Programme
The programme opened with a song ("That was the week that was, It's over, let it go ...") sung by Millicent Martin, referring to news of the week just gone. Lance Percival sang a topical calypso each week. Satirical targets, such as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Home Secretary Henry Brooke were lampooned in sketches, debates and monologues. Other targets were the monarchy, Britain's declining status as a global power, racism (particularly in the American South and South Africa under Apartheid), sexual and social hypocrisy, the class system, and the BBC itself. Well-remembered sketches include a 'consumers' guide to religion', which discussed relative merits of faiths in the manner of a Which? magazine report.
TW3 was broadcast on Saturday night and attracted an audience of 12 million. It often under- or overran as cast and crew worked through material as they saw fit. For the first three editions of the second series in 1963, the BBC attempted to limit the team by scheduling repeats of The Third Man after the programme, so they could not overrun. Frost took to reading synopses of the plots of Third Man at the end of each TW3, meaning there was little point in watching. The BBC dropped the repeats and TW3 returned to being open-ended.
On Saturday, October 20, 1962 the award of Nobel prizes to John Kendrew and Max Perutz, and to Francis Crick, James D. Watson, and Maurice Wilkins was satirised in a short sketch with the prizes referred to as The Alfred Nobel Peace Pools; in this sketch Watson was called "Little J.D. Watson" and "Who'd have thought he'd ever get the Nobel Prize? Makes you think, doesn't it". The germ of the joke was that Watson was only 25 when he helped discover DNA; much younger than the others.
Frost often ended a satirical attack with the remark "But seriously, he's doing a grand job". At the end of each episode, Frost usually signed off with: "That was the week, that was." At the end of the final programme he announced: "That was That Was The Week That Was...that was."
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Famous quotes containing the word programme:
“In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The idealist’s programme of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Bolkenstein, a Minister, was speaking on the Dutch programme from London, and he said that they ought to make a collection of diaries and letters after the war. Of course, they all made a rush at my diary immediately. Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the “Secret Annexe.” The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)