Dad's Army missing episodes#Recreations

Until 1978, when the BBC 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, 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 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. 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.

In 1998, David Croft, one of the co-creators of Dad's Army, made an appeal on BBC Two 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: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308144/ 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.{{cite news |title=Lost Dad's Army shows found |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/1364418.stm |work=BBC News |publisher=BBC |date=1 June 2001 |access-date=9 August 2008 }} 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. 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".[https://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt/missing/dadsarmy.shtml The missing episodes at the BBC Treasure Hunt site], URL accessed 4 June 2006 There are three likely sources for recovering these episodes, if they are still in existence:

1. 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 machine
2. The episodes were recorded off-air during their original UK broadcasts by having a 8 mm or 16mm camera pointed at the television screen
3. 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 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.https://twitter.com/filmisfabulous/status/1846966218999144782?s=46&t=n1ymF6URs9Fk5Zw8aOt81Ahttps://twitter.com/filmisfabulous/status/1846966221880881196?s=46&t=n1ymF6URs9Fk5Zw8aOt81A

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 of 1975. This second version is still extant.

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 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) to have all of its 1970s episodes exist as masters or telerecordings, while other series such as Z-Cars and Dixon of Dock Green are missing episodes from as late as 1975.{{cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt/missing/zcars.shtml|title=Z Cars|publisher=BBC|access-date=18 April 2007|archive-date=24 February 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070224133427/http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt/missing/zcars.shtml|url-status=live}}{{cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt/missing/dixon.shtml|title=Dixon of Dock Green|publisher=BBC|access-date=18 April 2007|archive-date=24 May 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100524123025/https://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt/missing/dixon.shtml|url-status=live}}

{{multiple image

| align = right

| direction = vertical

| width = 250

| header = Episode restoration and recreation

| image1 = Original film frame from "Dad's Army" split-screened with colour.jpg

| alt1 = Room at the Bottom colour restoration

| caption1 = "Room at the Bottom" – to the left is the 16 mm black and white copy; to the right is the restored colour version.

| image2 = A Stripe for Frazer - animated.jpg

| alt2 = A Stripe for Frazer animation

| caption2 = "A Stripe for Frazer" – a scene from the animated episode

| image3 = Dad's Army lost episodes cast.jpg

| alt3 = The Lost Episodes cast

| caption3 = Kevin McNally as Captain Mainwaring and Robert Bathurst as Sergeant Wilson in Dad's Army: The Lost Episodes

}}

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.{{cite web |url=https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/dec/11/digital-video-restoration-dad-s-army |title=Unscrambling an army of colours |last=Norton |first=Charles |date=11 December 2008 |website=The Guardian |access-date=17 April 2019 }} The new colour copy was officially adopted as the BBC's archive copy,Re-Colouring the Past, Radio Times, 13–19 December 2008, pages 24–25 and "Room at the Bottom" was broadcast in colour for the first time in almost forty years on 13 December 2008.{{cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/12_december/09/dadsarmy.shtml |title=Press Office – Dad's Army episode to be seen in colour |publisher=BBC |access-date=21 July 2012}}

Although not a deliberate attempt to restore lost material, the "Cornish Floral Dance" was also performed at the Royal Variety Performance of 1975. This second version is still extant.

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.{{cite web|url=http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-01-07/lost-dads-army-episode-to-be-released-as-an-animation |title='Lost' Dad's Army episode to be released as an animation |publisher=Radio Times |date=2016-01-07 |access-date=2016-01-07}}https://store.bbc.com/a-stripe-for-frazer{{Dead link|date=July 2019 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}

