In 1967, there was a comedy program on British television called At Last the 1948 Show starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Marty Feldman. It was a pretty clear antecedent of Monty Python's Flying Circus and not only because it had Cleese and Chapman in its cast and on the writing staff. For a long time, At Last the 1948 Show was not rerun anywhere and so its cast members did not hesitate to repeat some of its better material on other, later shows they did.
One sketch from the show which had an amazing afterlife was The Bookshop Sketch which usually — but not always as you'll see — featured Marty Feldman. It's a very funny sketch and — consider yourself warned — you may get very sick of it if you watch all the incarnations of it in this post. I have five of them for you.
Here is The Bookshop Sketch as performed on At Last the 1948 Show by Mssrs. Feldman and Cleese. This is actually the entire episode and you may want to stop the video after the sketch is over because we have a long way to go here. The skit starts right after a short opening gag and an intro by three women, one of whom I thought at first was Carol Cleveland but it isn't…
Here is a version of The Bookshop Sketch done three years later on a 1970 Marty Feldman special for the BBC. The proprietor here is played by John Junkin…
And now we have Mr. Feldman performing The Bookshop Sketch on a 1971 episode of The Flip Wilson Show with the star of that program. This was probably the first time it was ever seen on American television and as you can see, it loses much when the bookstore proprietor is played by someone who isn't very good at playing straight man — or maybe very willing to do that…
And now we have another version of The Bookshop Sketch done for American TV and this refry of it features neither Feldman nor Cleese. Graham Chapman, who was one of the authors of the sketch in the first place, performs it with Joe Baker on The Big Show in 1980. I actually met and had lunch with Mr. Chapman the week they taped this, though he didn't mention to me what material they'd be doing.
I also knew Joe Baker a little. He was a British comedian and impressionist who some of you may remember for a series that ran on American TV but was shot in Great Britain. It was called The Kopykats and it was a troupe of impressionists (Rich Little, Frank Gorshin, George Kirby and others) practicing their craft. Baker lived for a time in America where he did cartoon voices and I met him when he did a darn good Lou Costello imitation for a character named Hula Hula on the Plastic Man series. I'll bet this version of The Bookshop Sketch would have been funnier if he'd done it as Lou Costello…
Lastly, here's John Cleese doing about half of The Bookshop Sketch in 2014 with Eric Idle. This is a reading they did as part of a long interview Mr. Idle did with Mr. Cleese at the Alex Theater in Glendale. I was among those you'll hear laughing and I would recommend that you clear an hour and seventeen minutes sometime and watch the entire interview, which you can do at this link. But for now, here's just The Bookshop Sketch — most of it…
As you can see, The Bookshop Sketch is pretty funny when performed by a bizarre little man and a stuffy, easily-irritated bookseller. It loses a lot when you don't have both of those roles properly cast.