Dad's Army missing episodes

The British television sitcom Dad's Army ran for nine series between 1968 and 1977. Three out of six episodes from Series 2 and two of the four Christmas sketches (1968 and 1970) are missing from BBC archives.

Background

Until 1978, when the BBC Film and Videotape Library was created (a permanent archive for all its programmes), the BBC had no central archive; and videotapes and film recordings stored in the BBC's various libraries were often either wiped in order to record newer programmes without increasing costs, or destroyed to create new storage space. 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, 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 that were no longer formally required.

The first two series of Dad's Army were made in black-and-white, with most 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. 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, so that very few film copies of Series 2 episodes were made. Dad's Army was made in colour from the 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 kept permanently.

Series 2

Dad's Army series 2 remains incomplete, with three out of six episodes still missing from BBC archives (as of August 2024). However, the situation was previously much worse - five of the six episodes were no longer held by the BBC in 1978.

Episode 10, "Sgt. Wilson's Little Secret", survived the cull as it was recorded onto 35 mm film instead of videotape, either because it required additional editing (which was easier to do to film before the advent of electronic timecode editing) or because no videotape recording facilities were available in the recording period. This fortuitously assured the episode's survival: as a production made on film, it fell within the BBC Film Library's remit of retaining filmed productions.

Episodes 7 "Operation Kilt" and 8 "The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage" were returned to the BBC as 16 mm film recordings in 2001. 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. The film copies were then junked and retrieved from a skip by an opportunistic collector and stored in a garden shed for 30 years until returned to the BBC.

The three Series 2 episodes that remain missing are Episodes 9 "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker", 11 "A Stripe for Frazer" and 12 "Under Fire". 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 rich enough to buy new tapes rather than wiping and reusing their existing recordings) or unknown tele-recordings could have been found in a skip by a film collector or curious passer-by when they were junked. However these three episodes were among the 67 adapted for BBC Radio in the 1970s, and recordings of the radio episodes still exist.

In 2013 rumours began circulating that the missing episodes had been found, but no official word has come from the BBC confirming or denying the rumours.

In 2008 the soundtrack of the episode "A Stripe for Frazer" was rediscovered, and in 2015, a better copy was restored to the BBC archive. 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, for release via the BBC Store online service.

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 625 line colour format.

By the 1990s one episode, "Room at the Bottom" from the third series, survived only as a 16mm black-and-white film recording. Fortunately, because of 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 of colour recovery was developed to recover the information from telerecordings to create a usable colour signal. "Room at the Bottom" was one of the first telerecordings to undergo this process. It was broadcast in colour for the first time in almost forty years on 13 December 2008.

Christmas sketches

Two of the four Christmas sketches which aired as part of Christmas Night with the Stars from 1968 "Untitled Sketch" and 1970 "Cornish Floral Dance" (which was made in colour) remain missing.

Full list of episodes and sketches still missing

Episodes

Series	Episode	Title	Recorded	Broadcast	Notes
2
	009	The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker	27 October 1968	15 March 1969	Video and soundtrack still missing but radio version exists.
	011	A Stripe for Frazer	15 November 1968	29 March 1969	Soundtrack found in 2008, video still missing. Radio version exists. The episode has been animated and will be released 4 February 2016.
	012	Under Fire	27 November 1968	5 April 1969	Video and soundtrack still missing but radio version exists.

Sketches

No	Title	Recorded	First broadcast	Notes
001	Santa On Patrol	27 October 1968	25 December 1968	Video and soundtrack still missing.
003	Cornish Floral Dance	4 December 1970	25 December 1970	Video still missing, amateur soundtrack recording found (can be heard as an extra on the Christmas Specials DVD). The script was recycled for a scene in the radio adaptation of The Godiva Affair and as part of the Dad's Army stage show (a segment of which was also included in the 1975 Royal Variety Performance).

References

• BBC Archive Treasure Hunt