Abigoliah: We got nominated for an award.
Tom: Well done to us.
Abigoliah: We did it. We did it, and you did it too, listeners, because this podcast doesn’t happen without you. We said we’d do it for a year and see how it went.
Tom: It’s going really well.
Abigoliah: It’s going really well. It’s going so well. We got nominated for Best Podcast in Film or Television.
Tom: At the Independent Podcast Awards.
Abigoliah: At the Independent Podcast Awards. We’re the only nomination in our category that covers TV. Did you notice?
Tom: I didn’t notice that, no. That’s good. Yeah, yeah. We’re up against some strong competition. But I think, you know, it’s only the five nominees, so I like our chances.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And the awards ceremony is going to happen November 4th, so keep an eye out on our socials. We’ll let you know how it goes. If we don’t win, it’s always an honour to be nominated.
Tom: And if we do win, screw those other guys.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And if we don’t win, screw those other guys. It was fixed.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: But no, really, guys, we just wanted to share that with you because we’re super excited about it. And it’s my first ever award nomination personally.
Tom: Amazing. Yeah. I’m thrilled.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I have won the trophy on Pointless Celebrities, so just throwing that out there. And we have another announcement.
Tom: We do. Yes. So if you want to support the show, there is now an extra way in which you can do that. This show has always been both video and audio. We’ve always put the video up on YouTube, and there are now ads on YouTube. So, sorry about that. But if you want to get rid of them and show your support, you can become a member for £3 a month.
And just like on Patreon, if you can go up to £5 a month, you also get special bonus episodes. Those will now be monthly full-length episodes where, for this season, Abigoliah is showing me American comedy shows that she loves.
And what we’re going to do progressively is start putting some of those audio-only episodes up there as an archive. So you’ll get access to those as well as time goes on.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So the video episodes will start at The Smothers Brothers.
Tom: That’s right.
Abigoliah: And then we’ll slowly— We just didn’t record the video for the Jackass or I Love Lucy—
Tom: Or the little bonus minisodes we did for series two.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So it’s all coming to you. And guys, we do appreciate your support. And let’s do a show.
Tom: Let’s do a show.
Abigoliah: All right.
* * * * *
Abigoliah: Hello there. This is All British Comedy Explained, the podcast where I, Abigoliah, finally learn about all the British comedies I’ve been missing out on. And to guide us through this laughter of labyrinths — that sort of made sense — it’s Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello. Nice to be back.
Abigoliah: It is good to see you. I am excited about this.
Tom: Yeah. So this is one of those ones where we are going deep, deep, deep back into history.
Abigoliah: This is black and white.
Tom: This is black and white. Oh boy. This would have gone out live. It was first broadcast—
Abigoliah: It’s That Was the Week That Was.
Tom: Yes. First broadcast—
Abigoliah: We should mention.
Tom: —first broadcast in 1962. That’s the year the first ever communications satellite, Telstar, was launched into space. Marilyn Monroe died this year.
Abigoliah: Oh, such a sad year.
Tom: Nelson Mandela was arrested and began what would become a 27-year prison sentence.
Abigoliah: Or did he?
Tom: The Cuban Missile Crisis took place, and the first James Bond film, Dr. No, is in cinemas.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow. What a year.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: A lot going on.
Tom: So have you ever heard of That Was the Week That Was?
Abigoliah: Just from you. So, know what I’m picturing because we’ve talked about it before. We’ve had— We talked about someone who wrote on it. I’ve seen pictures—
Tom: Everyone wrote on it.
Abigoliah: I’ve seen pictures of it when I was making our comedy reels.
Tom: Men sitting behind a desk.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. So is it like a panel show?
Tom: It looks like that.
Abigoliah: But it’s not.
Tom: It’s not that.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And it’s kind of a show that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s basically a sketch show, but the presentation is going to seem very strange to you.
Abigoliah: Is it kind of like radio, but live? That sort of thing?
Tom: Has a little bit of that feel to it, yes.
Abigoliah: I’m going to stop asking questions. Explain, please. So, Tom, explain, please.
Tom: Let’s go back just a few more years to 1960. We talked about Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett when we did Not Only… But Also. And they did this landmark revue, Beyond the Fringe.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: And the attitudes towards the great and the good, the government of the day, the Royal Family, William Shakespeare — these were not topics of ridicule before this show. It was really groundbreaking.
Abigoliah: Pedestal was too high. You couldn’t touch them. I like that Shakespeare couldn’t be made fun of.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: He didn’t care. He was dead for several hundred years.
Tom: Jonathan Miller did an amazing Shakespeare spoof solo in Beyond the Fringe, which ended with, “And so to bed. I most royally to bed, to sleep off all the nonsense I’ve just said.”
But television at this time was still very staid.
So I think I mentioned John Reith when we did our AMA episode. He was the first Director-General of the BBC, and his edict that broadcasting should inform, educate and entertain was still very much remembered.
But in 1955 the broadcasting landscape had changed because of the creation of—
Abigoliah: Channel 4.
Tom: In 1955?
Abigoliah: 1955.
Tom: ITV.
Abigoliah: ITV. Yes. Sorry. Yeah.
Tom: And so—
Abigoliah: Because ITV’s the third—
Tom: The third channel.
Abigoliah: The—
Tom: Third channel, the second channel.
Abigoliah: The second channel.
Tom: Yes. There was no BBC—
Abigoliah: Two.
