Only surviving episode of His Lordship Entertains

The only surviving episode of a 1972 Ronnie Barker sitcom is finally seeing the light of day.

BBC executives wiped the tapes of His Lordship Entertains after it was aired, either to reuse or to save storage space.

However, after archivists sent out an appeal for the missing footage 15 years ago, a black-and-white film recording of the first episode was unearthed in New Zealand.

New technology has allowed the programme to be restored and coloured, and it will now be released on DVD next month.

 It features Barker's character Lord Rustless turning his stately home into a hotel, and co-stars frequent collaborator David Jason as the 100-year-old gardener Dithers.

Barker wrote all the scripts under the pseudonym Jonathan Cobbald and referred to the show as ‘Fawlty Towers mark one’, as it aired three years before the John Cleese and Connie Booth classic.

The recovered episode is entitled The Food Inspector and was found during ITV's Raiders of the Lost Archives, campaign in 2007 - but the broadcaster declined to accept the material as it was a BBC show.

Archivists at Kaleidoscope, which specialises in recovering lost TV shows, accepted and the print was shipped to the BBC and transferred.

The new colour master, cleaned up by restorer Jonathan Coley, was screened at the BFI's annual Missing Believed Wiped event in November last year.

It can now be ordered on DVD here, priced £19.99. The black-and-white version has been posted to YouTube.

The other six episodes, which originally aired on BBC Two, remain missing. Lord Rustless also appeared in the ITV series, Hark Art Barker, pictured, which aired on ITV three years earlier and is available on the compilation DVD The Ronnie Barker Collection.

Published: 5 Apr 2022