Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

Antecedents of Python, part two

My pre-Python collection is now complete, thanks to the arrival of the At Last the 1948 Show DVD set in the mail yesterday.  There are five episodes on two discs, and while I think the material on 1948 Show is a lot stronger (I’ve always preferred the “edgier” writing style of John Cleese and Graham Chapman) I have to give props to Do Not Adjust Your Set for a better presentation; the program seems to move along more seamlessly than 1948 Show.  (However, this might be due to the fact that the episodes included here are not the complete episodes, but were culled from surviving compilations that were discovered in Sweden.)

Many of the sketches on At Last the 1948 Show have a distinctive I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again imprint, due to the fact that stars Cleese and Tim Brooke-Taylor both performed and wrote for that classic BBC radio comedy (a few of the sketches on this DVD also have a clean-shaven Bill Oddie, another ISIRTA alum, present as well).  I believe that’s why many of 1948 Show’s sketches have a higher batting average than the ones on the Do Not Adjust Your Set collection; there are some real goodies here, including a falling-down funny espionage spoof entitled “Mice Laugh Softly Charlotte” which may remind Python fans of the “Lemming of the BDA” sketch on Flying Circus.  It’s also not unfair to note that Cleese dominates much of the proceedings; he positively shines in sketches like “Top of the Form” (in which he presides over a college quiz bowl…the answer to all the questions in one round is “pork”) and “The Nosmo Claphanger Quiz Show” (in which he plays an abusive game-show host).

I mentioned in the Do Not Adjust Your Set post that one of the extras on this DVD set is an interview with Tim Brooke-Taylor about working on 1948 Show, and he singles out one particular sketch, “Plain Clothes Police Women,” as particularly memorable.  Cleese, Chapman and Marty Feldman appear as cops in drag as Brooke-Taylor gives them an assignment that they’re to appear at a strip club working undercover as hookers.  He asks each one of them about the name they’re to use, and apparently the three of them decided to ad-lib something completely different because Brooke-Taylor is completely unable to maintain his composure (he acknowledges that it was unprofessional of him as an actor, but pretty damn funny otherwise).  The first episode on this DVD set also contains a sketch entitled “Four Yorkshiremen,” which Python fans will no doubt recognize as a staple of the Monty Python stage shows (“We used to dream of living in a corridor…would have been a palace to us”); it was actually written by Brooke-Taylor for this series…though I will admit the Pythons gave it a bit more panache.  1948 Show also had some recurring characters in a group of four men who dressed, talked and acted alike in “The Four Sydney Lotterbies;” Brooke-Taylor mentions that it was Feldman who came up with the idea for the characters’ moniker, but Tim was unaware that there was actually a BBC producer with that name…something he discovered when Lotterby oversaw the production of Broaden Your Mind.

- Posted by Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. - 10:50:55 PM - comment []