Tom: There was no BBC Two yet.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So ITV was the commercial channel. It was funded by advertising. And that rather kind of stiff presentation mode was already starting to seem a bit old-fashioned, and ITV’s presenters had a much more informal, conversational style, and the BBC was just beginning to catch up.
So an example of that is a now basically forgotten show called Tonight, which was like a magazine programme presented by a guy called Cliff Michelmore. And though he would look and sound to us very patrician and proper, with a suit and tie—
Abigoliah: It sounds—
Tom: He’s called Cliff Michelmore.
Abigoliah: It sounds like a sketch character.
Tom: But he had a kind of casual style which, at the time, was quite new. But also, this was a three-nights-a-week show, which meant that it ate material.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: One of its producers was a man called Ned Sherrin. Have you ever heard of Ned Sherrin?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: I thought you possibly might have done because he had a long career. But he was asked by the new Director-General, Hugh Carleton Greene, to come up with something for BBC television that would, as he put it, “prick the pomposity of the British establishment”.
Abigoliah: Well, we already know the problem is he says stuff like “prick the pomposity”.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: So ITV showed up and was, like, super cool.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Like sitting in the chair backwards, being like, “Hey, kids.”
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: “I’m just like you.”
Tom: So where did Ned Sherrin go to find the talent that he needed to do this?
Abigoliah: Pomposity-pricking Beyond the Fringe.
Tom: He went to Peter Cook’s Establishment Club.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: In London. So this was the cabaret night that Peter Cook had established following the success of Beyond the Fringe. And where was Peter Cook?
Abigoliah: He was busy making a film with Liza Minnelli. He wasn’t around.
Tom: He wasn’t around because he was in New York with the rest of the Beyond the Fringe crew performing Beyond the Fringe on Broadway.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: So Ned Sherrin came away from Peter Cook’s Establishment Club with a young man named David Frost.
Abigoliah: Yes, yes. Okay, this is all reminding me because wasn’t Peter Cook mad that he missed this opportunity?
Tom: Yes, he was.
Abigoliah: Because Peter Cook was a spicy, spiteful, angry, like, kind of a jealous dude.
Tom: I mean, Peter Cook has been much ruder about David Frost than David Frost has ever been about Peter Cook.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Peter Cook, I think I said this when we did Not Only… But Also, Peter Cook said that after he dove into a swimming pool to fish out David Frost, who was in trouble, essentially saving his life, he said that’s the only thing that he ever really regretted doing.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: I think he might also have described David Frost as “a man who rose without trace”.
Abigoliah: Okay. Well, I mean, he just happened to be sitting in the club at the right time at the right—
David Frost is still around.
Tom: No, no, no, no. He died some time ago. But he, in the sixties, was a man in a hurry.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So he’d been at Footlights, of course.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Just after Peter Cook, alongside people like John Bird, John Fortune, Eleanor Bron, Tim Brooke-Taylor—
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: —who we saw on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. And he was kind of trying on different careers for size. He was writing comedy sketches, he was performing at the Establishment Club and other comedy clubs besides, he was working for one of the ITV franchises as a producer, he was writing articles for newspapers and so on. He was hustling.
Abigoliah: I mean, well, that’s— He’s not a chancer, he’s a hustler.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And now Ned Sherrin was basically a current-affairs journalist, but he had a taste for mischief.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And a liking for vaudeville.
Abigoliah: Okay. I like this Ned guy.
Tom: And he saw a great potential in David Frost as this very energetic but also very organised young man who could be a slightly—
Abigoliah: I just realised he sounds like you. He writes, he directs, he— he’s doing all the things and organised. It’s hard to find.
Tom: He’d be a slightly bland but very personable figure around which more kind of flamboyant personalities could orbit.
Abigoliah: Okay, I take it back. You’re not bland. You’re not bland.
Tom: Now, the other big expression of satire in Britain at this time was a magazine called Private Eye. You heard of Private Eye?
Abigoliah: I mean, it makes me wonder, is that where Brass Eye got its name? But I would assume—
Tom: I would have thought so. Yeah. Private Eye is still being published today.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: It was founded in 1961 by a guy called Richard Ingrams and a little consortium, which also included Christopher Booker, Willie Rushton, a few other people. Peter Cook became its principal financial backer shortly after it was launched and helped keep it afloat.
And lots and lots of people wrote for both Private Eye and Ned Sherrin’s new show, including Willie Rushton, who was also one of the first people to be cast in it.
Abigoliah: Can I ask you? You said it’s still around today. Is it still being printed, or is it now—
Tom: Printed. Really.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Ian Hislop took over as editor about 20 years ago, and it’s still very influential. It’s a combination of silly jokes and parodies and really quite hard-hitting investigative journalism. It’s well worth picking up a copy.
Abigoliah: Are you— Okay. About a year ago, I decided I wanted to subscribe to a magazine and get a physical magazine to my house. So I decided to do The New Yorker because I used to get The New Yorker, love The New Yorker, and I keep asking people, I’m like, “Is there a London version of The New Yorker?”
Tom: Probably not The New Yorker, but it would scratch that itch.
Abigoliah: Yeah, I’m gonna subscribe because I’ve been— I mean, maybe not exactly, but I’m like, is there something that has funny stories in it, but also has good journalism, that also has cartoons?
Tom: Absolutely.
Abigoliah: Are you serious?
Tom: I’m 100% serious.
Abigoliah: No one has told me about this, and I have been asking people for a year when I carry around my New Yorker.
