An Amazing Rediscovery of Lost British TV

Most of the earliest examples of British television are lost forever. From the first regular broadcasts in November 1936, transmissions were almost entirely live, and only a tiny few were ever captured on film. Later, film and videotape would replace much live broadcasting, particularly in drama and comedy. But even these recordings were not safe from extinction. Videotape, in particular, was expensive and took up storage space, and from around the early 1970s, broadcasters, seeing no immediate value in certain types of programmes, began to wipe the recordings in order to reuse or dispose of the stock. As a result, there are now huge gaps in our record of British TV history.

But even now, some of those losses can still be restored. For the past 17 years, the BFI, in association with the BBC, ITV, and the classic TV fans' organisation Kaleidoscope, has been running Missing Believed Wiped, a campaign to locate and recover television programmes from the 1950s, 60s and 70s which are known to be missing from the public and broadcasting archives. Many well-loved and significant titles were discarded or wiped in the years before the current archival safeguards were put into place, but lost titles can still sometimes be uncovered at overseas TV stations and archives, in the possession of those involved in the productions or with private collectors.

Missing Believed Wiped has been able to celebrate a number of notable successes over the years: the two lost series of Steptoe and Son restored by the BFI from copies kept by writers Galton and Simpson; the BBC's recovery of two missing Dad's Army episodes from a collector; a lost Dennis Potter play uncovered at LWT. But the collection recently uncovered at the Library of Congress in Washington DC surpasses everything else in scale, quality and vintage: it comprises more than 60 classic dramas originally transmitted on BBC or ITV from 1957 to 1969 - well over 100 hours of material.

These titles formed part of a collection of over 20,000 items donated to the Library of Congress by US National Educational Television (the forerunner of the Public Broadcasting Service, which replaced it at the end of the 1960s), through its flagship channel WNET/Thirteen, New York. Then, as now, British productions of literary classics were seen as the acme of 'quality' television, and imported for transmission by WNET. Fortunately, they were also retained and handed over to the Library of Congress, where they remained uncatalogued until a researcher looking for productions of Shakespeare recently found some of them and noted the presence of others. Later, browsing the Kaleidoscope website, he noticed that many titles he remembered were listed as missing - and the process of identifying the collection was underway.

Thanks to unprecedented co-operation between the BFI National Archive and the Library of Congress's Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia, digital copies are now being made from the original tapes and films and sent to the BFI. Most of the programmes are television versions of stage productions or literary adaptations, though there are also some contemporary dramas, such as Auto Stop, a 1965 Wednesday Play starring David Hemmings. Many major stars of British stage and screen are featured, among them Sean Connery and Dorothy Tutin in a 1960 adaptation of Jean Anouilh's Colombe (pictured), Maggie Smith and Derek Jacobi in the National Theatre production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and a 17-year-old Jane Asher as Juliet in a 1962 ITV Schools Television production of Romeo and Juliet (see the full list of programmes).

The BFI will showcase some extracts from the collection at its annual Missing Believed Wiped screening at BFI Southbank on 7 November. After that, we hope that the programmes will also be seen and enjoyed once again through further public screenings, in the six BFI Mediatheques and on BFI Screenonline. The programmes will also be available to the broadcasters and rightsholders for possible re-transmission or DVD release

Steve Bryant
Senior Curator of Television, BFI National Archive