We don’t know who thought it was a good idea to save money by wiping the two-inch mastertapes of hundreds of classic BBC shows then recording new television programmes over the top. But should their identity ever come to light, they might safely be addressed, Captain Mainwaring-style, as: “You stupid boy!”
Alongside half of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Not Only… But Also, many Top of the Pops programmes, 100 episodes of Doctor Who and at least five Dad’s Army episodes were lost thanks to the misguided penny-pinching.
The latter – featuring the hapless Home Guard of Walmington-on-Sea – was originally broadcast between 1968 and 1977, but the wartime sitcom is still enjoyed by millions of fans, more than half a century on.
Now those five missing episodes, never seen since their original transmission, have been recreated using audio recordings by the Dad’s Army cast painstakingly married to hand-drawn cartoons.
Monday night saw the start of a five-part series in which the lost episodes – written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft – returned to our screens as animated specials.
The animations have been synced to the voices of the original actors, including Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier and Clive Dunn.
Dad’s Army: The Animations has been produced by the award-winning team behind recent animated episodes of Doctor Who, comprising – among others – director Charles Norton and celebrated comic book artist Martin Geraghty.
Three of the episodes are from the show’s second series, first broadcast in 1969. The other two are shorter Christmas Night With the Stars specials from 1968 and 1970.
“It wasn’t part of the BBC’s remit to maintain and archive all of its programmes,” explains Norton. “There would be a mastertape broadcast on BBC One. A copy would have been made on to black-and-white film used to broadcast the show overseas. After a few years, the mastertape would be erased and used to record new programmes at which point the only surviving copy was the film recording.
“After colour TV came in, they became less marketable and in the mid-1970s, the BBC had a big clearout.”
While most of the modern-day team worked from home in the UK with occasional meetings at the BBC Studios in London, other team members were beavering away around the globe.
“One of our animators was based in Queensland, Australia, three were in America and one was in Vietnam,” says Norton. “We kept in contact via email and Zoom.”
It took nine months from the first storyboard meeting in Manchester to the delivery of the final animated episodes – and it was a painstaking job for all concerned. “I transcribed the audio for each episode and worked out my shots and editing on the print-outs of those scripts,” Norton explains.
“This produced pretty much the same kind of written camera script that David Croft would have used on the original TV productions. Then, I sat down with our storyboard artist, Adrian Salmon, and went through every shot – sketching things and even acting out the action ourselves.
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“Adrian went away and drew up shots in rough, based on our conversation and my notes on the camera script. These were sometimes revised several times before being finalised for the finished storyboards.”
The animation process started with character designer Martin Geraghty drawing the characters, first in pencil and then in ink before they were scanned.
Meanwhile, other aspects of the production were happening, such as background plates being painted onto watercolour paper before scanning. “When required to draw likenesses of famous and well-loved TV characters,there’s always an element of trepidation,” admits Geraghty.
“Thankfully, I think this cast in particular lend themselves very well to caricature and animation.” The likenesses are good – particularly of Lowe as Mainwaring and a scowling John Laurie as Private Frazer.
When asked which actor was most difficult to draw, Geraghty picks Le Mesurier, who played the languid Sergeant Wilson.
“He’s not as ‘cartoonish’ as the rest of the cast,” he smiles. “The others have very recognisable visual trademarks, whereas John is quite diffident with a laissez-faire demeanour that isn’t easy to capture – although the animators have done a terrific job bringing him to life.”
Of those easier to capture, he chooses Frazer, played by Laurie. “He was great fun to draw, with his wild eyebrows and air of simmering belligerence,” smiles Geraghty.
An integral part of each animated episode is syncing the words to the animation.
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“The bulk of the character animation was completed using Adobe Animate and it’s a case of going through each shot frame-by-frame and getting the right mouth-shape for each sound the character makes,” says Norton. “It’s much faster than if you were doing the whole thing on paper with an animation disc.”
Of all the episodes he worked on, he says that the 1968 Christmas special, Poles Apart, is his favourite. “It’s due to the touching section at the end, where Mainwaring thanks the platoon for their dedication,” he says.
“It’s a nice reminder that, whatever else happens, this is a group of people who genuinely care about each other and would probably be prepared to die for each other. They are friends, first and foremost.”
Geraghty, meanwhile, opts for The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Walker. “It has some great gags in it and offered James Beck, who played Private Walker, a nice central role in the episode.”
But sadly, Beck’s voice does not appear in the animation. This is because, when the cast came to record episodes for Radio 4 in 1973 – which provided some of the audio for the new animations – Beck was too ill to take part and, indeed, died soon afterwards.
He was understudied by an actor with a quite different voice. For the animated version, Norton cast actor David Benson – who has Noel Coward, Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams in his vocal repertoire – to do a pitch-perfect impersonation.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Walker was among Jimmy Perry’s favourite episodes, too
He once explained to me: “When it came to dreaming up ideas for all the episodes, we often focused on issues which affected society during the war, such as rationing. We were all in the same boat.
“Other times, we chose subjects which affected us. “This is a lovely episode in which Walker discovers he’s got an allergy to corned beef.
“It was partly based on the fact that I was allergic to mustard pickle. If I ate it, I’d
swell up and have to be taken to sick bay. They didn’t know a lot about allergies in those days…”
- Dad’s Army: The Animations is on Mondays on Gold at 8pm. Dad’s Army: The Missing Episodes DVD will be released on November 27
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