Tom: It’s been continuously published for 65 years.
Abigoliah: Everyone has forgotten about it. I’m gonna— I’m not even joking.
Tom: Pick up a copy for a train ride.
Abigoliah: I’m going to. I’m going to get a subscription. Is it weekly?
Tom: I think it’s every two weeks.
Abigoliah: Better, because weekly? Oh my God, this New Yorker.
Tom: It will take you a while to pick up on all the running jokes, but—
Abigoliah: I’ll figure it out.
Tom: Of course you will.
So the rest of the line-up for this new show was an actor-singer called David Kernan, a comedian called Lance Percival, a couple of actors, Kenneth Cope and Roy Kinnear, and a very experienced West End and Broadway musical star called Millicent Martin.
Abigoliah: It sounds like a name for a character who is a stage-show actress.
Tom: Millicent Martin. There was a young cartoonist called Timothy Birdsall who would do live cartoons, and a political journalist called Bernard Levin, who would normally do quite serious debates.
Abigoliah: So he’d draw cartoons on television?
Tom: Yeah, like on an easel.
Abigoliah: Okay, I like this.
Tom: And the idea was to try and have as much variety as possible. The first episode went out on the 24th of November 1962 at 10:50pm, and it was pretty much an instant sensation.
Abigoliah: Did it pop the paucity of—
Tom: Prick the—
Abigoliah: Prick the pomposity of ITV?
Tom: So it was called That Was the Week That Was. And Ned Sherrin’s idea was it would kind of be a feeling of New Year’s Eve every seven days. It might have been a good week or a bad week, but it’s over. Let it go.
Abigoliah: I just—
Tom: Looking back on the past seven—
Abigoliah: Days. I just like this as a way of living your life.
Tom: And that little phrase became the backbone of the opening song, a melody written by Ron Grainer, who only a year later would go on to create the Doctor Who theme tune.
Abigoliah: I’ve heard that.
Tom: Yeah. And it would have new lyrics every week with topical jokes in them.
Abigoliah: Oh, fun.
Tom: Many of those lyrics provided by Herbert Kretzmer, who would go on to translate Les Misérables into English.
Abigoliah: Well, he did one thing that was fun.
Tom: But critics loved the show, and it quickly gained ground with the public. It had the good fortune to be on the air during the Profumo affair.
Abigoliah: What’s a Profumo affair?
Tom: It was a scandal surrounding the relationship between cabinet minister John Profumo and 19-year-old model Christine Keeler.
Abigoliah: I thought this was going to be a cabinet minister who liked to wear ladies’ perfume.
Tom: Oh no. So Profumo denied that any affair had taken place—
Abigoliah: As they always do.
Tom: —in the House of Commons.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: He was then shown to have lied to the House and forced to resign.
Abigoliah: So if you lie in the House of Commons, is that kind of like lying under oath?
Tom: A little bit, especially in 1962.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, there’s no, like, jail time. It’s not— But it’s worse than lying on the steps of your house at a press thing?
Tom: Yes. And by now the show was—
Abigoliah: Was he under investigation for it?
Tom: Like, there was a whole— There was a whole report, the Denning Report. The report was published, That Was the Week That Was had an absolute field day.
Abigoliah: Oh my God.
Tom: And so this is all being written and transmitted live the week that it goes out.
Abigoliah: He is the Bill Clinton of his time.
Tom: He kind of—
Abigoliah: Is, and That Was the Week That Was was there to capture—
Tom: Exactly. So they had this amazing good fortune. Just as faith in politicians is being eroded by these kinds of stories, they’re there to make fun.
And the show was described as “pub-emptying television” because at 10:30, suddenly, on a Saturday night, everybody would leave the pub to go home and watch That Was the Week That Was. Pubs ended up installing televisions to try and keep patrons there.
Abigoliah: You told me this. I don’t know if it was on mic or another place, which blew my mind because I always assumed that pubs had TVs for sports.
Tom: Yeah, they do now. Yes, obviously.
Abigoliah: But the fact that it started with comedy just makes me— just makes me love this country more.
Tom: One of the actors, Kenneth Cope, described the cast as prowling around the BBC like young lions.
Abigoliah: I’m getting a young SNL vibe.
Tom: Very much.
Abigoliah: Loads of drugs, loads of naughtiness.
Tom: I don’t know about drugs, but—
Abigoliah: Because this was the BBC after all.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: But still, it was the sixties and they were young. I’m not saying Mr Pomposity wasn’t doing the drugs.
Tom: And the line-up of people who contributed material is amazing. So, briefly: playwrights Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, critic Caryl Brahms, dramatist Dennis Potter, comedy writers who’d go on to great things like David Nobbs, who I think is the one we talked about—
Abigoliah: Yes, there we go.
Tom: Also Johnny Speight, Frank Muir and Denis Norden, novelists Roald Dahl and John Antrobus—
Abigoliah: I’ve heard of—
Tom: Him. Future Pythons Graham Chapman and John Cleese. Of course, Peter Cook.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Future Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, future Poet Laureate John Betjeman, and future member of The Goodies Bill Oddie, who died a few days before we’re recording this.
Abigoliah: I’m sorry for your loss. This is one— just the wealth of different types of people who wrote for this.
Tom: They’ve all been young men and women just kind of figuring out what their career was going to look like.
Abigoliah: And this was in the sixties, early sixties.
Tom: 1962.
Abigoliah: And some of them would go on to be household names by the seventies. This is great.
