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The Complete and Utter History of Britain

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The Complete and Utter History of Britain
Created byTerry Jones
Michael Palin
StarringWallas Eaton
Colin Gordon
Terry Jones
Roddy Maude-Roxby
Melinda May
Michael Palin
Diana Quick
Country of originUnited Kingdom
Original languageEnglish
No. of episodes6
Production
Executive producerHumphrey Barclay
Running time25 minutes
Original release
NetworkLondon Weekend Television
Release12 January (1969-01-12) –
16 February 1969 (1969-02-16)

The Complete and Utter History of Britain is a 1969 television comedy sketch show. It was created and written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones between the two series of Do Not Adjust Your Set. It was produced for and broadcast by London Weekend Television but was not shown in all of the other ITV regions.

Concept

The idea (inspired by a sketch in an earlier show, Twice a Fortnight) was to replay history as if television had been around at the time. Sketches included interviews with the vital characters in the dressing-room after the Battle of Hastings, Samuel Pepys presenting a television chat-show and an estate agent trying to sell Stonehenge to a young couple looking for their first home ("It's got character, charm and a slab in the middle").

Seven programmes were written and produced, but LWT amalgamated the first two episodes into a single "stronger" (in their opinion) episode, resulting in a six-part series - the final cut of the first episode being 25 minutes like the others (i.e. of the first two episodes as originally recorded, 25 minutes were discarded).

For many years, the entire series was believed to have been wiped. However, copies of the first two episodes (as broadcast) were eventually found, along with the complete first two episodes 'as produced'. The latter are in the form of poor quality video recordings, probably in CV-2000 format, with visible line structure and numerous instances of dropout. These were taken from the personal collection of the director, Maurice Murphy.

Terry Jones has expressed dissatisfaction with the series, complaining (after a showing of surviving episodes) that the pacing was off and the soundtrack all wrong.

It was doing The Complete and Utter History of Britain that got me really convinced that you have to control everything. You not only act in the things - you've got to actually start directing the thing as well.[1]

Episodes

Home media

On 7 April 2014, Network Distributing released all extant material on a Blu-ray/DVD set in the UK. This release includes the first two episodes as broadcast, the first two episodes as recorded, which included the material removed from the TV broadcasts, and all available film inserts. New linking material for film inserts was recorded by Jones and Palin especially for this release, and included as a 50-minute programme entitled The New Incomplete Complete and Utter History of Britain.[2]

References

  1. ^ Eggers, Dave (13 September 2006). "Interview with Eric Idle in The Guardian, with quotes from Terry Jones and Michael Palin". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 May 2014.
  2. ^ Spiny Norman (7 April 2014). "> Features > Palin and Jones Return!". Networkonair. Retrieved 11 May 2014.
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