We watched the first M&W episode last night. It was introduced by Michael Aspel and Philip Morris. They mentioned the recovery of the episodes and they had a look at the unrestored version of this one. Some of it looked in terrible condition which backed up my memory of what I'd heard rather than the Independent's perfect condition story. Sure enough the colour was very bad throughout. It had a general washed out look. Skin tones varied from blue to "I'm about to have a heart attack" bright red. I still wasn't very well yesterday which wouldn't have helped me getting into it but the colour was very distracting. It took me quite a while before I started laughing on a regular basis.
I'm sure I read somewhere that this was the first time these episodes have been repeated but they seemed familiar to me but I don't think we had BBC2 back then. Maybe M&W reused the same material later on. They did that often as I recall.
Bri