HOME CINEMA
86 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
AT LAST THE 1948 SHOW
Ian Fordyce; UK 1967; BFI; Region 2 DVD; Certificate 12;
325 minutes; 4:3. Extras: new interviews with John Cleese,
Tim Brooke-Taylor; 1967 appearance by team on BBC1
chat-show Dee Time (audio only); 2006 NFT interview with
Cleese; 2003 intro by Cleese to BFI event; 2000 discussion
including Brooke-Taylor, Aimi MacDonald (audio only);
archive audio interviews with Brooke-Taylor, MacDonald;
1968 interview with Marty Feldman; photos, drawings
from Humphrey Barclay’s personal archive; image gallery;
reproductions of scripts for incomplete episodes.
DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET
Daphne Shadwell/Adrian Cooper; UK 1967–69; BFI;
Certificate PG; 350 minutes; 4:3. Extras: Terry Gilliam short
animations The Christmas Card, Beware of the Elephants,
Learning to Live with an Elephant (1968); interviews with
producer Humphrey Barclay, Michael Palin; short interviews
with John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor; Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah
Band documentary; intro by Neil Innes; audio excerpts
from missing episodes; photos, cuttings, drawings from
Barclay’s personal archive; scripts of missing episodes.
Half a century ago two extraordinary cultural
shifts were ushered in on television screens: on
20 July 1969, the Apollo 11 mission landed on
the moon and shifted the human perspective
on the universe; less than three months later, on
5 October, the BBC broadcast the first episode
of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, inaugurating
a new era of young men – and, later, quite old
ones – imagining they could hold audiences
spellbound by recounting the criminal careers
of Doug and Dinsdale Piranha, singing the
‘Lumberjack Song’, and saying “’E’s pining for
the fjords” in a mockney accent. And honestly,
I don’t like to think about which of the two
has loomed larger in my life. (Let’s leave aside
the question, possibly even more vexed, of
which one involved more location shooting.)
A lot of the interest of At Last the 1948 Show
and Do Not Adjust Your Set lies in their status as
the Mercury and Gemini, earlier, experimental
programmes, to Python’s Apollo. The Python
team was formed from a combination of the
two series’ personnel: Graham Chapman and
John Cleese from At Last...; Eric Idle, Terry Jones,
Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam from D NAY S.
A lot of what made Python funny – I’m going to
assume we agree Python was funny – is already
here: absurd juxtapositions, low gags enlivened
by highbrow references, stock characters (Palin’s
unhelpful shopkeepers, Chapman’s cheerfully
vague Blimps), voices and intonations (Cleese’s
strangulated rage), catchphrases (“And now
for something completely different,” spoken
in At Last... by Aimi MacDonald), even whole
sketches. The first episode of At Last... features
an early version of Chapman’s man wrestling
himself – the athleticism and precise observation
of the mannerisms of professional wrestling
are more impressive than in later outings on
TV and film. A nonsensical quiz show from
DNAYS ended up virtually unchanged on
the LP Monty Python’s Previous Record. A neat
sketch set in an art gallery has Jones as a living
statue, in braces, with a knotted handkerchief
on his head, a prototype for the Gumbies.
At Last the 1948 Show was a late-night successor
to The Frost Report, a more pointedly satirical
programme, fronted by David Frost, remembered
now chiefly for the sketch in which Cleese,
Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett are lined up
in descending order of class and height. Cleese
was the linchpin of the new show: he brought
in Chapman, who he’d worked with in the
Cambridge Footlights, as well as future Goodie
Tim Brooke-Taylor, a colleague from Footlights
and the radio comedy I’m Sorry I’ll Read That
Again, and Marty Feldman, a co-writer on The Frost
Report. The four of them wrote and performed
the whole thing, with MacDonald – always
“The Lovely Aimi MacDonald” – doing links
and knowingly bimboish monologues. Her
excellence underlines what a boy’s club the rest
of it is; you wish she’d been given more to do, and
not saddled with a feeble catch-phrase (“Know
what I mean, darling?”). Occasional support came
from, among others, Idle, Corbett, the American-
born Dick Vosburgh and a youthful Barry Cryer.
Cleese is a dominant presence, certainly in the
first series, in part because of his height and the
sense of threat he almost constantly projects
(in an atypically mellow interview that’s one of
the extras he suggests that people think of him
as angry because of Basil Fawlty, but you can
feel the boiling long before then). As the series
goes on, Feldman’s weird presence, stooped,
bug-eyed and needy, seems more compelling.
The roots of At Last... are obviously in stage
revue – few of the gags need a camera or an edit.
D NAY S, on the other hand, could only be TV: it
was filmed partly on location, and much more
wrapped up in the medium, with lots of spoofs
of TV formats and tropes. It was broadcast at 5.25
on Thursday afternoons, ostensibly a children’s
programme, and has an essential gentleness and
joyousness that fit the supposed demographic. So
do some of the jokes, such as a courtroom sketch
in which words have randomly been swapped
for kinds of food – the defendant, listed as “of
no fixed watercress”, is charged with grievous
bodily marmalade: “One of the most cereal and
digestive crimes that it is possible to meringue.”
Hard to know what children will have made
of the occasional strip-club gags, though, and
by all accounts it soon accumulated an adult
following. Idle, Jones and Palin wrote the bulk
of the material, but were generous in doling out
gags to David Jason and Denise Coffey, proper
actors, who completed the core performing team.
Art-school refugees Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
performed a couple of songs a week and beefed
up numbers in a lot of the sketches (wonder
how the kids took the grim fatalism of ‘Death
Cab for Cutie’). Their sheer larkiness comes
over more clearly than on record; frontman Viv
Stanshall is particularly jaunty, before mental
illness and alcohol did him over. It feels as though
everyone was having a good time, and as a
result is more fun to watch now than At Last...
Gilliam joined for the second series, adding
animations between sketches, but only two
episodes survive, both pretty blurred. Neither
programme was properly archived, and what
material there is comes from a variety of sources.
Under the circumstances these three-DVD sets
are remarkably comprehensive and watchable,
and both come with generous packages of
extras, including some of Gilliam’s shorts
from his own archive, to give you the idea.
Archive Television by Robert Hanks
At Last the 1948 Show Aimi MacDonald’s
excellence underlines what a boy’s club the rest
of it is; you wish she’d been given more to do
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Home cinema, 5
