The Late Show

'The Late Show' was yet one more attempt by the BBC to recapture the success of the political-satire programme 'That Was the Week that Was', which Auntie Beeb had 'suspended' (cancelled, actually) before the 1964 general election. 'The Late Show' staggered along for six months, occasionally triggering controversy but never high viewer figures.

IMDb's webpage lists Barry Humphries as playing Edna Everage on this programme, implying that 'she' was a recurring character in the programme. Not quite, Lord Copper. Humphries was one of the Late Show's scriptwriters, and at one point he pitched a comic monologue for an overblown housewife, acting out the character in a script conference. Producer Dennis Main-Wilson assumed that Humphries was offering to perform the monologue on-air, in female costume. Humphries later claimed that this was not his intention, yet 'The Late Show' indeed marks Edna Everage's debut ... as a prosaic housewife. The self-awarded DBE, the hideous facial mole and the 'possums' came later.

'The Late Show' featured scripts by Terry Jones and Michael Palin in collaboration: very much in their later Monty Python style, though less funny. There was also occasional 'lazy animation' of the sort now associated with Terry Gilliam (though done by other hands here), in which existing graphics are cut up and animated via stop-motion. One 'Late Show' episode featured a rostrum-camera shot of Holman Hunt's painting 'The Light of the World', depicting Jesus holding a glowing lantern. In stop-motion, Christ's mouth began to move while a voice (presumably also Christ's) delivered a verbatim commercial -- well-known in Britain at the time -- for a popular lantern fluid. This sketch succeeded in arousing controversy and provoking protests, but it utterly failed in raising viewer figures.

I recall 'The Late Show' from its original transmissions. The last time I visited the BBC archives, I wasn't able to locate any surviving episodes ... but I haven't verified that they've been wiped. I'll rate 'The Late Show' 5 out of 10. Some very talented people worked on this series (and Barry Humphries too), but all of them did better work elsewhere.