Tom: Yeah. So That Was the Week That Was, being a slightly cumbersome title, it was sometimes abbreviated to TW3.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: TW3, That Was the Week That Was. It felt live. It felt fresh. Sometimes it felt messy. Ned Sherrin didn’t worry about cameras seeing microphones, seeing the audience, seeing other cameras. It was all part of the show.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And that was brand new.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And it was real satire. One very famous sketch: David Frost presented a buyer’s guide to religions.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Comparing Catholicism, Judaism, Hinduism and so on in the language of consumer magazines.
Abigoliah: Amazing.
Tom: Ending up describing the Church of England as “a jolly good little faith for very little outlay”.
Abigoliah: Hey, he nailed it.
Tom: Yeah. That might sound a bit tame to you, but as one of our correspondents mentioned when we did our AMA, some of the material still has the power to shock.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: The programme was fiercely anti-racist, with frequent attacks on the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Ku Klux Klan.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: One episode featured Millicent Martin leading a troupe of black-and-white minstrels.
Abigoliah: Oh boy.
Tom: In what sounds like a good old Southern song, but the lyrics are devastating, including the line—
I wanna go back to Mississippi
Where the scent of blossoms kiss the evening breeze
Where the Mississippi mud kinda mingles with the blood
Of the n*****s who are hanging from the branches of the trees…
Tom: I’ll probably bleep that for the audience.
Abigoliah: Yeah. In the right context, that’s haunting.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: But then that— We talked about this before. When satire is thought-provoking but not funny, is it still satire?
Tom: I mean—
Abigoliah: Did this get a huge laugh?
Tom: It’s one of the things, actually, as you’ll watch it. I think the way that these days studio audiences are kind of gingered up with a warm-up person, where the microphones are so sensitive that they can bring up or take down the audience laughter as they need to, it all sounds very precise and crisp.
This sounds more like watching it live, where it’s like scattered bits of laughter here and there. When big laughs come, they’re really big, but you don’t get that kind of consistency.
But also because with a sitcom the performances have been honed over the weeks’ rehearsals. But this is all being done very close to the wire, and a lot of it’s being read off autocues.
Abigoliah: And it goes—
Tom: Out—
Abigoliah: Live. Yeah. So the laughter will sometimes— it’ll be in pockets. Wow.
Tom: But also this was a song. And so there was an orchestra playing and everyone singing together, so the laughter would have been muted by that anyway. But the audience did appreciate it and they got the point.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah.
Tom: It’s tough.
Abigoliah: But going back to it, as you say this, I would be— not having seen the sketch, but explaining what it is, I’m fine with the use of that word in that moment.
Tom: I personally— it’s harmless in the right place, but I think you wouldn’t make that point using that language today because the word is so toxic and it blares more loudly than the point you’re trying to make.
All right. What are you expecting?
Abigoliah: I’m expecting line flubs because it’s all live. I’m expecting to visibly see they’re reading off cue cards, à la Tony Hancock or SNL. I am also expecting some tight writing. Like, tight like a diamond. I’m expecting it to be really dense, strong writing.
Now, I’m also expecting you to have to explain a lot of what’s going on at the time.
Tom: What I’m actually going to do is I’m going to give you a primer.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So I’ll explain a couple of things now on mic, but I’m also going to print off a few things for your ready reference as we watch, because this was— The episode we’re going to watch is season one, episode nine.
Abigoliah: I want to say this is when you know comedy is good, is when someone has to print you, like, a glossary to follow along.
Tom: Only because you weren’t alive in January of 1963. So that’s when it was broadcast, 19th of January 1963. It’s the middle of one of the coldest British winters of the 20th century. Snow, frozen roads, cancelled football matches, general national misery.
Abigoliah: Oh gosh. It’s almost like now, we’re having one of our hottest summers and, look at you all, miserable. Miserable, wishing for that cold winter.
Tom: The other huge story is Charles de Gaulle’s veto of Britain joining the Common Market.
Abigoliah: Which was what the EU was before.
Tom: Exactly. The precursor to the EU.
Abigoliah: So the person who vetoed it was the—
Tom: Charles de Gaulle.
Abigoliah: Is that the—
Tom: Yeah, the French leader.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So Britain had applied to join. But on 14th of January 1963, so five days before this was broadcast, de Gaulle had publicly blocked it.
Abigoliah: Yes, I remember hearing about this.
Tom: So the joke here is that Britain had helped liberate France in the war, and now France is saying Britain is not European enough to join the club.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And a third major story arrived—
Abigoliah: Well, guess what, Charles? You’ll get what you want eventually.
Tom: A third major story arrived almost as the programme was being made. Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, died the day before this was broadcast.
Abigoliah: Holy shit.
Tom: So with these things, it’s always difficult to find a perfect episode to show you. I didn’t want to cut this one up and show you extracts.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And these are hour-long episodes, roughly.
Tom: We’ll come to that as well. Bernard Levin, who was a journalist, would usually do stage debates. He’d, like, get on a load of Tory women and have a go at them live on air. And for this one, he just does a tribute to Hugh Gaitskell, which isn’t funny at all.
Abigoliah: Like a genuine—
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: You’ve got to be careful about that stuff. I remember when the Queen died, live comedians cancelled shows.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Because they couldn’t go on and say anything about it. Some people did go on and perform that night, and they were then made the news because of it. And some people didn’t, out of respect, which was insane.
