There is a resurrection the machines could now perform, and almost nobody has asked them to attempt it.

Artificial intelligence has reached the point where a degraded archive can be lifted into clarity: grainy tape upscaled, a lost voice rebuilt from a handful of recordings, a vanished performer restored to something close to life. We use this power to colourise old footage and to make the dead sing in advertisements. We could, with no great difficulty, bring back the Dick Emery Show.

For eighteen years, between 1963 and 1981, Emery drew something near seventeen million viewers a week across one hundred and sixty six episodes. He was, alongside Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies, the ratings gold of British Saturday nights. Yet unlike them, he is almost never repeated. His characters survive only as catchphrases whose origins most people have forgotten: Mandy, the peroxide blonde who heard a filthy meaning in every innocent question and answered it with a shove and “Ooh, you are awful — but I like you”; Clarence, gloriously camp, sailing in on “Hello, honky tonks”; the toothy vicar, old Lampwick, College the educated tramp, Hettie the man hungry spinster. A vivid cast of comic grotesques, in the BBC’s own phrase, all played by one man.

The machine can restore the picture. What it cannot restore is the permission.

Emery has been quietly shelved because the present age has judged his work homophobic, racist and sexist, and therefore unshowable. The BBC still repeats Morecambe and Wise; it still repeats the Two Ronnies; Emery it leaves in the vault. This is the real cancellation, and artificial intelligence exposes it cleanly, because it........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)