The Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club was founded in 1883 with about 30 members. Its first revue was put on in June of that year to “a large and fashionable audience” of around 800 people. Its earliest material was drawn from the standard repertoire of Victorian light entertainment – short farces, burlesque and comic operetta. By the early 1950s, the annual summer revue had started coming to the attention of the wider world, with BBC radio broadcasting its first selections from it in 1951.

It was during the 1950s that some of the familiar names in British broadcasting first came to prominence with the Footlights. Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Eleanor Bron and David Frost all appeared in the annual revues, many of which transferred to the London stage. In 1960, the group took a show to the Edinburgh Festival under the title Beyond The Fringe. Its principal subject matter was political satire and social criticism. It sent up the most absurd aspects of British life with a cast of stock characters, which included Miller’s impersonation of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and Cook’s of the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

The 1960 Beyond The Fringe show is the one that has passed into legend, featuring as it did the unforgettable quartet of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. Among its funniest sketches was a two-hander played by Cook and Moore, in which a theatre producer delicately interviews a one-legged man for the part of Tarzan. The show courted controversy with its caricatures of political and military figures, and its irreverent approach to the establishment.

To hear an interview with Jonathan Miller on ICONS, click here.

A 1963 revue entitled Cambridge Circus featured John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie and was the most successful production to date, enjoying a West End residency of several months, and eventually touring the United States and New Zealand. Cambridge Circus differed from earlier shows, in that contained no political material, and barely any reference to current affairs. The humour that began to emerge from this intensely creative period drew on the techniques of experimental theatre, most notably the Theatre of the Absurd, a current that included the work of Tom Stoppard, NF Simpson and European dramatists such as Eugène Ionesco.

The Goon Show

Much of the work that the various Footlights groups put on in the 1950s and early 1960s was influenced by a radio show that went out on the then BBC Home Service, forerunner of Radio 4. The Goon Show starred Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, playing a vast, diverse range of stock characters, with Milligan writing the scripts. Running for ten series between 1951 and 1960, the Goon Show fully exploited the possibilities of radio, creating anarchic cartoon situations that could only exist in the performers’ and listeners’ heads. Occasionally, it referenced the outside world, as when a whole show was built around a skit on the sci-fi drama serial Quatermass And The Pit (1958-9), but mostly the plot lines had a purely random, stream-of-consciousness feel.

The Goons’ cast of characters included: the nerdish hero of all the stories, Neddie Seagoon; the cretinous Eccles; a dilapidated elderly couple, Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister; a squeaky-voiced overgrown schoolboy called Bluebottle; and the swinish Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, a dyed-in-the-wool English cad. The show drew huge audiences, who appreciated the knowing nature of much of the humour, with its shameless recourse to feeble puns, and the sheer vocal versatility of the performers.

That Was The Week That Was

When the BBC televised the Beyond The Fringe shows of the early 1960s, they helped to create an appetite for hard-edged political satire, but of course they were only broadcasting a show created outside the corporation. The first attempt to replicate the Fringe with a commissioned BBC show was That Was The Week That Was. This was a late-night satirical round-up of the week’s current affairs, featuring David Frost, Millicent Martin and Kenneth Cope, and produced by Ned Sherrin.

The show employed a variety of what is known in theatrical parlance as alienation techniques, in which the mechanics of the production are put on public view. Bird’s-eye cameras looked down on to the set, and viewers caught occasional glimpses of the cameras and technical equipment. Among the names it made were those of Willie Rushton, Roy Kinnear, Lance Percival, John Bird and John Fortune. Like Beyond The Fringe, the show aimed to be deliberately inflammatory. In one memorable incident, a member of the audience stepped on to the set during a live debate, and physically attacked Bernard Levin.

After a combined run of more than three dozen editions between 1962 and 1963, That Was The Week That Was was taken off air during the general election year of 1964, and never returned to the screens, but it had had a considerable impact on redrawing the boundaries of where TV humour could go.

At Last The 1948 Show

In 1967, ITV began screening what can be considered the immediate precursor of Monty Python. Produced by David Frost, it introduced the partnership of John Cleese and Graham Chapman, as well as featuring Tim Brooke-Taylor (later to star in The Goodies) and Marty Feldman, who was making the transition from comedy writer to writer and performer.

At Last The 1948 Show was built around surreal sketches that bore no relation to each other, and was in effect the first of a whole new breed of sketch shows. It ran for a mere 13 programmes over two series in 1967 and, although not all the ITV regions screened it, it had become enough of a cult by the end of the year to have spawned a new generation of comic writers.

Spike Milligan v the Python team

When the first series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was commissioned in 1969, the team had a clear idea of the style of humour they wanted to bring to the screen (unlike the BBC commissioning editors, who had happily ordered 13 programmes without knowing what they were going to get!). They were perfectly convinced that they were about to strike out into uncharted territory, at least until March 24, 1969, when the first show in a new Spike Milligan TV series, Q5, was aired.

As John Cleese and Terry Jones in particular have acknowledged many times, Milligan had effectively beaten them to it. His was the first series that really began to play about with the conventions of television in a subversive way. The so-called "sketches" typically began with a simple enough premise but then wandered off the point and petered out, leading to neither conclusions nor punchlines. The set props and camera teams were often fully visible, and the performers often appeared either to be improvising, or else blatantly reading their lines off cue-cards.

It was only after the final Python series in 1974 that Milligan was commissioned to make a follow-up series to Q5, called Q6. A succession of later series ran up to Q9 in 1980, before the show was axed. It had lost its initial producer Ian MacNaughton, to the Pythons, and Milligan’s love-hate relationship with the BBC made him a risky investment. The final series was extremely shambolic and, by then, its regular resort to racial caricatures and female nudity was beginning to look decidedly dubious.

The rivalry between Milligan and the Python team was never wholly friendly although, fittingly, Milligan provided a short cameo appearance in Python’s feature film, The Life Of Brian (1979). He happened to be on holiday in Tunisia when the location filming was going on, and agreed to appear in a scene.