Trivia / At Last the 1948 Show

• The Cast Showoff: Aimi MacDonald was classically trained in ballet and began dancing professionally at the age of 14. Several of her link segments feature her showing off her dancing talents for the audience; for example, in one segment she performs a tap dance while reciting the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet.
• Corpsing: In "Plain Clothes Police Women", Tim Brooke-Taylor tries unsuccessfully to keep from laughing when PC Staveacre (Graham Chapman) announces that his drag name is "Philippa" (Tim has confirmed in interviews that the other three went off script for their drag names just to make him laugh); before long, all four performers are struggling to keep the sketch going.
• Enforced Method Acting: One sketch featured John Cleese as an intimidating psychiatrist and Tim Brooke-Taylor as his patient. Throughout rehearsals, Tim thought that John wasn't intimidating enough, and so, following Marty Feldman's advice, when it came to filming, Tim stamped on John's foot at the beginning of the filming...making John absolutely furious.
• Missing Episode: When Thames Television acquired the Rediffusion archive, they wiped the tapes of At Last the 1948 Show, and all that remained was a set of five half-hour compilations for Swedish and Australian television. However, between 1994 and 2015, kinescopes and other copies of eight episodes were recovered (including two from Marty Feldman's personal collection which his widow, Lauretta, left to John Cleese in her will when she died in 2010, and two, the first and last to be broadcast, from the personal collection of Sir David Frost, the series' executive producer, following his death in 2013), while the BFI re-constructed another two episodes from the compilations. Excerpts from the other three episodes are known to survive, so that about forty minutes of material is still missing (though the audio for the series is complete). The "complete" series was released on DVD in 2019.
• The Pete Best: Aimi MacDonald never collaborated with the Monty Python team in any of their future projects, and neither did Jo Kendall, the other regular actress in this series. MacDonald's place in the ensemble would later be taken by Carol Cleveland starting with Monty Python's Flying Circus; Kendall was initially set to take part in How to Irritate People, but a scheduling conflict saw her replaced by Connie Booth, who subsequently took over Kendall's role as the "straight woman" of the team.
• Throw It In!: Because re-shooting scenes and editing videotape was expensive, many flubbed lines and other mistakes made their way into the finished product, although in some cases they are seen by the performers as an improvement. Perhaps the most notable example is the case of Corpsing which affects all four actors in "Plain Clothes Police Women" as PC Staveacre (Graham Chapman) declares that his undercover name is "Philippa", which was not the name he had given in rehearsals. Tim Brooke-Taylor as the sergeant can barely stifle his laughter, and it only gets worse as Marty Feldman and John Cleese also give unscripted "stage names". Tim Brooke-Taylor later said in an interview that it may have been completely unprofessional, but it made for a memorable sketch.

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