Saturday Night Live has largely turned into a show that people watch for the opening sketch and for Weekend Update. Beginning tomorrow night and continuing through the election, there will be a half-hour edition of Weekend Update on Thursday evenings at 9:30, following The Office. (Actually, to get nitpicky about this, it's on at 9:31.) Assuming the writers can generate enough solid material to fill this show and the one on Saturday, this is probably a great idea…and one of the few times we've seen political satire programmed by any network before late night hours.
Which reminds me of something I've been meaning to ask: Does anyone anywhere have any tapes of That Was the Week That Was? You may not even remember that show but it was a half-hour of topical humor that ran on NBC from January of '64 until May of '65. It was the Americanized version of a popular British series starring David Frost…and Frost was also prominent on the U.S. version, along with Henry Morgan, Buck Henry, Alan Alda, Elliot Reid, some amazing guest stars and the "TW3 Girl," Nancy Ames, who sang the theme each week with sharp, topical lyrics. Tom Lehrer wrote and occasionally performed songs and puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, who'd been responsible for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, did some amazing "hand ballets" that I really can't explain. You'd have to see them to understand.
I was only twelve but I loved that show…and got very angry at Barry Goldwater for taking it away for much of that year's presidential campaign. Back in those days, political parties could and did buy out whole hours or half-hours of prime-time TV to broadcast their commercials, and the G.O.P. made a point of buying out the That Was the Week That Was time slot almost every week, just to keep it off the air. (NBC might have made more of a fuss — or moved it to another time slot temporarily but its ratings weren't fabulous and there were rumors that some NBC execs didn't like its mockery of their favorite candidates.)
After the show went off, it disappeared completely. Not a trace. There was a record album with some bad audio recordings of material from the program but otherwise, I haven't seen a tape, a clip or almost anything since. I suppose I should get my butt down to the Museum of Television and Radio and see what, if anything, they have…but I'm wondering if any reader of this site knows or has anything. I'd like to see if the show was anywhere near as great as I remember.