Monkhouse has treasure of TV past

Bob monkhouse keeps on given even after his death and its believe that he may have copies of many missing shows!

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7774828.stm

I think there could be a gold mine in here, it also state the collection which hes been building since the 1950 also has , Tapes have weather forecasts, continuity girls, trailers for things. Those things are largely missing before about 1980 and that can be quite interesting."

Fascinating Newsnight story about the archive last night. I think it's great how they're managing to turn later black and white shows into colour (i.e. a Dad's Army episode that airs for the first time in colour this Saturday).

I knew Bob Monkhouse liked to keep old stuff. I always remember watching the ITN News at 5.45 where he was walking out of a studio with all of these tapes of his shows. Maybe some of those are what was in his collection?

Thank you Bob!! Fingers crossed that there is an old Doctor Who episode in there.

Old goats like me will remember "colourisation" the first time round - which was pretty ghastly in most cases.

I expect now it looks brilliant.

I love Bob Monkhouse.

This Dads Army programme hasn't been colourised, it's been re-colourised. There is a big difference

The clip shown on Newsnight last night looked quite good, the colours looked better than the ones that didn't lose theirs in the first place

Explain, please.

when it was First shown many years ago it was in colour!

but the BBC wiped the colour master and kept this black and white copy

That's not an explanation you silly billy.

Anyway - I have just read the article and it explains that there was colour information left on the B&W tapes - enough for them to use it to restore.

Now I get it.

There was colour information on the B&W film

Yes, colourisation is colouring films that weren't made in colour. This is putting back the original colour that was lost when the film back up was made.

I assume that the big advantage of Dads Army is that the opening titles have very defined areas of red and blue in them so can be used as a kind of calibration

Yeesh. Now I'm the silly billy.

All very fascinating though.

Int this science stuff wonderful. What a clever idea. As Jimmy Perry said, though, if they dare touch anything like Casablanca or similar, so help me!

Yes, but they wouldn't be able to, because Casablanca was not recorded on video tape, let alone colour PAL video tape. Jimmy is right, but he has misunderstood the technique.