Reception
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was initially supportive, chastising the Postmaster General Reginald Bevins for threatening to "do something about it". However, the BBC received many complaints from organisations and establishment figures. Lord Aldington, vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, wrote to the BBC's director-general Hugh Carleton Greene that Frost had a "hatred" of the Prime Minister, which "he finds impossible to control". The programme also attracted complaints from the Boy Scout Association, upset by an item questioning the sexuality of its founder Lord Baden-Powell, and the government of Cyprus, which claimed a joke about Archbishop Makarios, the country's ruler, was a "gross violation of internationally accepted ethics".
Historians have identified TW3 as breaking ground in comedy and broadcasting. Graham McCann said it challenged the "convention that television should not acknowledge that it is television; the show made no attempt to hide its cameras, allowed the microphone boom to intrude and often revealed other nuts and bolts of studio technology." In the 1960s, this was unusual and gave the programme an exciting, modern feel. TW3 also flouted conventions by adopting "a relaxed attitude to its running time: loosely structured and open-ended, it seemed to last just as long as it wanted and needed to last, even if that meant going beyond the advertised time for the ending the real controversy of course, was caused by the content."
Its subject matter has also been praised. McCann says: "TW3...did its research, thought its arguments through and seemed unafraid of anything or anyone... Every hypocrisy was highlighted and each contradiction was held up for sardonic inspection. No target was deemed out of bounds: royalty was reviewed by republicans; rival religions were subjected to no-nonsense 'consumer reports'; pompous priests were symbolically defrocked; corrupt businessmen, closet bigots and chronic plagiarists were exposed; and topical ideologies were treated to swingeing critiques."
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