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Come 6.30, four hours to go before the soft underbelly of society was to be obligingly exposed to the watching millions, and as yet nothing in the quiver save three outrageous puns and a joke about knickers.

Alan Bennett on writing topical comedy, 5 October 1967

THE REVUE THAT HAD led Bennett to that quiet teatime desperation, Beyond the Fringe, is one of the landmarks of twentieth century comedy. As Bennett, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook laid into Macmillan, Churchill and one-legged stuntmen in an apocalyptic basement set, the idea of comedy as a cleansing, angry, youthful force got its first British airing for decades. Many of the older generation hated it, but a surprising number applauded. Even staunch conservative T. S. Eliot gave praise. ‘An amazingly vigorous quartet of young men: their show well produced and fast moving, a mixture of brilliance, juvenility and bad taste,’ he wrote. In spite of reservations, ‘it is pleasant to see this type of entertainment so successful.’93

Success piled on success. The show conquered the country, then the USA. Cook opened a nightclub, The Establishment, to showcase the best British and American insurgent entertainment in an atmosphere redolent of Weimar Germany. Scurrilous, bedroom-built magazine Private Eye, when it wasn’t facing imminent legal destruction, thrived. The steady, apolitical ‘progress’ of the fifties transformed into urgent, questioning rebellion. Television, the medium of the hour, just had to be invaded.

And it was, on 25 October 1962. ‘For the first time on television,’ promised the publicity, ‘a critical, funny, adult, non-singing, non-dancing show about current events.’ This ‘weekly dose of virulent, unrestrained satire’ promised to take an unflinching look at ‘people from a race-rioter to the PM, at subjects from the Common Market to the Space Race.’ Its crack team of young Turks would ‘be seeking pomposity – when they find it they will attack and deflate.’94

This crocodile of clichés described What the Public Wants?, a hastily assembled late-night sketch show from Associated-Rediffusion, which featured such incendiary concepts as Father Christmas’s sleigh being mistaken for a UFO and shot down by the RAF. It was, said The Times, ‘a feeble and irritating little show that suffers from the callow superciliousness of undergraduate revue’.95 By the end of the year it was gone, with another, Granada’s Man Bites Dog, scrapped in pre-production.

If the irresponsible commercial channel couldn’t raise a decent satire, what chance the regulation-bound BBC? John Bird, a colleague of Cook, took the concept of ‘Establishment TV’ to young BBC producer Ned Sherrin, who moulded it into a hip end-of-the-week compendium of sketch, song, cartoon and political barb. The studio would be coolly stripped down, showing its busy internal workings and louche audience of wine-bibbing hangers-on. The pace would be relentless, the cast impeccable: improv singer Millicent Martin, Private Eye alumnus Willie Rushton, Joan Littlewood alumnus Roy Kinnear and ‘calypsologist’ Lance Percival among them. The host would be not Bird or Cook, but David Frost.

This decision raised eyebrows, and a few hackles. Regarded, rather snobbishly, in his Cambridge years as a hyper-ambitious hack, Frost had already earned Cook’s disapproval for performing highly derivative ‘homages’ to his material. His greatest television achievement to date was fronting Rediffusion’s dance craze schedule filler Let’s Twist on the Riviera. Sherrin ignored these concerns and launched one of television’s most prodigious careers.

On 24 November, That Was the Week That Was played out in a welter of fluffed cues and missed cameras. The army, the police and composer Norrie Paramor were among the targets. Bernard Levin (‘the most detestable smarty-boots on television’) hosted an adversarial discussion with public relations workers in a debate disarmingly titled ‘Invective’. The stand out sketch, a parody of ITV’s shameless ‘ad-mag’ programme Jim’s Inn, was a refugee from Cook’s Beyond the Fringe days. ‘Anyone who stayed up in the hope of enjoying some ripe topical savagery, continental-style, was doomed to disappointment,’ wrote Peter Green in the Listener. ‘I hope future editions will get some real bite in them, and shed that air of daring cosiness which bedevils British satire at its very roots.’96

Fortunately, TW3 rapidly grew teeth. The third edition achieved Sherrin’s dream of transition from the review pages to the headlines, thanks to comically edited footage of Macmillan talking cobblers and Levin putting the boot into hotel magnate Charles Forte. ‘Private Eye may lash out in all directions and provoke nothing more than a chorus of bland coo-ings,’ observed The Times, ‘but let the BBC do something similar … and they arouse the public to close on a thousand telephone calls and a threat of legal action.’97 Anthony Burgess summed up its winning naivety: ‘Its special virtue is its genuine innocence, a sort of schoolboy surprise that the adult world should behave as it does. A very nice little programme at which only a boor could take offence. Wholesome, high-spirited, unpretentious, humanly unbuttoned, often shrewd, amusing and – above all – totally lacking in malice.’98 Even Peter Green was now sold. ‘[TW3] has acquired that sine qua non of satire, a firm moral stance. “We mustn’t make fun of Mr Macmillan, we mustn’t be rude about British catering” – the terrifying thing is that the views of these witless subtopian boot-lickers command attention. Why, in heaven’s name?’99

Old and young, subtopian and cosmopolitan, reactionary and progressive – all went head to head last thing on a Saturday night, the latter always getting the final word. And what words they were, from a writers’ roster that gathered illustrious names of the past, present and future: Dennis Potter, David Nobbs, Bill Oddie, Kenneth Tynan, John Betjeman, John Cleese, Roald Dahl and many more fed Frost and friends killer lines. For Green, and many others, TW3 became unimpeachable, mainly because ‘it carries a bigger moral punch than all of its critics combined, and the day it is bullied or snivelled out of existence will be a poor one for British television.’100

That day was close at hand. When a second series began in 1963, the blaze of triumphant pre-publicity soon faded into critical murmurings of a loss of purpose. ‘There is less specific emphasis on politics, and a marked swing towards mildly risqué intimate revue.’101 Sketches about open flies, and liberal sprinklings of outré words like ‘bum’ and ‘poo’, had a habit of taking over the more considered (and considerably harder to knock out) political material. This smutty path of least resistance would dog topical comedy shows ever after.

The heavyweight stuff did continue, though, and proved to be the show’s undoing. When Macmillan was replaced by the questionable choice of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, TW3 pounced, dressing Frost in Disraeli gear to deliver a politely damning ‘in character’ summary of Douglas-Home’s unique attributes. What with this, a sketch mocking another Tory hero, Baden-Powell, and the continuing stream of ‘racy’ material, many formerly indulgent champions of the show reached their limits of tolerance, and called for cancellation.

The Director General, Hugh Carleton Greene, felt TW3 was becoming an albatross for the Corporation, monopolising staff time and detracting from his achievements in the more serious departments of drama and current affairs. With a general election looming the following year, he curtailed its run at the end of 1963. Private Eye, the relatively low profile satirical survivor, summed up popular reaction to TW3’s sacrifice by having ‘Greene’ confess: ‘What I really wanted was something reminiscent of Berlin in the 1930s; now that I’ve stopped it, I feel that I have at last recreated that atmosphere.’102