Dad's Army: The Lost Episodes (2002) By Jimmy Perry & David Croft
 
When this book was originally published, five of the six episodes from Series 2 of ‘Dad’s Army’ were missing from the television archives, with only ‘Sgt. Wilson’s Little Secret’ known to exist as moving images. The recovery of ‘Operation Kilt’ and ‘The Battle of Godfrey’s Cottage’ in 2001 brought the list of absentees down to three. Even so, ‘Dad’s Army: The Lost Episodes’ remains an enlightening book, as it includes the television scripts for the still missing ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker’, ‘A Stripe for Frazer’ and ‘Under Fire’.
 
Though radio adaptations of these episodes survive, numerous changes took place to make them work on audio – for example, omitting sight gags such as Captain Mainwaring repeatedly colliding with a plank of wood in ‘A Stripe for Frazer’ and reducing the number of characters in certain scenes by transferring lines from, say, Walker to Frazer in ‘Under Fire’. This book returns us to the original television versions, complete with descriptions of the action and informative historical notes from the writers.
 
Actually, the scripts published herein appear to be slightly earlier versions of the stories than the shows that went out before the viewing public in 1969. Comparisons with the surviving episodes reveal differences in the dialogue. Some of these changes are subtle and may be explained by the actors paraphrasing their lines during recording. There are some larger discrepancies, though, such as the transposition of an entire section of speech from one episode to another, possibly for timing reasons. Unfortunately, we may never know the extent of any alterations that affected the missing episodes.
 
Soft Cover 
160 pages
Good condition