Recovering Morecambe and Wise

A regular TV tradition at this time of year is the repeat of the Morecambe and Wise Christmas specials and 2017 is no exception - there is even a special BBC FOUR drama about the pair on air this evening too.

We thought readers might enjoy a good tale of some work we're involved with - to recover an episode of the comedy duo's TV series that was previously considered 'lost'. It involves some pretty advanced tech development work - a 'diseased' film, a trip to Nigeria, dentistry, lasers, X-ray tomography, algorithms and some goo...

| see here …….. | RD on BBC.CO.UK | 30-Dec-2017 @ 19:59 |

Amazing what technology can do these days, who'd have thought it would be possible to scan film reels without needing to unravel them? That's very Tomorrow's World, that is. Excellent idea.

Amazing story. And maybe the technology could be used on other projects too?

Here's the full thing:

pt 1 (Charles Norton) - http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-film-archive-restoration
pt 2 (Dr Graham Davis) - http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-xray-microtomography
pt 3 (Adam Wiewiorka) - http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-film-recovery-processing-algorithm

They can definitely claim to be the kings of TV geekdom now!

That has blown my mind.

Amazing the processes that this film has gone through.
Some very clever people involved here.
I just hope the BBC lawyers are not now going after RKTV!

"At one point, the laser caused a loose bit of film to catch fire...." 😬
X-ray and lasers come into play to help restore an episode of Morecambe and Wise's tv show. Read the latest in our series: https://t.co/fAjQiQikJx pic.twitter.com/p0wgDsnbAX

— BBC Research & Development (@BBCRD) December 30, 2017

A discussion on the Steve Hoffman forums includes this:

I watched a short piece about this story from Click on the NC over the weekend.

I thought it was an amazing effort that these guys did such an incredible amount of work to attempt getting the film reel back together in one piece. It would have been a very sad day if that film reel was completely destroyed & never seeing the light of day again. This story tells us that other archived video that was 'lost' from the past is a very likely candidate for immediate restoration by being kept on digital servers so that future generations will be taught about the history of recovering impossibly restored broadcast media stored from the British Archives. This task has made all the good because of great improvements in the technology used in this process. It can in some ways give us incredible ways of restoring media that was impossible from years gone by.

Well done to all of the people involved in doing this incredible work. Kudos to them all.

Yes, a short clip is available (not quite 30 seconds) to watch online:

- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-43118475/morecambe-and-wise-rescuing-a-lost-film




YouTube version, and another write-up, on QMUL's website

- https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2018/smd/dentistry-x-rays-and-morecambe-and-wise.html

Even this, I fear, won’t aid in the recovery of the missing TVS archive....

*i’ll get my coat*