Morecambe and Wise lost episodes restored and released for first time

By Lauren Morris

Published: Tuesday, 03 May 2022 at 12:00 am

The first episodes of The Morecambe and Wise Show, which were previously thought to have been lost, have been restored, BBC Studios has announced.

Originally broadcast on BBC Two in 1968, the episodes are from the show’s first run and will be available to watch as part of Morecambe and Wise: The Lost Tapes DVD, set for release in June.

The eight lost episodes, which featured guest appearances from Sir Bruce Forsyth and Matt Monro, were never archived at the time of their broadcast and were disposed of in the 1970s to make space in the BBC’s archives.

However, film copies of four episodes and audio copies of the others were found after years of research and restoration.

“All episodes have undergone extensive sound and picture restoration, with ‘colour recovery’ software having been used to restore all bar one of the episodes to their original full colour for the first time since they were originally screened by BBC Two in 1968,” the BBC has said.

After a seven-year-long restoration project by the BBC and Queen Mary University in London, images from badly decayed film, rediscovered in a West African film vault, were recovered from one of the episodes.

All eight episodes will be released in DVD form, along with a previously lost one-off special from October 1970 and never-before-released special features, including an original trailer, interviews from the 1960s and deleted scenes.