A lost TV artifact has been rediscovered. The British channel ITV has recovered a comedy that served as the precursor to the beloved series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, per British Comedy Guide. It dug up The Complete and Utter History of Britain, written by and starring Monty Python’s Michael Palin and Terry Jones. The six-part series aired in January and February 1969. The famous sketch comedy premiered just eight months later in October. Previously, only the first two episodes were believed to have survived the ravages of time, making it onto DVD and Blu-ray in 2014. ITV managed to recover every single episode of the series.
“It was found by the ITV Archive team as part of a huge project to fully identify every archive asset ITV holds,” the channel told British Comedy Guide on October 2. “The series had been sitting in the ITV vaults though mis-catalogued for decades, but through the identification programme we were able to make this remarkable find. We flagged it to our colleagues in streaming, had the film cleaned and restored from the 16-mm. telerecordings and then finally made available to our viewers for the first time since the original broadcasts.” All six episodes are now streaming on ITV Premium.
