That Was The Week That Was: The Satire Boom of the 1960s
How a BBC television program transformed British political culture and inaugurated a new era of satirical comedy
By Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson, Ph.D. — satire.info
In the autumn of 1962, the BBC broadcast the first episode of That Was The Week That Was (known as TW3), and British political culture was permanently changed. The program — a live Saturday night satirical review hosted by David Frost and featuring a cast of writers and performers including Bernard Levin, Millicent Martin, and Roy Kinnear — attacked politicians, institutions, and social conventions with a directness and irreverence that British television had never previously seen. The show ran for only two series before being taken off the air by the BBC in the run-up to the 1964 general election, but its cultural impact was disproportionate to its brief run: it inaugurated the tradition of satirical political comedy on British television that continues to the present day.
The Cultural and Political Context
TW3 emerged at a specific historical moment when the conditions for satirical breakthrough were exceptionally favorable. The Macmillan government had been damaged by the Profumo affair (1963); the class-bound deference of the 1950s was beginning to erode under the pressure of the social changes that would characterize the decade; and a generation of Oxbridge-educated writers and performers — many of whom had worked on Beyond the Fringe (1960), the theatrical revue that had created the satirical template that TW3 would adapt for television — were ready to deploy their skills in the new medium. The combination of political scandal, social change, and concentrated talent produced a satirical moment whose effects were felt long after the program itself had ended. The BBC’s history of satirical programming situates TW3 within the longer institutional context of the corporation’s complex relationship with political comedy.
Legacy: Private Eye, Not the Nine O’Clock News, and Beyond
The satire boom of the early 1960s was not limited to TW3. Private Eye magazine (founded 1961) provided the print dimension of the satire boom, combining investigative journalism with satirical mockery of political and cultural establishment figures in a format that has proved remarkably durable. The theatrical dimension was provided by Beyond the Fringe, the Edinburgh Festival revue by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller that transferred to the West End and Broadway and set the tone for a generation of Oxbridge satirical wit. The tradition that TW3 inaugurated is visible in every subsequent generation of British political comedy: Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image, Have I Got News For You, The Thick of It all trace their institutional lineage, however indirectly, to the Saturday night breakthrough of 1962. TW3’s full history is documented in the BBC archives and in the substantial secondary literature on British satirical television.