This is the tenth and final post of a series. The previous posts are:
#1: The Howdy Doody Show
#2: 77 Sunset Strip
#3: The Edge of Night
#4: The Defenders
#5: That Was The Week That Was
#6: The Dick Van Dyke Show
#7: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
#8: The Mary Tyle Moore Show
#9: St. Elsewhere
#10: The West Wing
I remember the original TV special for That Was The Week That Was that aired in 1963 shortly before JFK was assassinated. I still recall the cold open that featured someone supposedly calling into the White House. The phone was answered by a very young girl’s voice who was intended to be Caroline Kennedy. The caller asked for her father, who wasn’t in. Then the caller asked repeatedly for her other relatives, one by one, and she kept answering that they were not in.
Finally the exasperated caller asked, “Well, who is in charge?”
At which point a smiling Back man (I think it may have been Nipsey Russell) appeared on the screen and declared, “We are!”
Cue the theme song.
That routine might not seem like much today, but back then it received a big laugh from the studio audience. It set the tone for the irreverent humor of this British import of political satire that was to distinguish TW3, as it was generally known, from other comedy shows.
Not only was the show imported from the UK, but its host, David Frost, was as well.
When the weekly show began airing, I was a faithful viewer. As were several of my classmates. I used to talk and laugh about the previous night’s episode in school with Gary and Maryann. Probably some others as well.
As it was broadcast live from New York City, it featured regulars from the Broadway stage such as Alan Alda, Phyllis Newman, and Bob Dishy. Other recurring cast members included Buck Henry, Burr Tillstrom and his puppets, and Henry Morgan.
On one episode Woody Allen was a guest, and that was the first time I had ever seen or heard of him. He did a terrific monologue in which he described how he had been hired by a company where his only function was to look Jewish. He was eventually fired because he took off too many Jewish holidays.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, many of the satirical songs were provided by Tom Lehrer.
And speaking of songs, there was always the TW3 “girl” Nancy Ames who sang the theme song at the start and end of each show, with new topical lyrics each week.
Because it was a live show and this was 1964-65 (it only lasted barely two seasons), and the network was NBC, none of the shows has been preserved. The network pooh-bahs didn’t have any inkling that anyone might be interested in the show after it was broadcast.
I can recall a few highlights, however.
There was one cold open where an announcer gave example after example of Easter sales going through the roof and how much money was being made from the holiday by commercial interests, whereupon Nancy Ames appeared and sang, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!”
When the Berlin Wall was lowered for one day, allowing relatives on either side to see each other for the first time in years, puppeteer Burr Tillstrom did a very moving rendition of how a meeting between two relatives might have gone using only his hands.
Then in the fall of 1964 when the presidential campaign between LBJ and Barry Goldwater was in full swing, the Republican Party bought the entire half hour to pre-empt the show at the beginning of October for a campaign ad showing Goldwater visiting Dwight Eisenhower on his farm in Western Pennsylvania. Even I, a die-hard Goldwater supporter, found the ad a bore.
The following week TW3 had a field day tearing that half hour ad to shreds. At the end of the show, Nancy Ames sang the following lyrics to the TW3 theme song (yes, I remember them after all these years):
The GOP bought three more weeks of our space
They could keep us off until after the race
So we’ll say Merry Christmas right now just in case
From That Was The Week That Was!
Probably because of all the pre-emptions, TW3 never developed an audience, so it was cancelled. Although it had been on for two seasons, neither one of them was a full season.
Shortly after that, NBC changed its policy and stopped selling entire half hours to political campaigns.
The following year Tom Lehrer released his album with him singing all the songs he wrote for the show,That Was The Year That Was.
If you search on YouTube you can find the audio of one or two episodes of TW3, and I found this brief segment of the ending of a TW3 episode embedded in a much longer video. It features Henry Morgan and Nancy Ames.