Trivia / That Was the Week That Was

• Creator Backlash: Tom Lehrer detested Nancy Ames' performances of his songs on the US version, feeling that her vocalizing was too conventional and suspecting that she didn't get the humor of the lyrics. His main motivation in recording the That Was the Year That Was album was to make the songs available in the way he'd intended them to be performed.
• In Memoriam: Both the 23 November 1963 and 28 December 1963 episodes featured tributes to assassinated US President John F. Kennedy; in the latter episode, actor Robert Lang recited a poem referencing other figures in British and world politics, entertainment, and the arts who had died in 1963.^note  These included French singer Édith Piaf, French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, Pope John XXIII, cricketer Jack Hobbs, singer Mike Holliday, newspaper editor Arthur Christiansen, writer Aldous Huxley, American writer Robert Frost, Irish writer Louis MacNeice, French painter Georges Braque, automaker William Morris (elevated to the peerage as Lord Nuffield), Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, Welsh doctor Horace, Lord Evans (doctor to the Royal Family), American columnist and hostess Elsa Maxwell, New Zealand-born cartoonist David Low (creator of Colonel Blimp), French actor Adolphe Menjou, Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, osteopath Stephen Ward (who introduced Christine Keeler to John Profumo), and finally John F. Kennedy.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Though the series has mostly survived intact, what was topical in 1962-63 is largely forgotten now, so repeat airings of the series have become increasingly rare. Even when BBC2 aired weekly episodes for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they had been cut up and re-assembled from the original broadcasts and included annotations to explain the once-topical references; only a handful of episodes are known to circulate in the format in which they were originally broadcast.
• Missing Episode:
  • Surprisingly for a series which aired live, more than fifty years ago, and on the TV station of a corporation not known for preserving old programmes responsibly, just one of the 37 episodes of the British version of TW3 (from 13 April 1963) has no known surviving recording.
  • The American version is less fortunate; most of the tapes were wiped after broadcast, although a copy of the pilot was donated to the Library of Congress by a collector. Luckily, teenage fan Art Chimes made audio recordings of nearly every episode during the original run, and they are available to listen to for free on the University of Georgia's library website.
• Screwed by the Network: Happened twice, only once successfully.
  • Averted at the beginning of the second series in 1963. TW3 aired on BBC Television at 10:45 on Saturday nights and, since it was the last programme before the station went off the air for the night, it frequently ran over its allotted time. To force them to finish on time, the BBC scheduled repeats of the TV series spinoff of The Third Man starring Michael Rennie and Jonathan Harris after TW3. Frost responded by reading summaries of each week's Third Man episode at the end of TW3, killing audience interest in the former. The BBC gave up after three episodes and TW3 went back to running over time.
  • Played straight after the end of the second series; a General Election was called for 1964, and the BBC cancelled the series, citing the need to remain impartial in the run-up to the election.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: The series aired for just over a year (November 1962-December 1963) and just 37 episodes, but it was one of the first series aired on The BBC to openly criticise the political establishment, and the effects of the "satire boom" of the 1960s which TW3 helped to launch can still be seen on British television to this day.
• Throw It In!: Since the programme aired live, all sorts of flubbed lines and ad-libs ended up in the finished product, but two examples stand out:
  • At the beginning of one of Bernard Levin's debate segments in 1963, writer and musician Desmond Leslie approached Levin and asked for a moment of his time, then proceeded to attack him - first verbally, then physically - for a negative review he had given to the production An Evening of Savagery and Delight starring Leslie's then-wife Agnes Bernelle.^note  As a large part of Levin's criticism had been directed at the malfunctioning sound system - of Leslie's own design - Bernelle has speculated that Leslie may have been acting out of embarrassment rather than out of loyalty to her. Leslie was escorted out of the studio by security before he could seriously injure Levin.^note  Levin and Leslie met again years later in a restaurant in Dublin, but their conversation was much more civil and no reference was made to the earlier fight.
  • As the end credits of the final episode rolled, half a dozen cast members - Kenneth Cope, David Kernan, Al Mancini, Millicent Martin, Lance Percival, and Willie Rushton - decided to pile into a convertible that had been used in a sketch with Percival, who took the wheel and drove the car out of the studio.

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