Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: It's the same old welcome back to 100 Years of Television, where for 100 weeks that started in October 2025, we've been counting down the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown will culminate on September 7, 2027. That's the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, the world came back from the brink of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962.
Today is countdown number 53.
That was the week that was.
If the Cuban Missile Crisis did anything, it fulfilled television's promise to put viewers in the middle of history as it unfolded in a way that print or radio could scarcely imagine.
From Herbert Morrison's radio account of the Hindenburg disaster. Oh, the humanity in 1937 to Edward R. Murrow's rooftop broadcasts during the Battle of Britain.
This is London in 1940.
Radio made urgency audible for the listener.
But for viewers around the world, television made the impending doom of the Cuban Missile crisis truly visceral.
The maps and photos of missile silos displayed in living rooms from coast to coast engaged Buer's central nervous system in a way that sound alone never could.
They did not only hear the firmness in President Kennedy's voice, seeing his determined gaze through the fixed frame of the screen made the tension between an existential peril and the President's grace under pressure trust truly palpable.
Once the crisis had passed and the world went on about its business, what television audiences wanted was some kind of release.
One way that television responded to the absurd prospect of nuclear annihilation was the time tested tradition of satire. It is fitting that the first response would start in Britain, the first country to launch regular television Service in 1936, as covered in Countdown 95.
From the caricatures printed in Georgian tabloids to the Victorian irreverence of Punch, the roots of British satire reached well back into the print era, fostering a tradition that assumed public life was fair game.
But in the age of electronic media, the BBC was the epitome of British decorum.
The restraint was first dictated by John Reath, the founding director general of the British Broadcasting Company from 1927 until 1938, Reith's guiding maxim was inform, educate and entertain. In that precise order of diminishing priorities, public affairs were to be covered with impartiality, authority, and what came to be known as Wreathian restraint.
Sharp opinions were permissible, but critiques stopped at the point of ad hominem attacks or maliciously mocking those in public office.
John Reith retired from the BBC in 1938, but his shadow loomed over the organization well into the 1940s.
So it might have come as a bit of a surprise to radio audiences in 1951 when the BBC launched the Goon Show, a surreal, anarchic comedy that challenged many of the conventions of traditional broadcasting.
Created by Spike Milligan and featuring rising comics like Peter Sellers, the Goon show treated authority and bureaucracy as raw material for all manner of nonsense for nearly a decade. The airing of its final episode in the winter of 1960, left something of a hole in the British cultural landscape.
But if radio could make authority sound silly, then television could make it look downright ridiculous, and two years later, the BBC rose to the task.
On November 24, 1962, just a few weeks after the Cuban Missile crisis, the BBC began airing a program that treated the week's news not as sacred text, but as grist for large scale mockery.
That Was the Week that was, or TW3 as it was quickly branded, wasn't the first time politics was the butt of British humor, but it is fondly recalled as the first time television made topical satire. The premise for a nationwide weekly ritual.
TW3 was created, produced and directed by Ned Sheeran and Jack Duncan.
The host was an aspiring 23 year old Briton named David Frost.
Frost was neither a comic nor a journalist, but was earning a reputation as a clever, articulate champion of the post war intellectual culture that produced beyond the Fringe and other satirical reviews.
Frost had studied English at Cambridge, edited the university magazine Granta, and was coming up through the ranks of the BBC from the Talk department, a division that placed him in proximity to news discussion and analysis rather than either straight news reporting or sketch comedy.
He was smart, clean cut and spoke with the kind of precise British diction that lent an air of gravitas to his on screen Persona even as he delivered devastating punchlines.
That Was the Week that Was was more than a variety show with topical jokes.
It was a weekly act of cultural sabotage.
Putting a traditional comedian at the front might have framed the show as frivolous or irresponsible.
David Frost, by contrast, looked like someone who might just as plausibly be hosting the BBC's flagship current affairs program, Panorama.
Young as he was, Frost's presence provided a sense of reassurance that the show's incendiary material was being presented by somebody who bore some resemblance to an adult.
From the first fade in, TW3 offered a departure from anything that had preceded it.
More than a comedy about politics, it was a kinetic collage that borrowed the familiar constructs of current affairs in journalism. Headlines, quotes, summaries and debates were delivered with a serious tone and then subverted with sketches, monologues and music.
The show vaporized whatever remained of John Reith's long shadow of restraint and turned the venerable Beebs mantle of seriousness inside out every week. TW3 opened with a musical number performed by Millicent Martin, a young actress and singer who warbled outrageous political observations with the calm demeanor of a BBC newsreader.
Martin's phrasing delivered an absurdist counterpoint to the biting lyrical content, declaring in the opening minutes of each episode the show's subversive tension between decorum and dissent.
The lyrics of the opening number changed with the headlines, but the show was careful to use the same melody every week, effectively turning the news into a chorus that the whole country could sing along to.
And fittingly, the opening song of that first show in November 1962 offered a cutting recap of the recent, narrowly survived Cuban missile crisis and the strange anti climax that followed.
TW3 honed its satirical edge by putting public figures and institutions the prime minister, the parliament, established manners and the hypocrisies of class and society into a stark comic relief that seemed disruptive under the solemn mantle of the BBC.
What was pioneering in its time seems obvious now, but it was startling amid a post war BBC culture where convention and respectability were part of the brand.
That was the week that was ran for only two seasons over 13 months, airing its last episode in Great Britain on December 28, 1963. But that was not the end of the weeks that were Even as the last episode aired in Britain, TW3 was setting up its second act across the pond after NBC secured the rights to replicate the program in the United States. The A pilot episode aired on November 10, 1963, under the direction of producer Leland Hayward.
David Frost remained the on air face of the US version, effectively importing the show's tone along with its title.
Between Hayward and Frost, the American version of TW3 leaned hard on its British predecessor's DNA.
Frost remained central, but American folk singer and actress Nancy Ames assumed Millicent Martin's role as the resident vocalist.
More of a trained singer than a comic, Ames helped translate the British program's satirical format into the American idiom when it crossed the Atlantic. TW3 landed in an environment that was primed for its kind of humor. The trail had been blazed in print and radio, from editorial cartoons to Will Rogers folksy monologues.
Early television variety shows routinely included topical jokes, but TW3 was arguably the first program to make political satire the sustained focus of an entire broadcast.
That Was the Week that Was was by no means the first program on television in either the UK or the US to make fun of politicians or joke about current affairs, but TV historians routinely cite TW3 as a prototype ground zero for a through line that continued in the 1960s with the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, expanded in the 1970s through Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, sharpened in the 1980s and 90s with programs like Spitting Image and Politically Incorrect, and became staples of the cable era with Comedy Central's the Daily show and the Colbert Rapport.
This brings us to the end of number 53 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when Television takes us to Dealey plaza in Dallas, Texas in November 1963.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027. For more, aim your gizmo to 100 Years tv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin, and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:12:12] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and ha.
But ho ho ho good got the lives right now.