Tom: So you’ll also hear about Harold Macmillan, who was the Prime Minister of the day.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: His government is in trouble. You might remember him from The Crown. So this is post-Suez, pre-the Profumo affair, now humiliated over Europe.
You’ll hear about Nye Bevan, who is the Labour left-wing hero and founder of the NHS. You’ll hear about Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond and a few other people. I’m going to print off a little card for you to consult as we watch.
Abigoliah: What I love about our series on satire is I’m also learning about British history at the same time, so—
Tom: All right. Are you ready to go back to 1962? Let’s— 1963, actually. January 1963.
Abigoliah: January 1963. Let’s get into the time machine and see the week that was.
Tom: Let’s do it.
* * * * *
Tom: That was satire that was. That’s how they used to do it.
Abigoliah: Back in the old days.
Tom: Back in the old days.
Abigoliah: I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t think I would recognise anyone’s faces, and I was quite excited when Veruca Salt’s dad showed up. I was like, look at that. Look at that.
I mean, I found it captivating. A lot of the jokes, I think, went over my head. It is incredibly rudimentary, like, basic. And it also— And I kind of said it when we did The Fast Show, but when you have Britain trying to bring back sketch through SNL in 2026, I’m like, why aren’t we redoing this show? I would love to see this show nowadays.
Tom: I mean, essentially, Have I Got News for You is this show.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I was kind of wondering if that’s where Have I Got News for You came from.
Tom: Do you remember one of the reasons that Spitting Image was wound up was because Have I Got News for You was doing the same thing for a quarter of the price on the other side?
But I think it’s really important to bear in mind how new this was.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So I know it didn’t really land for you, but that thing about MPs not having spoken in the House of Commons and making fun of them, and finding old speeches in which they said how much they were going to speak up, and then explaining how little they had spoken — we were not used to hearing our elected representatives held to account like this.
This was shockingly new. And there is this journalistic seam that runs through, which, again, you also see in Private Eye. Really holding people to account, really holding their feet to the fire and saying, “You said this. You’re doing this. Explain yourself.”
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, that, again, that sketch, though, it’s like, what would happen if you did it today? Would I—
Tom: But today there’s an assumption that politicians are on the make. They’re not to be trusted.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But in 1962, there was an assumption that politicians were fine, upstanding men. They were mainly men who we could trust to make decisions on our behalf. And the idea that they should be criticised wasn’t brand new, but to do it on the BBC on a Saturday night was still kind of breathtaking.
Abigoliah: Well, that was one of my questions. Did they get pushback from censors, or did they make the news, or did a— what’s your name? Miss Cancel Culture—
Tom: Mary Whitehouse. A little before Mary Whitehouse. This time she was— she was only just getting going at this point.
So obviously these are not very repeatable.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So most of them haven’t been seen for years.
Abigoliah: Is there anywhere to see them?
Tom: Not really. We have, like, in the archives all but two episodes.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Why do we have them at all, given that they went out live?
Abigoliah: Because tape? Why?
Tom: They were all recorded as they went out for legal reasons.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: So that if anyone did complain, they would have a copy of the broadcast and they could say, this was said, this was not said. Your allegation that we said this isn’t true, or this is the context in which we said it.
So it all had to be very carefully checked by lawyers before it went out. But that’s why we have any recordings at all, because a lot of these shows would go out live and nobody would record them, because why bother?
Abigoliah: Yeah. What’s the point?
And what I thought was interesting is some of the sketches you could still do today. Like the weather sketch. To me, I’m like, right after Covid, you do that sketch. Like, that exact sketch.
The weather sketch.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: The song about noses and ears, which just actually does sound like an old Broadway standard in a way.
Tom: Sometimes she does old standards in that slot because—
Abigoliah: I was like, I don’t know if that was a new song for the show or whether that’s a standard.
Tom: That could have existed before.
Abigoliah: The one about teachers, you could do that. The improvised song that—
Tom: Lance Percival.
Abigoliah: Lance did, which I loved. You could do that. Like, so much of this—
Tom: But the balls at the end of the programme to say, now I’m going to make stuff up live, and this is one of the most watched programmes of the week.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And the fact that, like, it’s so— I mean, it reminded me how live it was when he’s like, “Sorry that my string broke.”
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: I’m missing— you know, but I have to do this anyway. How many viewers did it pull in?
Tom: I mean, it would be— I haven’t got the figures in front of me, but it would have been at least ten million.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And it was a sensation.
Abigoliah: And it came out in the sixties. One of my questions for you, as I was watching it, I realised that Technicolor TV, I’m pretty sure, came about in 1954.
Tom: So BBC Two started in 1968, I want to say. And that was in colour from the very beginning. So colour came to the BBC in the mid-sixties.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But for a long time there were programmes— some programmes in black and white, some programmes in colour. Obviously, if you repeat an old black-and-white show, you couldn’t magic colour into it.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So it was a slow evolution rather than a sudden change.
Abigoliah: Okay. But they elected to do this one in black and white, or—
Tom: Sixty— still all black and white.
Abigoliah: Okay. Because colour TVs existed then. And I know this because the changeover happened while I Love Lucy was on the air.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: And there was a lot of talk: would they switch to colour? And as much as revolutionary Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were in making television, they insisted that comedy is best in black and white. They wouldn’t switch over.
Tom: I remember there was somebody who was asked to consult on the very first series of Star Trek, and he wrote a letter back saying, “I can see already that Star Trek is going to cost me $300 because I’m going to have to go out and buy a colour television.”
