At Last the 1948 Show (1967) is a classic British television sketch comedy series that is now best known as one of the stepping-stones that led to Monty Python's Flying Circus, but well deserves to be recognised in its own right. The show was written by and starred Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Marty Feldman, and was hosted by 'the lovely' Aimi MacDonald. This was one of the last television series to be commissioned for ITV franchise-holder Rediffusion¹. 13 × black and white half-hour² episodes were made in two series, the first running in February and March and the second between September and November 1967.

Unfortunately, due to the television politics of the day, the show was not fully broadcast outside London. Other ITV regions did not broadcast every episode and also broadcast the episodes they did show out of order. This meant that few duplicate copies of the series were made and the episodes were believed to have all been deleted along with most other Rediffusion shows.

Assembled At Last

In 1967 David Frost was a well-known British television host. When at Cambridge University he had been the secretary of its famous Footlights drama and comedy society, and so knew many of the talented writers and performers there. After leaving university he established his career on satire, alternating between ITV and the BBC. While at the BBC he hosted The Frost Report (1966-67), a satirical show for which he assembled many of the leading young writing and acting talents he knew, including those from Footlights such as Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman and John Cleese. Many of these had previously worked together on radio show I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again (1964-73). The Frost Report famously began the collaboration of Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett and its success allowed David Frost to create his own television company, Paradine Pictures. The enabled Frost to agree to create a satirical sketch show for Rediffusion and so he turned to two of the comedy team he had assembled for The Frost Report, namely John Cleese and Tim Brooke-Taylor. He was initially unsure which of the two would be the star of the new show, but they both wanted to develop the sketch show together. Brooke-Taylor and Cleese, along with Graham Chapman, had all previously been housemates. Cleese described being offered the chance to have his own show but ultimately collaborating with Brooke-Taylor with the words:

I was both flattered and very scared, but came to the conclusion that since I could surround myself with a team of hand-picked people, I wouldn't have to carry too much responsibility myself and would therefore be able to cope. I always strongly believed in safety in numbers. So, it turned out, did Tim Brooke-Taylor.

The title At Last the 1948 Show was intended as a joke about the snail-speed at which television shows were commissioned at the time.

Together At Last

John Cleese was instrumental in bringing his writing partner Graham Chapman into the show, where he became a performer for the first time having previously been a writer only. Another writer brought in to perform on the show was Marty Feldman, who was well-known as one of the two writers on the first three years of radio comedy Round the Horne (1965-68). David Frost was uncertain that Feldman was suitable for television as he had Graves' ophthalmopathy, which caused his eyes to protrude and be misaligned, yet the others insisted that Feldman had such a warm, winning personality the audience would respond to his charm. Cleese has described the genesis of the show with the words:

David Frost had approached Tim Brooke-Taylor and me to do a show. I think he meant for us to do two separate shows but we said we wanted to do it together and we immediately roped Graham in. Then we decided we wanted to use Marty because I'd got very friendly with Marty during 'The Frost Report' and I thought he would be a terrific performer. Then he was only known as a writer, he was the head writer on 'Frost' but not a performer.

Following the show John Cleese and Graham Chapman would become a third of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-74) while Tim Brooke-Taylor was a third of comedy trio The Goodies (1970-82). Yet Marty Feldman had the most immediate success as he was head-hunted by the BBC and given his own show, Marty, later It's Marty (1968-69), which also featured Tim Brooke-Taylor and included sketches written by the other three members of At Last the 1948 Show³. Initially nervous about performing on camera, he was given extensive rehearsals before the first series to build his confidence and give him an understanding of performing for television - by the second series he was at home. He was best able to create annoying characters that they nicknamed 'Mr Pest' while John Cleese's speciality was portraying comic anger.

Sadly Aimi MacDonald was given very little to do in the first series except to look glamorous, say 'And now for something completely different' and provide other introductions to various sketches. She was there mainly to avoid the traditional comedy format of either having songs between sketches or a linkman, instead being a link girl who introduces the next item as if it was an unimportant inconvenience. She would inform the audience that the next sketch was set in, say, Spain. A running joke in the first series was that in the first episode she was the only hostess, but in each subsequent episodes she would gain another hostess to help with the introductions until she was joined by six more hostesses all saying identical lines by the seventh episode. After being told that she would be joined by increasingly more co-hostesses during an early planning meeting Aimi replied, 'but I'm the loveliest' and from that moment on was always referred to onscreen as 'the lovely Aimi MacDonald'.

It was in the second series that she was given a larger role, launching the continuous 'Make the Lovely Aimi MacDonald a Rich Lady Appeal' as well as getting her own theme tune ⁴. The fund actually attracted some donations which were returned where possible and donated to charity where not. Her character was convinced that she was the star of the show and the others were only there doing comedy to fill in the time to allow her to change costumes.

