"Steptoe and Son" is unique among 1960s BBC television programmes in that every episode has survived, despite the mass wiping of BBC archive holdings between 1967 and 1978. However, all the instalments from the first 1970 series and all but two from the second that were originally made in colour only survive in the form of black and white domestic videotape recordings. Copies were made from the master tapes for the writers by an engineer at the BBC using a Shibaden SV-700 half-inch reel-to-reel video recorder—a forerunner of the video cassette recorder. In 2008, the first reel of a black and white telerecording of the Series 5 episode "A Winter's Tale" (lasting approximately 15 minutes) was returned to the BBC; this is the only telerecording of a colour "Steptoe and Son" episode known to still exist.