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: This was in 1966.
Abigoliah: That’s amazing. Because it was live, was there a lot of corpsing? Like, I didn’t see a lot.
Tom: Not a huge amount. These are all, like, experienced rep actors, or they’d done revue in Footlights or elsewhere. So they knew their stuff.
And there, as you predicted, there were little flubs and stumbles and little kind of mini-retakes. But I don’t remember a lot of corpsing from the ones I’ve seen. I watched about seven or eight of these in preparation. I wasn’t able to watch all of them because they’re an hour long and there were about 25 of them.
Abigoliah: Okay. Twenty-five that we have, or 25—
Tom: It might even be more than that in total. Hang on. Let me just give you chapter and verse. In total, there were 37 broadcasts, of which we have 35.
Abigoliah: Okay. And I have to say, their choice to— because they’re a topical show — their choice to kind of stop for a moment and just commemorate Hugh Gaitskell—
Tom: Gaitskell, yeah.
Abigoliah: —I thought was quite beautiful. Because especially nowadays, when everyone’s— immediately we get the news, immediately we have access to make a joke in a video, in a tweet, in a post, everyone’s looking for the joke angle.
And in a show where they could have gone for that, they were like, let’s just stop and have a moment and remember this leader. I thought was quite, quite refreshing. I know that sounds weird to say because it came out in the sixties, but I thought that was a really nice choice.
Because they also could have just ignored it. They could have just gone, we can’t touch this now. And the fact that they chose to go for it, I loved.
I just— I liked the way it looked. Like, I liked the fact that you could see the actors standing offstage. I liked the fact that it looked messy.
It did make me feel like, oh, this is what it was like to watch Beyond the Fringe.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: I felt that more watching this than I did watching Not Only… But Also. But it had that real— It did feel a bit like watching a live radio show or like a live Edinburgh show.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Like watching the Footlights. And I really appreciated that.
And I also liked that not Maleficent, Millicent Martin, had so much to do.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Which—
Tom: She’s one of the boys.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And in the 1960s, because I really thought she was going to come on, sing the opening song, and then we wouldn’t see her again. And I loved that she was in a bunch of other sketches, came on and sang other songs. I really liked how much she was used.
Did she write as well?
Tom: No, I don’t think so.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Actor first, but—
Tom: But brilliant. Neither did Kenneth Cope or Roy Kinnear, you know.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Fair enough. I also love that opening song. So jazzy.
Tom: And again, a different version of the lyrics every single week to reflect what the news stories of the week had been.
Abigoliah: It was smoother in a lot of ways than I thought it’d be.
Tom: There’s a couple of bits. The captions in that silent-MP sketch get messed up a few times.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And they cut to the wrong camera. And there was one bit where, in the Evening Standard Award sketch, where they cut to the wrong actor, and the right actor is waiting for the camera to cut to him so he can say his line. Then eventually he just ends up saying his line off-camera.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Oh, that’s what happened there. Okay.
I really enjoyed it. I’m really, really glad you showed it to me.
Tom: Oh, good.
Abigoliah: Even though I didn’t completely— Like, if you hadn’t given me so much context, I don’t think I would have known anything that was going on.
Tom: Edgar Lustgarten, Potato Marketing Board sketch. You can sort of get a sense of what is being parodied without ever having seen Edgar Lustgarten.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And it’s sort of silly and over the top, even if you don’t know that this is a take-off of something else. But you’d probably guess it was a take-off of something else even if you hadn’t been told that.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I wonder how he felt about being parodied on it.
Tom: I don’t know. Probably it was an honour.
Abigoliah: Yeah. You’d think.
Tell me. Tell me what happened next.
Tom: So it began in ’62, towards the end of the year, and I think — I haven’t been able to substantiate this — but my guess is that maybe they thought if it didn’t work, they would let it have those six episodes, take it off at Christmas, and it would never be heard of again.
But that’s not what happened. It ended up running for 23 consecutive weeks.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: Through to April 1963.
Abigoliah: Which is a lot.
Tom: Yeah. And then it took a break for the summer, and then it came back for a second run in autumn 1963.
Now, Ned Sherrin took advantage of the fact that he was going out live because, if the audience was up for it and the cast seemed inspired, he would add extra items to the running order once the show had started, which meant nobody knew what time the show was going to end.
Abigoliah: That sounds really problematic for the broadcaster.
Tom: It was the last show of the night.
Abigoliah: Oh, because TV turned off.
Tom: Closedown.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Because you guys had the flag and the national anthem played. So it could have ended— What time do you say it went out?
Tom: 10:50, I believe.
Abigoliah: So it could have ended at midnight. It could have ended at— Oh, that’s brilliant. But, oh no.
Tom: When it came back for the second series, the BBC, in their infinite wisdom, put repeats of the American television version of The Third Man on after That Was the Week That Was.
Abigoliah: Why?
Tom: Meaning that it had to run for exactly 50 minutes for the first time. This was an outrage.
Abigoliah: Did the American public or the American— Did the British public find it to be an outrage, or just the makers of it?
Tom: David Frost and Ned Sherrin’s solution was simple. These were repeats.
Abigoliah: So it didn’t matter.
Tom: They got hold of the script, and at the end of the first programme of the second series, David Frost told viewers everything that was going to happen in the episode of The Third Man about to be broadcast, spoiling all of the surprises.
Abigoliah: What a little bitch.
