Lost in the archive for over 40 years

On the outskirts of West London lies an important part of Britain's TV history. From the outside it's just a dull, unassuming building - but the inside is packed with entertainment, drama and hundreds of celebrities.

The building houses the archive of ATV. Headed by showbiz mogul Lew Grade, ATV was part of ITV from 1955 until 1981 and was regarded as the "song and dance" station. Its output of programming was huge, including famous shows like Sunday Night at the London Palladium, The Prisoner, The Saint, Edward the Seventh, Jesus of Nazareth and, of course, Crossroads.

After 1981, the ATV archive passed through several owners and was spread about the globe. It's during this time, sadly, that some historically significant programming disappeared - either lost or intentionally wiped. But there are occasional surprises, and the unearthing of the earliest surviving episode of Crossroads is a recent highlight.

Fiona Maxwell, Director of Operations and Servicing at Granada International explains: "Crossroads was a studio-based show, made up in Birmingham on videotape. But a look at our film holdings revealed a few mysterious film cans under 'Crossroads'. As the show is currently being released on web-exlcusive DVDs by Network, the cans were extracted from storage and the films run so that we could see what they were. They turned out to be two lost episodes from 1973, originally made in colour on video and copied onto black and white film for overseas broadcasters who bought the show in the 1970s. There was a third can, labelled only 'BM TR 2096', and this was also laced up and run. Everyone got very excited when the episode started - it's an important snapshot of the earliest days of the soap."

The restoration of now fragile film prints and archaic video tapes onto more modern formats is an ongoing process, and in a collection which runs to tens of thousands of hours of television it's inevitable that other treasures will turn up. Watch this space…