Comedy Connections

# Let's get together, oh yeah yeah yeah,

# We'll have a swinging time

It'll never be a hit.

It was a very exciting program to be on.

They had phone calls, saying, you know,

that the world was falling apart

and what was happening to these foul mouthed people.

Shocking!

We were walking round TV Centre the corridors like youg lions.

It was magic.

# But how far can you go? #

Unbelievable!

We wanted something like That Was The Week That Was

without knowing that it would ever come along.

That Was The Week That Was did more than just drag the stuffy old BBC

into the swinging '60s when it first went out live

at 10.50pm on Saturday the 24th of November 1962.

It tackled topical and taboo subjects in a way that had never

And just as The Beatles were and changing popular culture,

and changed public attitudes towards those in authority forever.

Understanding how this revolutionary programme came about

takes us back to 1960 and the appointment of Hugh Carlton Greene

as he put it, prick the pomposity of public figures

He charged current affairs producers Donald Baverstock and Alastair Milne

to come up with an idea that would mix current affairs and entertainment.

At the time, Baverstock and Milne were responsible for Tonight,

It was directed by Ned Sherrin and presented by Cliff Michelmore.

You're late. I thought you were all listening to The Archers.

After studying law at Oxford, Ned Sherrin decided to take up

and went to work in the brand new world of independent television.

In 1957, he left to join the BBC - a round which led him to Tonight.

Somebody says we appear to have lost that film.

We'll try and find it between then and now.

And it was Sherrin's talent for misschien making...

...that the producers decided was needed on the new show.

The only person on the whole Tonight team

who'd had any show business experience was Ned, and so

Ned Sherrin was charged with trying to pull something together as it were.

The natural parents, I suppose, of TW3 were the journalism

the current affairs feeling and research feeling

that one had upon Tonight. Plus it was a whole time of change.

The '60s were not so much a change as the start of an exploding

and the new magazine Private Eye.

What Sherrin needed was a versatile team of talents

able to embrace the potent mixture of

conversation, satire, comedy, debate, and music.

David Frost had studied at Cambridge alongside Peter Cook.

He'd also studied Cook himself and the lessons he'd learnt

helped Frost perform stand-up at the Blue Angel club.

while working by day for the TV company Associated Rediffusion.

He had quite a smart technique of asking a question and then

not quite answering but working round

to whatever prepared joke about MacMillan he had.

He'd say, "Give me another subject!"

Somebody said, "The Queen!"

and David very quickly said, "The Queen is not a subject."

A quick-witted fast-on-his-feet smart-arse

was just what Ned Sherrin needed to front the new project.

We met for lunch the next day at Percerose in Shepherd's Bush Green.

The cast for the pilot saw Sherrin involve young

Cambridge Footlights graduates John Bird, John Fortune, and Eleanor Bron,

alongside co-founder of Private Eye Willie Rushton.

From his own doorstep at Tonight, Sherrin took Brian Redhead, and

Lance Percival. And with Bird browsing West End musicals

he added Tonight's regular singers, David Kernan and Millicent Martin.

What Ned said was "We're going to do a pilot,

"and we'd like you to come in and do it. It's a completely new format.

"We want you to sing the opening number,

we want you to do some sketches with the rest of the cast,

and we want you also to sing a jazz number."

It was time to put the format to the test and make the pilot.

There was one sketch I remember that was some linking stuff

that David and Christopher Booker

and there was a discussion group and 12 Conservative ladies.

acerbic journalist, parliamentary sketch writer and theatre critic.

Yet another Tonight regular, his notoriously argumentative

With the sense of its own history for which the BBC is famous,

And they kept coming up with double

There was this wonderful woman who said, "Mr. Levin, mr. MacMillan

has always satisfied me.", and she said it five times.

At one point, he said to them, "Thanks to ridiculous letters you send them

"Conservative Party Central Office has bigger wastepaper baskets

than anywhere else in Brittain.".

And one woman said, "And they need them, mr. Levin, and they need them.".

And Bernard said, was that my point or yours?

The show went on and some middle higher ups in the BBC

were recruited to look at the pilot the following week.

And they for some reason thought it was disgraceful and said no to it.

The show seemed destined to be That Wasn't The Week That Was,

The Conservative ladies were so shocked,

they protested to Central Office, who protested to the BBC.

So some rather more senior and sophisticated people at the BBC

and they thought it was rather good.

And they said one more pilot, and then let's go.

So without the Conservative ladies and of course Bernard,

it wouldn't have happened.

But Brian Redhead had returned to Tonight and Bron, Bird and Fortune

had taken THEIR satirical review, The Establishment,

to New York, so were unavailable.

