The Week that Wasn't
Christopher Booker
My old friend Bernard Levin was in his rather embarrassingly rhapsodic mood last week on the subject of a new musical entertainment organised by Ned Sherrin called Saturday Night With Sontag, or words to that effect, which prompted him to some schmaltzy reminiscences about a certain television show called That Was The Week That Was. Bernard happily drooled away about 'Frostie' and 'Al' and 'Willie' Rushton, and Roy Kinnear and Lance Percival known as jug-ears to all'. He recalled 'the extraordinary camaraderie that grew up among the participants', 'the hours we Passed in each others' company off the studio floor', 'padding in and out of each Other's dressing rooms' ; 'Millie's ebullience; David's gentle mien; Ned's laughter; these flavoured our feasts as they had flavoured so many all those years before'.
To readers who may still recall TW3 as the savage, biting, irreverent explosion of satirical rage which brought down the the Macmillan Government in a shower of Plaster and old grouse feathers, such talk of feasts flavoured with gentle miens may ring With a slight jar of incongruity. But in a curious way perhaps Bernard has caught the true flavour of That Was The Week better than all those fond remembrances of Saturday nights when the nation's television Screens streamed with blood. I myself played a certain part in that show. Each week I used to write (usually with David Frost) the main Political sketch, and sit around every Saturday tryjing to think up 'lightning impromptus' for later in the evening. And not for the first time when I hear people mooning on about 'the greatest thing in the history of tFlevision., I wonder whether we are all sitting in the same universe, talking of the same TV show.
Of course, like Bernard, I look back on those days with a certain nostalgia. TW3 was great fun to work on. Ned Sherrin, the Producer, enjoyed one of those moments given to few, when his talents were (as Lord keith would put it) 'stretched' in such a way
that he managed to put together something very remarkable.
But for someone who, like myself, came from the altogether less glamorous and grittier world of trying to produce Private Eye in the waiters' changing room of The Establishment Club, there was always something discrepant about TW3. I sprang from that briefly established tradition where the writers and actors who traded in what was laughingly known as 'satire' were by and large the same people. When Peter Cook or John Bird cracked a joke about the Home Secretary, as like as not it was their own. But here suddenly the 'satire industry' was being taken over by a whole showbusiness machine. The scriptwriters who might (or might not) have felt some passion behind their jokes, were just a lot of names on a roll at the end of the programme. The people who suddenly became known to twelve million star-struck viewers as 'fearless TV satirists' were nothing more than a group of amiable and highly-paid actors, picked up by cunning old Sherrin from various nightclubs and West End stages, reading off from the Autocue the lines written for them, And as the show blossomed into the greatest hit of the millennium, there was something ofan uncanny sleight of hand about the way in which these actors were transmuted into 'satirists' themselves. What indeed could have been moresatirical?
The incident which more than anything else finally turned the whole satirical fantasy of That Was The Week inside out was the extraordinary episode which followed on the death of President Kennedy. When, on the evening of Thursday 22 November 1963, the news of Kennedy's assassination came through to various BBC chiefs gathered for some self-congratulatory showbiz occasion at the Dorchester, the first instinct was that the week's instalment of TW3 (then nearing the end of its second brief series) should be scrapped. But a few hours of frenzied telephoning later, a new decision emerged. We would do a show—but something entirely different from anything TW3 had done before. We would stage an entirely serious 'requiem' for the murdered President.
Throughout that Friday I sat at my typewriter in Chelsea, producing a, series of 'tributes' that would be paid to Kennedy by each member of the team. There was to be a poem by Ned and Caryl Brahm, read out by Dame Sibyl Thorndike; a song about 'a young man who rode into a Western town' ; and two serious slabs of prose from B. Levin. By Saturday morning I was rather pleased with my contribution—nothing more could be said, I felt. As usual I went in to the studio to watch rehearsals—and suddenly I was gripped by a chill of acute embarrassment. As 'Al' and 'Lance' and 'Willie' stumbled through the lines I had written, I realised they were nothing more than the most appalling schmaltz. What was worse, the actors, few of whom were really touched by the death of a President they had never taken much note of, showed by their fooling around on the studio floor that they were obviously just as embarrassed. In a desperate attempt to save the day, Ned Sherrin told them they should rephrase their lines, make them 'informal', try to sound as if they were speaking impromptu. The results were even more dire (I remember Willie Rushton changing some lines about Kennedy sitting in the back of a rowing boat eating peanut butter sandwiches, while Jackie ate pate de foie at the front, to 'knocking back the peanut butter sandwiches'). By evening apart from Bernard's pieces, wh; :I were perfectly dignified) I was so embarrassed by the whole spectacle that, for the only time in the entire run, I retreated home to watch the programme in privacy. It lived up to my worst fears, even to the point where Lance Percival, having to utter some line about Kennedy being 'the first Western politician to make politics a respectable profession in thirty years', nearly 'corpsed' on the set.
But then the extraordinary fantasy of 'those times' took over. By the beginning of the following week, Ned was telling us that the programme had been flown to the States and had been an astonishing success. NBC had been submerged in congratulatory telegrams. There was to be a 'rush' LP record. Hubert Humphrey had spoken movingly to the American Senate of the way these 'young Britons', with 'superb just short of staccato control' had produced a 'show of reverence and respect'—and read the entire script into the Congressional Record.
The satirical coup de grace was when we received news that the entire cast (and three scriptwriters) were to be flown across to New York as the guests of the 'Jewish Ladies Philanthropic League', to re-enact the whole show in Madison Square Garden. On a January evening in 1964, we arrived at the hall to find a gigantic international liberal jamboree in progress—Mexican dancers, Filipino folk singers, Japanese concert pianists, Senator Jacob Javits pacing backstage with a concerned look. Finally, the moment came. We all filed on the stage. David Frost announced to the 20,000 Jewish ladies and their consorts that the team would first gave an impression of TW3's normal style. Millie Martin and Roy Kinnear stepped forward to go through their famous 'fly buttons' sketch. Frostie performed, for the seventy-ninth time, his celebrated 'Sinking of the Royal Barge' monologue. Then the lights dimmed. The air of 'reverence and respect' which came over the audience could have been cut with a knife. As the fearless satirists went through the 'Kennedy Tribute' number there was not a dry eye in the house.
A few months later I was introduced to an extravert American real estate man. When he came into the room, he was obviously troubled by the sight of me, and went on worrying at his problem. Finally he clapped his hand to his forehead and cried, 'I know where I saw you before—you were the guy in Madison Square Garden that night, who sat through the whole show with his head in his hands'.
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