That Was the Week That Was

…format of British television’s pioneering That Was the Week That Was (1962–63, hosted by David Frost). But beyond those roots, from its inception it has been firmly grounded in the form of improvisational comedy developed in Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s by the Compass Players and at Second City.…

That Was the Week That Was, a weekly satirical review started in England in 1962, had remarkable success for a time but succumbed to a variety of pressures, some of them political; when a version of the program was attempted in the United States, it…