Tom: When he’d done that for three times, the BBC took The Third Man off the air again and TW3 could go as long as it wanted.
Abigoliah: That is so bitchy. I love this queen.
Tom: This is one of my favourite stories about comedy production ever.
Abigoliah: For those of you who are listening, Tom is now laughing so hard tears are in his eyes. Can you imagine getting away with that sort of thing? My God.
Tom: This show feels unstoppable.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But a couple of things did bring it to a halt. Now think about this show restarting in autumn 1963. Is there an important date that’s coming towards it very fast?
Abigoliah: 1963.
Tom: It was still on the air in November 1963.
Abigoliah: And then—
Tom: And that was the month that President Kennedy was assassinated.
Abigoliah: Oh, of course.
Tom: So that was on a Friday.
Abigoliah: Oh no.
Tom: Everything that That Was the Week That Was had planned for Saturday was scrapped. And the only thing they broadcast was 20 minutes of tributes to John F. Kennedy.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: Now, Ned Sherrin managed to get the tape of that episode — because, as we said, these were all recorded — over to the US, and they screened it over there. And that eventually led to an American version of That Was the Week That Was, which went out between January of 1964 and May of 1965.
Almost nothing of this survives in the archives.
Abigoliah: I was going to say, if I had known that, I would have done that on the Patreon.
Tom: There were various different hosts. David Frost himself hosted some episodes. The cast included Buck Henry, Tom Bosley and Alan Alda.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow. A young Alan Alda.
Tom: Tom Lehrer wrote satirical songs for it.
Abigoliah: One of your favourites?
Tom: Yeah. And he collected those on his third and final album, That Was the Year That Was.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: And the other thing which took it off the air is, you know— So now we’re back in Britain. A general election was called.
Abigoliah: And because they’re on the BBC, they’re not allowed to talk about the election.
Tom: Well, the BBC just felt it was risky, to say the least, to have a show like this on the air while a general election campaign is going on.
Abigoliah: There’s a rule because people who— When Mock the Week was on the BBC—
Tom: It’s an equal-time rule. Yes.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But it’s an equal time across the week. It doesn’t mean in one show you have to give exactly the same amount of time.
Abigoliah: But it meant that the comedians had to be really careful about doing jokes about the election. So, like, I never did Mock the Week, but I know friends who did during election years when it was like, it’s so hard because the one thing you want to talk about, you actually can’t talk about.
Tom: So it did finish at the end of 1963 and it didn’t come back. But several other very similar—
Abigoliah: Ratings drop?
Tom: Because of— It was still huge. Absolutely huge.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And so lots of very similar, often fronted by David Frost, shows filled the gap. So David Frost hosted a show called BBC-3. He hosted a show called Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, and then, most successfully, The Frost Report.
Abigoliah: Okay. And The Frost Report sounds like, I mentioned it as we were watching it, like a precursor for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Tom: Very much.
Abigoliah: So, yeah.
Tom: Yeah. Jon Oliver’s show.
These sorts of— Lots of writers would contribute to what was called the CDM, which stood for Continuously Developing Monologue.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Which is basically what Jon Stewart or John Oliver does. But then they’d break off into sketches, which would be enacted by John Cleese, Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker and a few other people.
Abigoliah: This doesn’t sound like— The fact that JFK died, the fact that they didn’t screw it up, you know what I mean? They didn’t screw it up. They didn’t make fun of it. They didn’t do something untoward. And then the fact that there was a general election doesn’t seem like it’s enough to have pulled it off the air, unless David Frost wanted to go do these other projects.
Tom: I mean, he— I’m sure he was very excited about going to do the American version, but he carried on working in British television for most of his life. He became quite a significant TV journalist. Obviously very famously interviewed Richard Nixon.
Abigoliah: Oh, really? Oh, yeah.
Tom: Frost/Nixon.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Yes. That’s him. That’s him.
Abigoliah: That’s—
Tom: Him. That’s the same guy.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow. Putting it all together. It’s all making sense.
Tom: In 1983, breakfast television launched in the UK, and David Frost was part of a consortium who launched TV-am, which was the ITV version of breakfast television.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: He died in 2013 at the age of 74.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: I mean, they’re all dead.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Many of the cast went on to great things. Lance Percival, I think we said on air as we were watching it, in lots of British comedy films in the sixties and seventies.
Weird connection that I didn’t know we were going to make as I was making these notes. When we did The Fast Show, I talked about Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Kenneth Cope is one half of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). He’s Marty Hopkirk, opposite Mike Pratt.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Roy Kinnear—
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: —is in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
Abigoliah: Which was written by Roald Dahl, who was also a writer on That Was the Week That Was.
Tom: Roy Kinnear died at 54 after falling off a horse.
Abigoliah: Jesus Christ.
Tom: But his son, Rory Kinnear, is now one of our most popular and able actors.
Abigoliah: I didn’t realise Rory Kinnear was Veruca Salt’s dad’s son.
Tom: Yes. Veruca Salt’s brother.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow. Well, one of them turned out right.
Tom: Yeah. And you’ve watched Frasier?
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Millicent Martin is Daphne’s mum on Frasier.
Abigoliah: No way.
Tom: Yes, she is.
Abigoliah: Whoa! That’s so cool.
Tom: And then Ned Sherrin. The reason I asked, did you know him? Because he, for many, many years, was the avuncular host of Loose Ends on BBC Radio 4. It’s now Clive Anderson’s show, but it was Ned Sherrin forever. And that’s how I first came in contact with Ned Sherrin.
