AT LAST THE 1948 SHOW/ DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET
Comprehensive reissues of proto-python foolery.
COMEDY that ages well is rare – comedy that is even funny the first time is unusual enough. Standards and mores change, perchance evolve. The various butts of jokes fade from the collective memory. One generation’s chuckle is another’s blasphemy. It is far from unusual, watching television comedy of the 1960s and 1970s in particular, to see things regarded as mainstream light entertainment then, which would be viewed as career-ending scandals if recorded and broadcast now.
Onto this tightrope tread these reissues of At Last The 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Set. Both were broadcast on ITV in the late 1960s, and both have lodged in the British comedy consciousness largely because of what some members of their casts went on to do. At Last The 1948 Show starred John Cleese and Graham Chapman, later of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Tim Brooke-taylor, later of The Goodies, and Marty Feldman. Featuring on Do Not Adjust Your Set were David Jason and The Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band, as well as soon-to-be Pythons Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle and Michael Palin.
As collectors’ items, these boxsets are unimpeachable. The At Last The 1948 Show box assembles for the first time both complete series of the programme; the Do Not Adjust Your Set box includes all known episodes, including five never previously available on DVD. The packaging, accompanying literature and extras are lavish. The only thing that can possibly let them down is the actual comedy contained therein.
Which, inevitably, is a mixed bag. Do Not Adjust Your Set in particular now seems substantially comprised of student revue zaniness. This is forgivable, given how recently the cast had been zany students, but it’s hard to recommend to a 21st-century audience as much beyond a period curio (though it is perhaps arguable that the sketch in which Eric Idle plays a TV star clinging for life to a bridge he has fallen from while passers-by proffer intrusive prurience, and ask for autographs and photographs, is a prescient portrait of modern celebrity).
Traces of Monty Python DNA are more discernible in the vastly superior At Last The 1948 Show, including some future Python sketches and tropes, among them the “Four Yorkshiremen” bit and the “And now for something completely different” continuity announcement. At Last The 1948 Show is gloriously dominated by the freshly unleashed John Cleese, in first seething flourish: his impatient, misanthropic psychiatrist terrorising Brooke-taylor’s bewildered patient would deserve ranking among Python’s greatest hits.
Extras: 10/10. Booklets, later cast interviews, episode guide, documentaries, Terry Gilliam animations, audio rarities, image galleries, unseen footage.