock Green
''Dixon of Dock Green'' is a BBC police procedural television series about daily life at a fictional London police station, with the emphasis on petty crime, successfully controlled through common sense and human understanding. It ran from 1955 ...
'' are missing episodes from as late as 1975.
Restoration and recreation
Colour restoration
By the 1990s, " Room at the Bottom", the sixth episode of Series 3, was the only episode produced in colour that did not have a colour copy in the archive; instead, it survived only as a 16 mm black-and-white film recording. Because of the way in which the original black and white recordings were made, colour information was sometimes inadvertently preserved in them even though it could not be displayed; this colour information is known as chroma dots. In 2008, a computer technique of colour recovery was developed to recover the chroma dot information from black and white recordings to recreate a usable colour signal. "Room at the Bottom" was used as the pilot project to test this process of colour recovery, with the success of the episode's restoration leading to it being used on other 16mm recordings. The new colour copy was officially adopted as the BBC's archive copy, and "Room at the Bottom" was broadcast in colour for the first time in almost forty years on 13 December 2008.
Recreations
Restagings
Although not a deliberate attempt to restore lost material, the " Cornish Floral Dance" was also performed at the Royal Variety Performance
The ''Royal Variety Performance'' is a televised variety show held annually in the United Kingdom to raise money for the Royal Variety Charity (of which King Charles III is life-patron). It is attended by senior members of the British royal ...
of 1975. This second version is still extant.
Animation
In 2008, the soundtrack of " A Stripe for Frazer" was rediscovered in the hands of a private collector. This recording was then digitally remastered for a 2015 BBC Audio CD release. In January 2016, it was announced that the BBC were creating an animated version of the episode, to be combined with the newly discovered copy of the audio, which was released via the BBC Store online service.
Pre-production for "A Stripe for Frazer" began in October 2015, and a little under 12 weeks later the finished animated episode was released on BBC Store on 4 February 2016. The animation was produced and directed for BBC Worldwide by Charles Norton and a team that included comic book artist, Martin Geraghty.
In October 2023, UKTV
UKTV Media Limited, trading as UKTV, is a British multi-channel broadcaster, which, since 2019, has been wholly owned by BBC Studios (formerly BBC Worldwide), a commercial subsidiary of the BBC. It was formed on 1 November 1992 through a join ...
announced that it had produced animated versions of the remaining missing episodes for broadcast on its Gold
Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal ...
channel alongside "A Stripe for Frazer". These were produced using the same production team that was originally assembled for "A Stripe for Frazer". The series ran to four episodes, with versions of the three missing episodes from Series 2, plus an additional episode containing the two missing sketches from '' Christmas Night with the Stars''. While the original audio from both "A Stripe for Frazer" and the two Christmas sketches was extant and available to be used alongside the animation, for the remaining two episodes the already existing radio series episodes were used as alternatives. For both "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Walker" and "Under Fire", neither James Beck nor Ian Lavender
Arthur Ian Lavender (16 February 1946 – 2 February 2024) was an English stage, film and television actor. He is best known for his role as Private Pike in ''Dad's Army'', a BBC sitcom set during World War II, of which he was the last survivi ...
appeared in the radio adaptations, and they were therefore not part of the cast of the animated versions of the episodes. The characters were instead redubbed by actors David Benson and Jack Lane, who created the two-man theatrical show "Dad's Army Radio Show".
Remake
In 2018, UKTV
UKTV Media Limited, trading as UKTV, is a British multi-channel broadcaster, which, since 2019, has been wholly owned by BBC Studios (formerly BBC Worldwide), a commercial subsidiary of the BBC. It was formed on 1 November 1992 through a join ...
announced plans to recreate the three missing episodes for broadcast on its Gold
Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal ...
channel under the title ''Dad's Army: The Lost Episodes''. Mercury Productions, the company responsible for ''Saluting Dad's Army'', Gold's 50th anniversary tribute series, produced the episodes, directed by Ben Kellett. The recreations were broadcast in 2019, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of their original broadcast on the BBC. Kevin McNally and Robert Bathurst
Robert Guy Bathurst (born 22 February 1957) is a British actor. Bathurst was born in The Gold Coast (British colony), The Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1957, where his father was working as a management consultant. In 1959, his family moved to Ball ...
were the initial casting announcements as Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson, with Bernard Cribbins
Bernard Joseph Cribbins (29 December 1928 – 27 July 2022) was an English actor and singer whose career spanned over eight decades.
