but when producer charles norton was given an old morecambe and wise episode there was a problem.d the british film institute have a look at the film and essentiallyjudged it to be irrecoverable, due to the advanced decomposition and they were, effectively it was going to be thrown out. the pictures inside that film, they're still there, they're still printed on the plastic, but they're all locked inside this permanently fused block of immobile gunk, which, sooner or later, will just rot away to soup. so charles brought the film to queen mary university's dental department to use their x—ray machine to see through the lump of decaying film to be precious pictures within. but now they had another problem. the film was too big to be x—rayed. the only thing you could do would be to cut the film into little pieces and scan one piece at a time. i didn't expect him to say yes to cutting up the film, but given the alternative was watching this just rapidly disintegrate, he said, yeah, let's do it. we were using an infrared laser, it generated a lot of heat, occasionally there were flames