lost episode of "At Last the 1948 Show" recovered
03/06/2010 03:57 GMT

Posted by lisa

Thanks to Jenny Gibbon for finding this news and jeffers for posting it in the GROK forums:

http://www.comedy.co.uk/news/story/00000316/frankie_howerd_1948_show_missing_believed_wiped/

from the article:
"Dick Fiddy, TV consultant at the BFI, says that a private collector is to thank for the recovery of a missing edition of At Last The 1948 Show (pictured), one of the sketch shows that lead almost directly to the creation of Monty Python's Flying Circus...

...All but two episodes of At Last The 1948 Show were destroyed in the late 1960s - a show now considered very important in British comedy history as its stars included John Cleese, Marty Feldman, Graham Chapman and Tim Brooke-Taylor, all of whom would go on to be huge stars.

Mr Fiddy said: "The 1948 Show episode plugs yet another gap in what has become the most successful rebuilding project of the entire Missing Believed Wiped initiative. Material has come back from Sweden, Australia, industry personnel and private collectors to rebuild the once-thought-lost programme. This latest retrieval is a near-complete episode which can be restored with the help of an existing clip of one of the two missing sketches and an audio recording of the other."

Both items will be shown later this year at a Missing Believed Wiped special event at BFI Southbank."