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.{{cite web|last1=Bowles|first1=Chris|title=Dad's Army Animation / Release day|url=https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dads-army-animation-chris-bowles-6101335626274078720|publisher=LinkedIn|access-date=5 October 2016|date=5 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 announced that it had produced animated versions of the remaining missing episodes for broadcast on its Gold channel alongside "A Stripe for Frazer". These were produced using the same production team that was originally assembled for "A Stripe for Frazer".{{cite web|last1=Godfrey|first1=Jake|title=Dad's Army: Animated versions of missing episodes to air on GOLD|url=https://filmstories.co.uk/news/dads-army-animated-versions-of-missing-episodes-to-air-on-gold/|publisher=Film Stories|access-date=12 November 2023|date=11 October 2023}} 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.{{cite web|last1=Elliott|first1=Dave|title=UKTV Gold sets November date to air 'Dad's Army: The Animations' |url=https://www.geektown.co.uk/2023/10/19/uktv-gold-sets-november-premiere-date-for-dads-army-the-animations/|publisher=Geektown|access-date=12 November 2023|date=19 October 2023}} 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 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".{{cite web|last1=|first1=|title=Dad's Army Radio Show - About |url=https://www.dadsarmyradioshow.co.uk/about/|publisher=Dad's Army Radio Show|access-date=12 November 2023|date=21 July 2019}}{{cite web|last1=|first1=|title=Dad's Army The Animations - Cast and Crew |url=https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/dads-army-the-animations/cast_crew/|publisher=British Comedy Guide|access-date=12 November 2023|date=}}

In 2018, UKTV announced plans to recreate the three missing episodes for broadcast on its Gold 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.{{cite web |url=https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2018-10-03/dads-army-lost-episodes-remade-new-cast-uktv/ |title=Lost episodes of Dad's Army to be remade with a new cast |last=Braxton |first=Mark |date=3 October 2018 |website=Radio Times |access-date=7 November 2018 }} Kevin McNally and Robert Bathurst were the initial casting announcements as Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson,{{cite web |url=https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/news/5097/dads_army_2019_cast/ |title=Kevin McNally and Robert Bathurst to star in new Dad's Army |author= |date=9 November 2018 |website=comedy.co.uk |access-date=9 November 2018 }} with Bernard Cribbins portraying Private Godfrey.{{cite journal |url=https://www.theoldie.co.uk/blog/bernard-cribbins-the-new-private-godfrey |title=Bernard Cribbins, the new Private Godfrey |journal=The Oldie |date=12 November 2018 |access-date=13 November 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190329134926/https://www.theoldie.co.uk/blog/bernard-cribbins-the-new-private-godfrey |archive-date=29 March 2019 |url-status=dead }} The full cast was announced in January 2019, with McNally, Bathurst and Cribbins joined by Kevin Eldon, Mathew Horne, David Hayman and Tom Rosenthal.{{cite web |url=https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/news/5162/dads_army_lost_episodes_cast/ |title=Cast revealed for Dad's Army: The Lost Episodes |author= |date=16 January 2019 |website=comedy.co.uk |access-date=1 March 2019 }} However, Bernard Cribbins subsequently withdrew from the project, and was replaced as Godfrey by Timothy West.{{cite web |url=https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/news/5214/bernard_cribbins_exits_dads_army_remake/ |title=Timothy West replaces Bernard Cribbins in Dad's Army remakes

|author= |date=19 February 2019 |website=comedy.co.uk |access-date=2 March 2019 }} The recreated episodes were shown in August 2019{{Cite tweet|number=1141614363201159169|title=Don't panic! Not long now... #DadsArmy: The Lost Episodes starring @exkevinmcnally, @RobertBathurst, @ItsKevinEldon, David Hayman, Timothy West, @rosentweets and @mfhorne will transmit this August only on Gold.pic.twitter.com/n0jVv9dGwZ|last=Gold|date=2019-06-20|user=goldchannel|language=en|access-date=2019-06-24}} 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.{{Cite web|url=https://yesterday.uktv.co.uk/shows/dads-army-lost-episodes/|title = Dad's Army Lost Episodes | Yesterday Channel}}

{{Episode table |background=#bdb76b |overall=5 |aux1=5|title=5 |aux1T=Original series number|aux2=5 |aux3T=Recorded date |airdate=5 |aux3=5 |aux2T=Original episode airdate | total_width=80 |episodes=

