Infrequently I've downloaded programs and the subtitles have failed to download.

Is there a way I can download just the subtitles for a program I already have?

I know about opensubtitles et al, but some BBC stuff, especially new documentaries can't be found on 3rd party sites.

See examples page in wiki

I really like get_iplayer - a fantastic tool and hope it is up and running again soon. I have a request I can get some BBC TV programs from BBC iplayer which include subtitles in an XML format which can be converted to a SRT file. Is it possible to extract these from BBC iplayer without waiting for the whole episode to download or is there any orther way (apart from Subtitle sites) to download the subtitles only in the meantime until the get_iplayer functionality is restored.

Thanks

No. You would need the development version of get_iplayer for --subsonly to work with --pid. You can find the subtitles URL for a programme via browser sniffing with subtitles turned on in iPlayer, but if you don't know how to do that, I'll leave it to someone else to explain.