‘Junking’: how a generation of TV comedy classics was lost forever

Do you know the Morecambe and Wise sketch about a toy dog that shoots nerve gas out of its bottom? Chances are you don’t – because practically no one’s ever seen it. The sketch was broadcast in 1970 as part of the first episode of The Morecambe & Wise Show. It was never repeated, and the BBC wiped the master recording some time in the 1970s. 

Last year, however, Eric Morecambe’s son Gary chanced upon an old film can in the attic. And now, one of the most fabled “lost” episodes in British television will finally be shown again, as part of Morecambe & Wise: The Lost Episode, this Wednesday on ITV.   

You don’t have to be a Morecambe & Wise fan to be mildly surprised that a primetime recording of one of the greatest double acts in TV history had just disappeared. But the truth is that there are reels and reels of classic TV footage that have somehow vanished.  

Chris Perry is CEO of Kaleidoscope, a Birmingham-based company that specialises in finding lost gems. “It is rare that you find missing Morecambe & Wise,” he says, “Because there’s not actually that much of it missing. This is the most high-profile one that was wiped.”   

But there is plenty else that’s missing that people would love to see: the vast majority of Multicoloured Swap Shop, which ran from 1976–82 and launched the careers of Keith Chegwin and Maggie Philbin, is gone. Very little of Juke Box Jury survives, including a 1963 edition in which The Beatles appeared as the four panellists (they failed to predict all four records that would make the hit parade). Many performances on Top of the Pops from the 1960s and 1970s are lost as well as much canonical comedy including Hancock’s Half Hour; and plays from such celebrated strands as The Wednesday Play and Armchair Theatre, including work by JB Priestley, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn.   

The reasons for so much of what’s known as “junking” vary depending on what decade the junking took place. In the 1950s, at the birth of mass-market television, most programmes were broadcast live and could not be recorded, so there was nothing to preserve. When they did start to record output in the early 1960s the medium of choice was two-inch tape. That was bulky to store and very expensive (at £200 a reel then, or nearly £5,000 in today’s money). But the tape could be recorded over. It therefore fell to individual programme producers (who had budgets to meet) to decide which old shows should be deleted.   

The advent of colour, that medium of the future, was the death knell for older monochrome recordings – why keep a tired old black-and-white programme when you could record a shiny new colour one instead? Added to this, union rules (Equity, Musicians Union and the Writer’s Guild) only allowed a certain number of transmissions within a certain time period – because it was felt that repeats took away work from their members. There was little incentive, therefore, to store programmes that couldn’t be shown again. Better to wipe and re-use the film stock.   

“The BBC would keep the odd example of really important things,” says Perry. “Such as, say, opera from Glyndebourne or royal programmes – but in the main, thousands and thousands of what they called ‘normal’ dramas, comedies, light entertainment and so on were just not kept.” According to work conducted by Richard Molesworth, a BBC historian, 60 to 70 per cent of all BBC programming produced between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s ended up being deleted. 

The question is, who decided what was “important” and why? In 1977, Lord Annan published a report on the future of broadcasting. In it, he noted that a whole generation of culturally important programmes were being wiped on the whims of individual producers wanting to save money on their budgets. Following Annan’s recommendations, the BBC appointed its first archive selector, and in 1978 the BBC Film and Videotape Library was created.   

“The archive selector would grade programmes,” says Perry, “from an A, as in very, very culturally important – say, the Royal Wedding – down to E, which was basically Playschool. People thought an E meant it was virtually junk. And that was how it worked for many, many years after that. So despite the fact that programmes were largely kept from 1977 onwards, because of this grading system a lot of the lower graded stuff like the Playschools of this world ended up getting junked in the 80s and 90s. People didn’t believe they were important.”   

According to the BFI’s 2018 report, ‘Missing, Believed Wiped’, most junking took place between 1972–8, but a further round was conducted in 1993, and another between 2004 and 2007. In 2008 it was discovered that the entire British Satellite Broadcasting archive from 1990 (and the early output of Sky from 1985–1992) had been wiped or never recorded. 

Even more recently, in 2017, it was confirmed that the vast majority of the output from TVS (1982–1992) had been wiped by its US owners, the Disney Corporation, in 2010. As with the BBC, commercial broadcasters had only been keeping material they considered to be important – and once again, what was deemed important was a subjective judgement, not an archival or historical one.   

The good news is that even as broadcasters persisted in destroying their own programmes, people at home have been inadvertently doing the archiving for them. The advent of home video machines in the late 1960s, and the eventual ubiquity of VHS recorders in every living room, mean that there is a national TV archive out there.  

So if you have a film reel or two gathering dust in the attic, or even a pile of VHSs propping up a sidetable, take a closer look. They won’t be worth much to you, but to that Doctor Who completist or diehard Morecambe & Wise fan, you might well bring them some sunshine.     

Morecambe and Wise: The Lost Episode is on ITV on Wednesday at 9pm

Five lost televisual gems   

Doctor Who   

Many episodes from the programme’s first six years are missing, including the episode in which William Hartnell regenerates into Patrick Troughton.    

The Avengers   

Before it became a campy 1960s caper, this was a more sober affair featuring Ian Hendry. Most of these episodes were junked.

The Likely Lads 

Many episodes of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’s first sitcom no longer exist, although two were recently recovered from a private collection.     

David Frost’s Moon Party 

ITV’s coverage of the Moon Landing combined light entertainment with more serious discussion. The cast list included Peter Cook, AJP Taylor and Lulu.

Dad’s Army   

The first series of Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s classic sold poorly overseas and thus the BBC made very few film copies of series two. Half are missing.