Whatever else 2023 has been, its final months are proving to be quite the boom time for British comedy completists. Last month, ITVX sent shockwaves through the seen-every-episode-of-everything community when it nonchalantly released the whole series of Terry Jones and Michael Palin’s Complete and Utter History of Britain, including four instalments unseen since 1969. Now on Gold we have something not as revelatory but just as enjoyable, in the form of the affectionate compromise that is Dad’s Army: The Animations.
Three episodes of Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s classic sitcom on wartime, all from the second season shown on BBC One in the spring of 1969, suffered the fate of so many important programmes of the era: the BBC wiped the master tapes so it could record something else on them, and no backup film has been found. But they all exist in some form of audio. In 2016, A Stripe for Frazer was recreated by producing an animated approximation of the action, synced to a sound recording made by an amateur archivist. That guy hadn’t been holding his microphone up to his telly when the other two missing episodes were aired, but there is a viable alternative in the form of a 1974 Radio 4 adaptation, featuring most of the core cast. With the same animation team now drawing on the radio show, patched up and brought closer to the TV scripts with the addition of some new vocal performances, the final two pieces of the puzzle have been slotted in, as best anyone can.
