[James2001]

There was a stupid story going round a few years back that around 500 Brookside episodes were "missing", I even saw someone claiming it after STV announced they'd be streaming it, even though it's fair to say trying to stream a consecutive run would be a mess if 1/6th of the episodes truly were missing (and would be a bit of a scandal if one of the most influential shows of the 80s and 90s had list so many episodes).

Typical internet chinese whispers, a bit like how someone saying the Big Breakfast archive was yet to be properly catalogued (i.e. they had the tapes, just couldn't licence clips for most episodes because they needed to find out what was where) morphed over the space of a couple of years to "most Big Breakfast episodes got wiped".