Quite a few of you have written to tell me that you first encountered The Bookshop Sketch on the 1980 Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album. Oddly enough, three people told me it was performed there by John Cleese and Terry Jones, whereas five of you said it was John Cleese and Graham Chapman. I just listened to it (which you can do here) and I'm with the five.
Jeff McGinley wrote to day he recalls the sketch being done on The Dean Martin Show by Dom DeLuise and Dean. I don't but I can believe it. There was a period when the show's producer Greg Garrison seemed to have acquired the right to use Python material…or at least he thought he had. I vividly recall the Python sketch, "How Not To Be Seen" being aired with a voiceover by Dean replacing the one by Mr. Cleese. I seem to be the only person on the planet who remembers this.
Its usage may or may not have something to do with the fact that Mr. Garrison produced Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers, a Summer replacement show for Dean's weekly series in 1970. It was shot in England and featured Marty Feldman, Charles Nelson Reilly and Tommy Tune along with The Golddiggers and others. Much of what Feldman did on the show was sketches he'd done before elsewhere, often with Mr. Reilly taking a role previously played by John Cleese or someone else on the At Last the 1948 Show show. Those episodes do not seem to be available anywhere but it would not surprise me if The Bookshop Sketch was in one of them.
And then the following year, Garrison was involved with Marty Feldman's Comedy Machine, an hour-long series done for both British and American TV, though for America it was chopped to a half-hour and Garrison inserted some comedy routines with American performers. Feldman also appeared a few times on The Dean Martin Show — sometimes even with Dean — and I think some sketches that were shot for the Golddiggers show or for the Comedy Machine were also edited into Dean's show. At least one of them from the former is on the home video collections of material from Dean's show.
If it sound like I don't understand the connection between various Greg Garrison shows and Marty Feldman and Monty Python, that might be because I don't.
Lastly for now, we have another version of The Bookshop Sketch and my thanks to Luke Menichelli, who told me about it. In 1977, some fine British comedians appeared in a benefit show supporting Amnesty International. It was called An Evening Without Sir Bernard Miles and it was staged at the Mermaid Theater. When it was turned into a TV special and a record album, it was retitled The Mermaid Frolics.
The cast included such Peter Cook, Terry Jones (who also directed), Peter Ustinov, Jonathan Miller…and John Cleese and his wife of the moment, Connie Booth. Mr. Cleese and Ms. Booth were then in the Fawlty Towers business and I think Cleese comes off more like Basil Fawlty in this version starring both of them.
What I have embedded below is the entire special but I've set the video so most browsers will open it at 42:15, which is when The Bookshop Sketch begins. After you watch it, you can watch the rest of the show if you want. You can also move the little slider back and watch the entire show. Right now, I'm only interested in The Bookshop Sketch…