Our Post Production team graded a lost episode of Dad's Army, Room at the Bottom, which has not been transmitted in colour since 1969. In the 30 minute episode, Sergeant Wilson is told that Captain Mainwaring is not actually a Captain, so his pips are removed and he’s demoted to the rank of private, alongside the likes of Pike.

The original episode was recorded in colour on videotape and a black and white 16mm film copy was made for sales purposes. The colour master was discarded in the 1970s, when it was common to erase tape material to save space and money. However, the black and white 16mm film recording of the programme was retained, which our Post Production team helped restore to colour.

The black and white film recording contained a fine dot patterning, which correlated with the colour from the original video signal. Until very recently, this patterning was simply looked upon as an unfortunate bi-product. However, James Insell, of BBC Information and Archives, through the external ‘Colour Recovery Working Group’, led on a pioneering project to establish the means of decoding the dots to retrieve the colour information necessary to create a true colour version. Group member Richard Russell, formally of BBC Research and Development, cracked the code and created colour recovery software, which analysed the information locked in the dot pattern and successfully extracted the colour hues and intensities. This new technique will enable the colour restoration of a wide range of further footage from this period, which was originally recorded in colour but where only 16mm black and white film versions now remain.

For Room at the Bottom, the 16mm film was transferred to HD and the HD data analysed by the new colour recovery software. The material was put onto tape and then graded by Post Production Colourist Jonathan Wood, on Pogle.

Jonathan says, “The film weave and grain meant that the recovered colours were not completely stable, which gave us problems with colour fluctuations. In the initial grade we reduced some of these problems with Pogle and the use of noise reduction (DVNR).”

The episode was then sent to SVS who carried out a manual frame-by-frame restoration to improve the picture quality further, before returning to our Post Production team for a final grade, making small adjustments to the colours, hues and skin tones to bring out the best in the material.

"The exterior scene two thirds of the way through the episode, shot on location on 35mm film, has come out brilliantly through the restoration process, " adds Jonathan. "There is a moment when Lance Corporal Jones steps on an ants nest and the results from a colour perspective are especially convincing."

Room at the Bottom is from the third series of Dad's Army, which was the first series to be recorded in colour. Several episodes from the series had been lost, however colour copies were found for most episodes in Australia. Room at the Bottom is the only episode from the series which had not been available in colour until now.

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