I kind of found some of the “lost” Geoffrey Whitehead episodes today

Sharing this here because tbh I'm just very glad I've managed to pull this off and have no one to tell about it elsewhere
Here's a bit of context: Some months ago (I believe in mid january of this year) I started and “finished” watching Sheldon Reynolds 1979 sherlock holmes adaptation titled “Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson” and despite it being a very old, low budget, forgotten and honestly not that good of a show I was instantly fascinated by it.
I'm not sure exactly what has made me latch on to this show so much specifically. I guess its the fact that I really like the dynamics between the characters and Geoffrey Whitehead and Donald Pickering's version of Holmes and Watson and that I am a really big fan of the 1954 show that it's based on. I realized only after getting to the last episode that the youtube playlist I was watching was missing 6 and a half episodes. So I thought “Okay, I'll just search them up in other video based social media I guess”. I managed to find one posted in a completely different YouTube channel and two others posted in Dailymotion (much to my annoyance because I really hate that site). Absolutely NO sign of the other 4 anywhere though. I searched far and wide. I went through old tv shows archives, the internet archive, multiple youtube channels that had posted some of the other episodes, a shitload of piracy and torrent sites … to find absolutely nothing.

This went on for months. I was genuinely pissed off (and still am tbh) because apparently all of the episodes WERE available on youtube for everyone to watch up until some months before I decided to watch it. Apparently only one channel had all of them up and absolutely no one thought “Hey maybe we should archive this somewhere else in case this guy decides to private all of his youtube videos out of nowhere. Considering this is an almost 50 year old show which is INCREDIBLY hard to find DVD copies of and all” and the guy did in fact private all of his youtube videos out of nowhere so there's now 4 episodes that are completely missing.
Needless to say, I was mad and I kind of get really really stubborn when something pisses me off, so I decided I HAD to find these somehow and that there's no way they are not uploaded somewhere. It got me thinking: This show is actually a british/polish co-production, which means that there's a pretty high chance that polish subtitled or dubbed versions of the DVDs were distributed. I don't even know how it didn't occur to me at any given point in the last 3 or so months since this search started but today I decided to just… look for the episode names in polish. Sure enough, after digging through the results in a language I don't understand a single word of, I managed to find on the second page of google results a polish video social media service called CDA that had, in fact, one of the first episodes of the show uploaded.

All of this was happening on my phone at 3:30am and I swear I dont think ive ever jumped out of my bed and turned my pc on faster in my entire life. I was thinking to myself “I really should not get excited. It probably won't work. I've been having absolutely ass luck with this search, there's no way I found it on a random monday at 3 and a half in the morning". But sure enough…… all of the episodes were there.
There were some catches before I actually managed to watch the videos though: when I first wanted to play one of the lost episodes it automatically gave me a 404 error. I felt like crying a bit. Then I realized I have like 45 different firefox extensions that are probably blocking the video from playing on this somewhat dodgy polish video site. So I tried on Google Chrome and had no issue. The other catch however was that, since it is a polish site after all, all of the episodes have this REALLY BAD dubbing that's directly on top of the english voices so you're kind of hearing both at once. And they don't have any subtitles whatsoever.

I am still OVERJOYED with this discovery. I don't think I can put it into words. I had to tinker around with a google chrome extension that listens to the output audio of your computer (I had to install some audio drivers for this to work and it took like 20 minutes to set them up) and it automatically puts it through Google (?) translate so that you can somewhat understand what they're saying. It's very wonky and I had to pause multiple times so that the sentences that the characters were saying in the show didn't get all jumbled up and mixed up with each other (made worse by the fact there's ONE guy dubbing ALL of the lines with this really monotone voice that makes it really hard to make out when one sentence starts and the other one ends) but I managed to watch one of the four episodes I thought completely lost on its ENTIRETY and completely understood it with the help of the google extension + the original english audio that I could kind of hear below the dubbing. All of this had me staying up until 5am and even then I couldn't sleep from how excited I was. I think I genuinely had like 3 hours of sleep total

Anyway, I still have 3 more episodes to watch but I'm genuinely so happy like wow. It's still not perfect and I'll keep asking and searching around for English versions of the episodes but this is closer than I ever thought I'd get !!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm currently backing up all of the available episodes and uploading them to Google Drive + possibly other archival sites whenever I'm done with that so that these don't take 3 thousand years to find ever again. Super happy.
All I have to say to conclude is that the Sherlock Holmes fandom is sometimes absurdly bad at archiving stuff. I understand he's the most adapted fictional character of all time but like c'mon guys how is it possible that NO ONE downloaded or uploaded these to any other site and we were all depending on this random YouTube guy to keep it available forever. Whatever the point of this post is not to complain but to celebrate. woohoo!!!!!!!

10/4/25 Edit: Some days ago I also found the entire italian dub uploaded to Youtube. Pretty good news since it's much, MUCH easier to translate to Spanish - I managed to watch and completely understand all of the episodes I was missing. I'm officially done watching this show :-) I'm super happy about it! I've uploaded all the dubs I have to Drive so I dont lose them again. If I ever come across any of the other ones (the german version for example) I might upload them as well, but I doubt it would be of much use for me.