Winston Churchill’s funeral in HD on BBC Parliament.

TV This Friday, BBC Parliament will be broadcasting the state funeral of Churchill from the original archive film masters. At the About the BBC blog, James Rowland, Senior Media Manager, BBC Archives describes the restoration process:

"While planning the project the BBC Archives team discovered that a section from the funeral footage, reportedly featuring two buglers inside St Paul’s Cathedral playing The Last Post followed by Reveille, was missing from a transfer that had been made from the print of the original film many years ago. When the team checked the original film they found, to their relief, the missing section of approximately 3 minutes and 35 seconds was safely preserved on the original film. Up until the Eighties it was relatively common, although not permitted, for users of the Archive to physically cut sections out of the film to use in their programmes with urgent deadlines such as current affairs and we think that’s what may have occurred with the print of the funeral which was later transferred to tape and added to the archive holdings."

BBC Parliament isn't in HD on Freeview yet, but fortunately this will be on the iPlayer afterwards which should be.