New performers were required and remembered Roy Kinnear from a review

and invited him to join the cast cartoonist Timothy Birdsall.

The very last to join was seasoned actor Kenneth Cope who, at the time,

was playing villain Jed Stone in Coronation Street.

Do you know a character who hangs out round here name of Dennis Tennant?

Aye, he lives just down the road - Number 11 Coronation Street.

Thanks, Da'. Ta-ra, well! By gum... he looks a real life case doesn't he?

Sherrin had assembled his team for a project that still carried

conceived at an early meeting with a performer from the first pilot.

There was an exploratory lunch with John Bird.

I was explaining the ethos of the programme -

the idea that every Saturday night ought to be like a mini New Year.

There was a feeling that the week is over - let it go,

it was a good time to get it out of your system.

I was explaining this to John and he said, quoting the old Shell

the car whizzing by and "That was Shell, that was..." - and he said,

Just 5 or 6 weeks before we thought we were supposed to be doing it,

Stuart Hood, the controller of BBC Television, said in a press

"but it certainly won't have That Was The Week That Was!"

It wasn't until we got the Radio Times for that particular Saturday,

that we were really sure we were actually on, that we were.

They were on, and the viewers in the BBC wouldn't know what hit them.

The studio audience was in place, the ridiculous title came up,

# That was the week that was

I would give a synopsis of all the different things that had happened

I ended up doing 40 of them,

# That was the week that was

# People are mending a few slips

# Teachers getting an £80 rise

# But you can't say this is putting # Mr. Chips in the chips

She used to set it up for us.

the beginning of the show with that lovely Dave Lee Orchestra

just set the show up for us,

That Was The Week That Was was, above all, topical. It was sketches, songs,

skits, arguments, regarding events of that particular week.

Although of course they did do some subjects of eternal importance.

An early target for TW3's elephant gun

was the previously sacrosanct world of politics.

For example Gerald Kaufman's first sketch, which was...

ten silent MP's who'd never spoken

in the 13 years or something that they'd been in the House.

Labour Charles Key, MP for Poplar. In his election address he called for:

The greatest effort and enthusiasm! With the very greatest enthusiasm

it's been impossible to trace a speech by him in the House

One of them got up to protest a breach of privilege or something -

and he was laughed out of the House.

Before That Was The Week That Was,

There is an assumption that every single politician is only in politics

entirely because of his sense of self sacrifice. He's doing it all for us,

nothing for himself, and that was the whole picture of politicians.

I wanted TW3 to be intensely topical, intensely aware of what was going on

in the world of politics, the various debates about religion,

the attitude to class, and news that came up.

And we were able to distill this, I suppose to a certain extent,

because so many of the writers had journalistic backgrounds.

The backbone of TW3 was its strong writing team, a winning combination

of star journalists and leading comedy writers.

Christopher Booker, Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall, Gerald Kaufman,

Johnny Speight, Dennis Potter, Richard Ingrams, Jack Rosenthal,

Herbert Kretzmer, Carol Brahms...

There were dozens of contributors, all with attitude.

While Frank Muir and Denis Norden were established comedy names,

they were joined by others just starting to make theirs,

including Peter Cook, Bill Oddie, and John Cleese.

Frost and I lunched a lot of people

we used to find halfway between Fleet Street and Shepherd's Bush

was the Cafe Royale and so we quite often prized a script out of somebody

by taking them to lunch and chatting them up.

For every week's show he had more material than would fit into one show,

to give him a chance to discard and be discriminating some.

That was the week that was. That'll be current affairs. Yeah...

Although TW3 often had an improvised look, most of it

was tightly scripted, rehearsed, and performed with the autocue.

But towards the end of the show some things were left to chance,

or, more accurately, to Lance.

The only improvising was me making up clips about topical events.

What was the one down here?

One of those jokes have come out,

# Well I must admit sir,

# I'm not being very swisher

# I assume you're referring to Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher

Just in case you don't know

# We've got to be very careful

# And she might be watching

Paul Merton and Ian Hislop use on...

In order to be able to be quick

listen to the radio the whole week.

# That's the end of... 1962. #

I would now like to present to you for sound radio, David Frost.

And it was that young cocky face that came to sum up everything

the rest of us. He was the presenter.

He used to do occasional sketches,

He was infinitely better when he was not doing a sketch

and simply holding the whole thing together

and tossing off the quips and comebacks and that sort of thing.

I wondered why in all the rehearsals you refused to do that last link.

But it was Ned Sherrin who ran the show. TW3 was very definitely

his baby. And everybody knew it.

To us in the cast, Ned Sherrin was very simply...God.

I mean, he made all the decisions.

I mean, he was 23, 24, 25...