Oh hello, the Omnirumour. It's been a while.

TV Despite never having seen a whole episode let alone any of the rest of it, I am aware of the sitcom Dad's Army and its many in-jokes and also how its continued existence as a piece of art runs parallel to Doctor Who in archive terms with episodes being wiped and the hunt being on.

Now we can add animations to that as some of the team responsible for the dvd versions of Who's missing episodes have recreated one of the sitcom's missing episode as a cartoon financed by BBC Store. The About The BBC blog has extensive explanation of how the project came about:

"Animators Zoran Jankovic and later Chris Bowles also joined us and we worked (entirely independently) on a short test animation, using a raw transfer of the tape. I called up the original camera script, and Radio Times historian Ralph Montagu, kindly traced some publicity images for us, that had been taken on the studio floor during the original recording session. We worked from this material over a period of months to story-board our test sequence, whilst discussing hilariously optimistic potential budgets and time-scales (and generally enjoying a luxury of time that we simply wouldn’t have once the project went into production)."

Perhaps for Who fans, the most interesting section is how the animation project was delayed and almost derailed by the discovery of The Web of Fear and Enemy of the World because the secrecy surrounding exactly what Philip Morris had found meant that it was entirely possible it included the very Dad's Army episode they were thinking about animating.  Eventually they had to call Morris and ...

"Into 2014, we still didn’t have an answer to the question of whether any Dad’s Army had been rediscovered as well. Finally, in March 2014, I phoned Philip Morris directly to ask if he was yet in a position to confirm one way or the other. There were perfectly reasonable limitations on what he felt able to talk about with regards to ongoing negotiations with other archives. However, after a short discussion of our situation, he was able to confirm that no Dad’s Army had been found in any form."

My italics. There are ongoing negotiations with other archives. Not about Dad's Army but there are ongoing negotiations with other archives.

Meanwhile the BBC's official account has been posting photos of the television series, one per day with no further information other than a number.  Yesterday it was Marco Polo.

Oh hello, the Omnirumour.  It's been a while.  How we've missed you.