During the 1960s, Cribbins became known in the UK for his successful novelty records " The Hole in the Ground" ...
portraying Private Godfrey
Private Charles Godfrey MM is a fictional Home Guard soldier, first portrayed by Arnold Ridley in the British television sitcom ''Dad's Army''. He is retired and was previously a tailor for the Civil Service Stores or the Army & Navy Stores. ...
. The full cast was announced in January 2019, with McNally, Bathurst and Cribbins joined by Kevin Eldon
Kevin Eldon (born 2 October 1959) is an English actor and comedian. He featured in British comedy television shows of the 1990s including ''Fist of Fun'', ''This Morning with Richard Not Judy'', ''Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge (TV ...
, Mathew Horne
Mathew Frazer Horne (born 6 September 1978) is an English actor, comedian, singer, television presenter, and narrator. He is best known for appearing on several BBC Sketch comedy, sketch shows and sitcoms, most notably ''Gavin & Stacey'' (as L ...
, David Hayman
David Hayman (born 9 February 1948) is a Scottish film, television and stage actor and director from Glasgow. His acting credits include '' Sid and Nancy'' (1986), '' Hope and Glory'' (1987), '' Rob Roy'' (1995), '' The Jackal'' (1997), '' Tri ...
and Tom Rosenthal. However, Bernard Cribbins subsequently withdrew from the project, and was replaced as Godfrey by Timothy West
Timothy Lancaster West (20 October 1934 – 12 November 2024) was an English actor with a long and varied career across theatre, film, and television. He began acting in repertory theatres in the 1950s before making his London stage debut in 19 ...
. The recreated episodes were shown in August 2019 and released on DVD & Blu Ray on 25 November 2019 by the British Network imprint. The series also ran on Yesterday on 25–28 August 2020.
=Cast
=
* Kevin McNally – Captain Mainwaring
*Robert Bathurst
Robert Guy Bathurst (born 22 February 1957) is a British actor. Bathurst was born in The Gold Coast (British colony), The Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1957, where his father was working as a management consultant. In 1959, his family moved to Ball ...
– Sergeant Wilson
*Kevin Eldon
Kevin Eldon (born 2 October 1959) is an English actor and comedian. He featured in British comedy television shows of the 1990s including ''Fist of Fun'', ''This Morning with Richard Not Judy'', ''Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge (TV ...
– Lance Corporal Jones
*David Hayman
David Hayman (born 9 February 1948) is a Scottish film, television and stage actor and director from Glasgow. His acting credits include '' Sid and Nancy'' (1986), '' Hope and Glory'' (1987), '' Rob Roy'' (1995), '' The Jackal'' (1997), '' Tri ...
– Private Frazer
*Mathew Horne
Mathew Frazer Horne (born 6 September 1978) is an English actor, comedian, singer, television presenter, and narrator. He is best known for appearing on several BBC Sketch comedy, sketch shows and sitcoms, most notably ''Gavin & Stacey'' (as L ...
– Private Walker
*Timothy West
Timothy Lancaster West (20 October 1934 – 12 November 2024) was an English actor with a long and varied career across theatre, film, and television. He began acting in repertory theatres in the 1950s before making his London stage debut in 19 ...
– Private Godfrey
* Tom Rosenthal – Private Pike
List of missing episodes
Further research
Documentaries
*''Dad's Army: Missing Presumed Wiped'' (2001) – a 30-minute documentary about episode recoveries and restoration.
*''Time Shift – Missing Believed Wiped'' (2003) – a general documentary about archive television, featuring some clips and discussions about ''Dad's Army''.
Overseas broadcasters
The following is a list of overseas broadcasters who purchased the second series of ''Dad's Army''.
See also
* Wiping
Wipe or wiping may refer to:
Hygiene
* Toilet paper or wet wipes, or their use
Arts and media
* Wipe (transition), a gradual transition in film editing
* Wipe curtain, a kind of theater curtain
* ''Wipe'' or ''Screenwipe'', a television series ...
* BBC Archive Treasure Hunt
* Missing Believed Wiped
* ''Doctor Who'' missing episodes
Notes
References
External links
BBC Missing episode list
A Stripe For Frazer: Animating the lost episode of Dad's Army at BBC Blogs
*
*
*
*
*
{{Dad's Army
Dad's Army