John Cleese, Marty Feldman, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman all appear in series, with one missing episode to be screened at TV festival next week

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Two missing episodes of the cult comedy series At Last the 1948 Show, a precursor to the Monty Python series, have been unearthed. The episodes, in which three then hatchling Pythons starred, feature one of John Cleese’s favourite sketches.

They have been placed in the national archives of the British Film Institute (BFI), which was alerted to their existence by a member of the public and one of them – episode three – will be screened at a film festival next week.

It includes the sketch Cleese remembered fondly, the Bookshop, in which he appears opposite Marty Feldman, a picky customer who comes into his shop making increasingly bizarre requests.



Future Pythons Eric Idle and Graham Chapman also appear in At Last the 1948 Show, which ran on ITV, as well as Bill Oddie, Tim Brooke-Taylor and “the lovely” Aimi Macdonald.

The show aired in 1967, its name a joke about the time television executives reputedly took to make a decision. It is credited with helping to introduce the surreal humour Monty Python would popularise when it started up two years later.

The comedy sketch show featured spoofs of different broadcasting formats and occasional long-running gags, such as the recurring appearance of “the lovely” Aimi Macdonald as a presenter between sketches, under the impression that she is the star of the show.

In one linking item she utters the words “and now for something completely different …” the continuity announcement cliche which would resurface as a recurring motif in Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

The discovery of the footage, which follows that of two more episodes last year, means that 11 of the original 13 episodes have now been preserved, with audio recordings of the remaining two also surviving.

‘Lost’ episodes of At Last the 1948 Show rediscovered Read more

Steve Bryant, the senior curator for television at the BFI national archive, said: “Once almost forgotten, the recovery and restoration of episodes of At Last the 1948 Show by the BFI over the past 25 years has led to it being acknowledged as one of the key milestones of British television comedy.

“Now we have another two missing episodes, and a third which was missing a brief segment, and the archive’s collection is almost complete – but the search still goes on. It is particularly gratifying to get back the Bookshop sketch, one of the show’s great classics and recognised as such by John Cleese in his recent autobiography.”

The third episode will be screened at the Radio Times Festival at Hampton Court on 25 September.

The editor of Radio Times Ben Preston said: “The 1948 Show inspired Monty Python, the Goodies and a host of greats. Finding a comedy unseen for years starring John Cleese, Marty Feldman, Tim Brooke Taylor, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle is finding the missing link.”