...but still dozens are missing

Two lost episodes of 1960s sitcoms have been rediscovered in private collections. 

They are  Sykes And A… Marriage, first broadcast on February 1, 1961 and an episode of Hugh And I called New Year Resolutions, which aired on January 4, 1964.

Both were missing from the BBC archive, and will now be returned there so they can be digitally copied. 

They were recovered by an organisation called Film is Fabulous! and will be discussed at an event they are staging at Leicester’s De Montfort University  this weekend.  Also recovered was an episode from 1966 oil industry drama Mogul.

Curator John Franklin told the BBC: ‘We really have been so lucky to have found these original films. We are fairly sure they were likely to have been thrown out by the BBC in a clear-out and been saved from the skip before ending up in these private collections.

‘We found them in the collections of people who have sadly passed away and recovered them before they were lost again in house clearances.’

He explained that the episode of Eric Sykes’s comedy was among hundreds of canisters of film recovered from one man's collection in 2022. The discovery means that 32 of the 59 episodes produced remain missing

The other two episodes were  found in the house of a collector who had 150 old projectors.

Hugh And I starred Hugh Lloyd and Terry Scott and ran for 74 episodes and two specials over seven series. But 45 of the episodes are still missing.  A DVD of surviving episodes was released in 2015.

Published: 26 Oct 2023