Before there was Monty Python's Flying Circus, John Cleese and Graham Chapman were part of another, not-dissimilar program in which they starred with Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. It was called At Last, the 1948 Show and of course, with those four gents involved, it was quite wonderful. A number of the sketches from that series later turned up in other venues, and you may have seen a version of the one from today's video link in one of the tapes of charity performances in which some of those men were involved.
Where I first saw it performed was on Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London, which was the series that replaced The Dean Martin Show on NBC for the summer of 1970. It starred — in addition to the comely song and dance troupe known as The Golddiggers — Charles Nelson Reilly, Tommy Tune and Marty Feldman. It was the first time America laid eyes, as it were, on Mr. Feldman. As I recall (and I haven't seen a trace of this show since it first aired), he stole the proceedings, largely by bringing along material that I later realized was from his earlier appearances on British TV.
On the strength of Feldman's showing, Greg Garrison — who produced Dean Martin's program and its summer replacements — sold a series to ABC called Marty Feldman's Comedy Machine, which came and went with barely a notice in '71. It was produced in London by Larry Gelbart and featured a number of top comedy writers from the U.S. including Rudy DeLuca, who owes me a lunch. It also had animations by Terry Gilliam. I would love to see someone dig those shows out and issue them on DVD. The one time I met Marty Feldman, he was both extremely proud of what he'd done on that project and extremely bitter about how the material had been chopped-up for U.S. television, with sketches truncated and edited and some of the silent ones even sped-up. He was also upset about what he called "mysteriously-appearing guest stars." Apparently, someone felt the show needed more faces familiar to the American viewer, so Garrison brought in some stand-up comedians, taped them in L.A. doing bits and cut them into the shows without Feldman's participation. Marty said, "I keep running into people I never heard of before who tell me, 'It was great to be a guest star on your program.'"
Even with all that, those shows are probably well worth putting out. Given that they looked an awful lot like Monty Python, what with Gilliam's cartoons and all, I think they'd would sell very decently now. I'd also like to see The Golddiggers in London turn up again somewhere, especially for its more elaborate version of the sketch you'll be watching when you click the link below. Feldman played the same part and Charles Nelson Reilly played the other man…and I remember laughing so hard that I missed a lot of it. Really, someone should dig up everything Marty Feldman did for television because he really was an enormously funny, clever man…and so, come to think of it, is Charles Nelson Reilly.
Here comes the sketch as performed on At Last, the 1948 Show. This is Tim Brooke-Taylor with Marty Feldman, and the cop who comes in at the end is Graham Chapman…