Among the other world-famous actors and performers to appear in the series were Barry Cryer, Bill Oddie, Eric Idle, Sir Antony Jay, Denis Norden and Jo Kendall. Eric Idle later said:

My first little performances were in 'At Last the 1948 Show', that's where I first performed. But I played small parts, like the hand through the door, the man who comes in, the defence lawyer and one or two other things.

Idle became involved in At Last the 1948 Show as at the time it was being made, he, Barry Cryer and Graham Chapman were writing sitcom No 96 That's Me Over Here! (1967-70), which starred Ronnie Corbett.

Broadcast At Last

Many of the sketches that the show contained had been written for The Frost Report only to be vetoed by David Frost as being too outrageous. Other sketches were even older and created for their Cambridge University Footlights revues as this familiar material reassured all concerned that the style they were adapting would succeed. A few had even been created for I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, with Jo Kendall appearing in a sketch as Mary, a character from that radio show.

The sketches were generally unrelated to each other and more likely to be surreal rather than satirical. There were sketches featuring numerous characters named Sidney Lotterby, named after a real television producer and director⁵. Sidney Lotterby would produce Broaden Your Mind 96 An Encyclopaedia of the Air, a 1968-69 comedy series starring Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden⁶.

As the cast wanted to push the barriers in established television comedy and do what had never been done before, they chose to use an editor to tighten up the shows. This was at a time when editing was a labour-intensive process involving physically cutting the film and was actively discouraged by Rediffusion executives. Cleese and Brooke-Taylor were also told that they were not allowed to credit the editor, Johnny Fielder, as this would break the audience's illusion that the show was being performed as live. Insisting that Johnny Fielder should be credited for his role in the show he was given the credit Choreographer of Underwater Chariot Race'.

Despite the revolutionary content, even as the series was made it was considered to be old-fashioned. Rival channel BBC2 began broadcasting in colour in 1967 and as a black and white sketch show At Last the 1948 Show was viewed as dated almost instantly.

Merchandising At Last

Two records were released of material from At Last the 1948 Show in 1967. The first was the double-A-side single of 'John Cleese and the 1948 Show Choir' singing 'The Ferret Song' and 'The Rhubarb Tart Song', both originally from I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again. An album containing various sketches was also released.

Found At Last

As At Last the 1948 Show was little seen around the UK, many of the sketches were re-used in later shows, not only those featuring the cast but even shows performed by other entertainers. This includes Marty, The Two Ronnies, How to Irritate People and The Secret Policeman's Ball as well as various Monty Python records spin-offs, Live at the Hollywood Bowl and most famous of all, the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, which was written and first performed for At Last the 1948 Show.

As with many television episodes of the era, including such classics as Doctor Who, The Avengers, Dad's Army and Morecambe and Wise, Rediffusion wiped the videotapes containing the original shows in the 1970s and they were re-used to record other shows on. In his autobiography John Cleese describes this by saying:

You see, back in those Palaeozoic times TV shows were recorded on enormous reels of videotape, which were expensive and also took up a lot of storage space. So unless a repeat was on the cards, TV companies liked to reuse the tape. [Destroying television series were] Acts of vandalism that, for me, equal the burning of the library of Alexandria. David Frost's hatchet man... ordered the wiping of 13 episodes... so that he could free up four and a half feet of shelf space. So suddenly there were no tapes of 'The 1948 Show'. It was no more. It was an ex-series.

By 1990 when the surviving Rediffusion collection was donated to the BFI National Film Archive none of the company's original videotapes had survived. Only two episodes were believed to still exist as film and filmed telerecordings⁷. Shortly afterwards the BFI (British Film Institute) began a campaign to trace missing television episodes as part of their Missing Believed Wiped campaign and there were rumours that episodes existed at Sweden's Sveriges Television. These proved to be five compilation episodes of various sketches from both series that were felt to be the easiest to understand in Sweden, and these episodes were later released in the first home media release of the show.

The BFI continued to pursue their campaign to locate missing episodes. A collection of clips from Australia's ABC network returned a variety of fragments - censored scenes which had been removed from the broadcast material, as well as scenes used for promotional purposes - and two complete sketches. It was also discovered that a teenage fan, Ray Frensham, had recorded virtually every episode's soundtrack with a reel-to-reel tape recorder for his own use by using a microphone pointed at the television and these were of sufficient quality to be used to reconstruct the audio. The promotion generated from the Missing Believed Wiped initiative, which has an annual event to promote what is missing and celebrate found materials as well as programmes broadcast on the BBC, led to the discovery and recovery of more episodes, including two held in David Frost's personal archive. Although most of Episode 2 and the first episode of the second series remain missing, by using the best material available, including episodes reconstructed from the clips from Sweden and Australia, this series is regarded as the campaign's greatest success. The almost-complete series was released on DVD in 2019 and is also now available on BritBox, the BBC and ITV's online streaming service.