{{Episode list

| EpisodeNumber = 1

| Aux1 = 2.3

| Title = The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker

| RTitle =

| Aux3 = {{Start date|df=yes|2019|03|01}}{{cite web |url=https://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2019/02/19/42354/bernard_cribbins_leaves_dads_army_remake |title=Bernard Cribbins leaves Dad's Army remake |author= |date=19 February 2019 |website=chortle.co.uk |access-date=28 March 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190219185012/https://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2019/02/19/42354/bernard_cribbins_leaves_dads_army_remake |archive-date=19 February 2019 |url-status=live }}

| OriginalAirDate = {{Start date|2019|8|25|df=y}}

| Aux2 = 15 March 1969

| ShortSummary = Walker is called up into the army. The platoon, anxious at how they will obtain off-the-ration supplies without him, fight to keep him.

| LineColor = #bdb76b

}}

{{Episode list

| EpisodeNumber = 2

| Aux1 = 2.5

| Title = A Stripe for Frazer

| RTitle =

| Aux3 = {{Start date|df=yes|2019|03|08}}

| OriginalAirDate = {{Start date|2019|8|26|df=y}}

| Aux2 = 29 March 1969

| ShortSummary = Mainwaring has the opportunity to promote someone to corporal. Rather than promote Jones, he tests who has the greatest potential by temporarily promoting Private Frazer to lance corporal. Frazer's increasingly dictatorial manner soon alienates the platoon.

| LineColor = #bdb76b

}}

{{Episode list

| EpisodeNumber = 3

| Aux1 = 2.6

| Title = Under Fire

| RTitle =

| Aux3 = {{Start date|df=yes|2019|03|15}}

| OriginalAirDate = {{Start date|2019|8|27|df=y}}

| Aux2 = 5 April 1969

| ShortSummary = When Frazer spots what he believes to be a German spy signalling planes, the platoon arrests a suspect who protests that he is a naturalised Englishman.

| LineColor = #bdb76b

}}

}}

• Kevin McNally – Captain Mainwaring
• Robert Bathurst – Sergeant Wilson
• Kevin Eldon – Lance Corporal Jones
• David Hayman – Private Frazer
• Mathew Horne – Private Walker
• Timothy West – Private Godfrey
• Tom Rosenthal – Private Pike

• Dad's Army: Missing Presumed Wiped (2001) – a 30-minute documentary about episode recoveries and restoration.{{cite web|title=Dad's Army: the Lost Episodes|date=28 December 2001 |url=http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/b90bae579d56483e83810b13c8566d76|publisher=BBC Genome|access-date=6 October 2016}}
• Time Shift – Missing Believed Wiped (2003) – a general documentary about archive television, featuring some clips and discussions about Dad's Army.{{cite web |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/11_november/25/digital_christmas.shtml |title=Have A Very Merry Digital Christmas!|publisher=BBC|access-date=12 January 2012}}

The following is a list of overseas broadcasters who purchased the second series of Dad's Army.

• Wiping
• BBC Archive Treasure Hunt
• Missing Believed Wiped
• Doctor Who missing episodes

{{Notelist|refs=

{{efn|name=a|Renamed as "Poles Apart" for the animated version broadcast by UKTV Gold in November 2023.}}

{{efn|name=b|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).}}

}}

{{Reflist}}

• [https://web.archive.org/web/20131112215719/http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt/missing/dadsarmy.shtml BBC Missing episode list ]
• [https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/c0bd7edb-5be3-4d4f-b36d-7ab6d91e22ef A Stripe For Frazer: Animating the lost episode of Dad's Army at BBC Blogs]
• {{IMDb title|10181132|Dad's Army: The Lost Episodes}}
• {{British Comedy Guide|tv|dads_army_lost_episodes|Dad's Army – The Lost Episodes}}
• {{British Comedy Guide|tv|dads_army_the_animations|Dad's Army - The Animations}}
• {{IMDb title|5420292|Dad's Army: A Stripe for Frazer (animated episode)}}
• {{British Comedy Guide|online|dads_army_a_stripe_for_frazer|Dad's Army: A Stripe for Frazer (animated)}}

{{Dad's Army}}

Category:Dad's Army