If the programme you’re searching for falls into one of these categories:

Some Children’s Magazine and Music Shows then we probably don’t have any information on it, so it might be missing, particularly if it was made in 1979 or earlier.

Lastly, don’t forget that we only hold information on British TV programmes, you won’t be able to find any information about programmes made for American or Australian television, for example. Just because we don’t have a listing for your programme doesn’t mean that it isn’t of interest to us. It just means that we don’t have any information about it.

We’ve got details on more than 175,000 different episodes, almost 40,000 of which are not thought to exist in the ‘official’ archives. Now, before you get too depressed by this fact, some of these are really old shows which were made before television programmes were generally recorded at all. We realise it’s very unlikely that these older programmes will exist at all, but there’s always the chance that someone recorded some 8mm film footage of them off their television screen or maybe made a sound recording of them while they were being broadcast. That’s still of interest to us.

However, our main hope is that someone will be able to help us recover some programmes which were recorded, but which are now thought to be lost for ever. That’s what this search engine is for – to help you identify whether that old film print you’ve got in your attic, or that old video recording you made back in the early 1970s is missing from the archives.

You could type in a programme name, or an episode name and click on ‘Search’ and it will give you some summary information whether or not the programme is lost. You don’t have to enter a complete name, entering part of the name – unless it’s very short – should find it too. If some or all of that programme is lost, you can click on the link and get further details. If it’s a music or variety programme you have, you may be able to locate it by typing in the names of one of the main guests and clicking on ‘Search’. This information is far from complete, but it may help you to identify a particular edition.

Our information is good, but it’s not perfect. There will be mistakes in it, and we know it’s incomplete. In particular, information is very patchy on programmes in the some categories. This website only contains information concerning British broadcasts. Happy searching!