Raiders of the Lost Archive

ITV is involved in a worldwide search for missing tv shows. Details can be found here

The list of the 50 most wanted shows can be found here

did anyone else see it Yesterday?

It was fun to see Bruce dress a a woman with a scarf around his head and its nice to a 4th episode of Tiswas has been found

There some other information about lost programmes here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt/

http://www.btinternet.com/~m.brown1/homepage.htm

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/tm_method=full%26objectid=18415738%26siteid=94762-name_page.html

with Benny hill, does all his show form the BBC ( apart form the Last service which there wipe) still around?

Not much of it seemed to be 'lost' really, just forgotten. Especially the stuff from the 1990s.

They claimed on this show that some of the clips had never seen the light of day; well that might have been true when they taped the programme, but I had seen two of the clips recently.

"Boomph with Becker" was one. I forget the other.

I didn't see it but apparently Paddy was a bad choice of host...?

I don't rate Paddy at all. His accent was so thick he even confused Bruce Forsythe. Some reference to "bare legs" came across as "burlesque".

I don't quite get why this chappy is doing shows of this type.

I think I must've totally missed the point of this show, because the whole reasoning behind the destruction of old shows and the search for missing material and the wonderful discoveries that have been made seemed to be glossed over in a matter of seconds.

maybe it to high light all the missing episode there don;t have and would love to get back......

and make money off.

Its strange, there have all those TV programmes in the archive But there still don;t show them!

One of the reasons almost all of the Dad's Army episodes survive is due to its producer, David Croft, withholding consent for the tapes to be wiped for re-use after their original transmission.

However, for some reason this didn't happen with series 2 and, as a result, only one episode of that series initially survived. Two of the missing episodes resurfaced a few years ago, and it turned out that they had been copied from the master tapes in order to sell the series abroad. David Croft is still ever-hopeful that the three remaining lost episodes from Series 2 are out there somewhere.

It's also worth noting that as well as these episodes and two of the Christmas sketches being lost, one of the first colour episodes from 1969, Room at the Bottom, exists only in black and white.

Although it appears many of the earlier colour episodes were actually wiped as well, the 1982 showing of 'Something Nasty in the Vault' was apparently from a B/W telerecording. It's only because these episodes were returned from places like Australia and New Zealand on 625-line colour videotape, that the BBC now hold all of the colour episodes in their original format, with the exception of 'Room at the Bottom'.

I just think it was great to see the old regional names and idents on screen again.

Two that I remember seeing were Granada (from the north) and ATV.

Weird programme. I don't think much of it had anything to do with missing episodes, just stuff that had been burried in archives for a long time, or where only part of it exists (like the Parky show where only the rushes of the interviews survive). One or two of the clips were actually from home recordings and the like, but then there was stuff like Boomph with Becker which has been in clips shows, and pretty much exactly the same clips were shown.

I wonder if somebody decided to just send the Tiswas clip in when they'd just bought it off e-bay, or got it in a fan tape-swap? It didn't look like a first generation recording, although it could've been early VHS. The fact that it was cropped and zoomed didn't help though. I also thought they knew all about the stuff on e-bay, so Chris Tarrent's claim that there were only 10 in existence is odd.