And it’s kind of difficult for me, and I guess other people of my age, to connect the maverick broadcaster of the early sixties with the rather more kind of cosy, patrician broadcaster that I grew up with. He died in 2007 at the age of 76.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So this is an absolute landmark television show, and it changed television in a way that very, very few shows do.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: It’s bound to look a bit creaky these days.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But I’m so pleased any of it connected with you because I had visions of this being another Goon Show. If you’re just writing, “I want to be anywhere other than here,” on your notepad.
Abigoliah: No, I really— It just made me want to see it now. Like, it really— And I mean, I know we sort of have it, but we don’t have it, you know what I mean? The going out live—
Tom: The live form, I think, makes it feel so fresh. Obviously, I think it must have influenced Lorne Michaels. It can’t not.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But do you also remember an American show called Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In?
Abigoliah: No. Laugh-In. Yeah, yeah.
Tom: Which was star-making for Goldie Hawn. So Ned Sherrin, I saw interviewed talking about the fact that an American producer had watched That Was the Week That Was and really admired its kind of energy and liveliness, and took some of that with him to Laugh-In.
And Ned Sherrin had met up with him years later and said, “You know, you must have been a bit influenced by TW3.”
And this guy said, “Influenced? We stole the whole fucking thing.”
Abigoliah: That’s amazing. You know what? He admits it, and I like that.
Tom: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So, shelf of fame?
Abigoliah: Absolutely not. Here’s the thing: I loved it. I loved it, and I’m so glad that I got to see it. I kind of don’t see a point of watching more of it because I know I won’t understand—
Tom: Yeah. You kind of have to do— You have to do the reading before you watch it.
Abigoliah: And as you say—
Tom: That’s kind of not what you’re usually looking for when it comes to comedy shows.
Abigoliah: It’s funny, the deep cuts, because with Spitting Image it’s further— long enough that I know the references. But this is so far back I’d have to rewatch The Crown again.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: It’s a whole thing.
Tom: I’m betting most people listening to this have never heard of Jo Grimond, who was— A whole sketch is devoted to that, partly devoted to the fact that he’s so obscure that even though he’s leading a political party, probably the American president won’t be able to get his name right.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But nevertheless, you know, everyone watching will be laughing at Jo Grimond, which is— And that is not a name which means anything, I don’t think, to— If there’s somebody listening to this who was actually alive when this was on, and not only alive but able to be aware of current affairs, then maybe. Or you’re a student of British political history. But Jo Grimond is not a name that’s going to mean anything to anyone.
Abigoliah: Yeah. It’s— I mean, it’s lost to history, isn’t it? I look at the shelf of fame right now, and I am— I love these shows so much that I don’t think I can put on That Was the Week That Was because I watched it once, and I know I’m only going to watch it once, you know?
But I loved it. And I gotta say, thank you so much for showing it to me because— And you know what I’m gonna do right after, right after this podcast? I’m going to get a subscription to Private Eye.
Tom: You should absolutely do that.
Abigoliah: I’m really looking— I’m not even joking. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll check back in and let you know what I think of the publication.
Tom: Well, I have high hopes for this next one getting onto the now very crowded shelf of fame because next time we’ll be watching Not the Nine O’Clock News.
Abigoliah: Oh, where it all started.
Tom: Where it all started.
Abigoliah: Where it all started.
Tom: These are hard to find, but you can track some of them down on YouTube. We’ll be watching series three, episode three, and series four, episode six, if anybody does have access to them.
They tended to be repeated only as compilations, and there are various reasons behind that, which we’ll go into next week.
Unfortunately, I would love, for example, to make the episode of That Was the Week That Was available, say, to our patrons on a special link to a secure server somewhere that you only have access to if you sign up to the Patreon. But unfortunately copyright laws mean I absolutely can’t do that.
Abigoliah: No, you can’t do that at the £5 tier.
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: Or any—
Abigoliah: Tier.
Tom: Tier.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Absolutely. There’s no way there would ever be a link for it on the page.
Tom: We wish.
Abigoliah: We wish there could be.
Tom: But unfortunately—
Abigoliah: We cannot do that.
And that being said, guys, though, thank you so much for joining us. A couple ways you can support the podcast. One, share it with a friend. One, leave a review on your podcatcher app, whatever it is. Five stars, please and thank you.
Subscribe to us on YouTube. Subscribe to us on any social-media platform of your choosing.
And we do have a Patreon where at £5 a month you get bonus monthly episodes. Now we are retiring, by the way, I don’t think we’ve said this yet, we’re retiring the minisodes for a while. We’re trying something else out where we do an All-American Comedy Explained, and our October episode for All-American Comedy Explained, which will be out at the end of the month, will be The Jeffersons. So please come and join us for that.
Also on the £3 tier, you get ad-free episodes. So yeah. Do you have anything else you want to say?
Tom: Let us know which model you prefer. I don’t think we can do both until we have a few more subscribers. But if you’re enjoying the bonus episodes, what do you prefer? A full-length bonus episode once a month, or little mini episodes every time we put a regular episode out?
Give us feedback on that and we’ll take that into consideration as we plan season four. But we have a lot of season three to get through.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: A lot of good shows to get through.
Abigoliah: Yes. I’m really enjoying this.
Well, until next time, guys, I’m Abigoliah.
Tom: I’m Tom.
Abigoliah: Thank you so much. Bye.
Tom: Cheerio.