The soundtracks to six lost episodes of the great comedy series Hancock’s Half Hour have been restored to the BBC archives after half a century thanks to the efforts of a bootlegger. They are thought to be the earliest examples of a DIY audio recording made directly from a television broadcast. (Click here to download an extract from The Flight Of The Red Shadow)

Bootlegs made by enthusiasts in their living rooms with a microphone held in front of the screen, or rarely — and dangerously — with a wire soldered to the back of the TV set, have proved an essential resource for recovering cherished programmes of the pre-video era including episodes of Dad’s Army and Doctor Who.

But thousands of hours of plays, comedy and variety performances are still missing either because they were not recorded when they were broadcast or because the archive copy that was made was wiped.

Hancock’s Half Hour, which starred Tony Hancock as a stoically miserable everyman from the fictional suburb of East Cheam, is among the biggest casualties. Twenty-six early episodes, including all the first series, are listed as missing.

Times Archive, 1959: Tony Hancock team

Alan Simpson and Ray Galton on how to write television comedy

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The series, which began on radio in 1954 and moved to TV in 1956, was written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who later created Steptoe and Son. It made Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques — as well as Hancock — comedy stars.

The BBC will release four of the rediscovered soundtracks as CDs and downloads this year. The sound quality on the two remaining episodes is so poor that it is not certain that they will be made available.

The tapes had circulated among a few Hancock aficionados for some time but were returned to the BBC only last winter with the help of The Hancock Appreciation Society.

All six are from the programme’s fourth series and were transmitted live from the BBC’s Riverside Studios in West London in early 1959. Today the best known Hancock episodes, including The Blood Donor, in which Hancock protests that giving a pint of blood is “very nearly an armful”, are from the seventh and final series.

“Nobody really thought that these things had a life after the immediate,” Simpson said. “It never even occurred to us that 50 years later there would be people wanting to buy them. We just wrote them for there and then.”

Galton said that it would be a great pleasure to hear the episodes again.

One of them, The Wrong Man, lampoons the Hitchcock film of that name. In another, Hancock and James enter a beauty contest, and in The Flight of the Red Shadow Hancock tries to pass himself off as the Maharaja of Renjipur to escape from disgruntled members of the East Cheam Repertory Company. There are cameo appearances from Warren Mitchell and Rolf Harris.

Steve Crickmer, of BBC Audiobooks, said that the episodes were “so strong that they transcend any difficulties from not having a visual”.

Hancock’s Half Hour suffered from the dismissivemess in the 1950s towards television. Only at the end of the decade did the BFI set up a committee to identify programmes that might be suitable for its archive. A BFI spokesman said: “Very few people gave TV a second thought. It was considered vastly inferior to film or any other artform.”

Videotape was so expensive that master-tapes were re-used. Even if a BBC programme did survive it was likely to be destroyed when storage became a problem in the 1970s.

The turning-point came with the establishment of the BBC television archive in 1978 and the arrival of video, DVD, satellite and digital television and the internet, which created a commercial motive for conserving and repackaging classic television. In the past 20 years the BBC, ITV and the BFI have all sought to recover lost material.

Stone me ...

•The radio hit Hancock’s Half Hour moved to television in 1956 as part of the BBC’s fightback in the ratings war against ITV.

•It remains one of the most influential BBC programmes.

•At the time television comedy was mired in the sketch-based tradition of the music hall. Hancock’s writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, replaced that with a narrative structure, character and situation-based humour and naturalistic dialogue.

•Their lead character was an exaggeration of the real Anthony John Hancock. Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock was a pompous misfit living in the unglamorous 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam •Episodes revolved around his daily frustrations, misunderstandings and ineffectual outbursts.

•The show established Hancock as the most prominent figure in British comedy, but he proved unable to handle the success. A warning of his self-destructive streak came when he fled to Rome during the recording of the second radio series and was replaced by Harry Secombe for three episodes.

•By the end of the sixth series of the television show in 1960 Hancock had become so jealous of the popularity of Sid James, his rogueish man-on-the-street foil, that he had him written out of the show.

•After a seventh series on BBC in 1961 he sacked his writing team and moved to ITV but his 1963 show there was a flop.

•Struggling with depression, Hancock began to drink more heavily. He took his own life in Australia in 1968.

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