This one runs a little over a half hour but you might want to watch all or most of it. It's an episode from Great Britain of That Was The Week That Was, a satirical review that ran in the early sixties. It was hosted by David Frost — who's now Sir David Frost to the likes of you — and it featured a bevy of the best British comic actors and writers, including at times, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. This installment seems to be from around January of 1963.
The show lasted 'til the end of that year, which was about the time an American version (also hosted by Sir David) got going on NBC. It was not a big hit and it got a lot of Republicans angry. Back then during our elections, it used to be fairly common for political parties to buy an hour or a half-hour of prime-time TV for their advertising. During the '64 elections, the G.O.P. arranged to preempt TW3 (as everyone called it) almost every week, not so much because they wanted the time slot for their Goldwater ads but because they wanted to keep the show off the air. Amazingly, there wasn't a lot of outcry that this was censorship or suppression of anything of the sort. Imagine what would happen today if an advertiser bumped even one broadcast by Sean Hannity or Keith Olbermann.
I remember the U.S. version as a great show. It certainly had incredible talent involved. Along with Frost, you had at times Tom Lehrer, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Henry Morgan, Alan Alda, Buck Henry, Woody Allen and many others. Puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, who'd been responsible for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, invented a new art form — a thing he did called "Hand Ballets," in which you just saw his hands miming a little story.
Of course, I haven't seen an episode since '64 so maybe it wouldn't seem as wonderful today. I hear conflicting things about whether tapes of those old broadcasts even exist. If they do, I wish someone would make them available. In the meantime, here's that episode of the British version…
