A 1963 television report on the satire boom by Bryan Magee

Now here's a find: a 1963 report on the satire boom by this blog's hero Bryan Magee.

We see John Bird, Jeremy Geidt, Peter Cook, Bernard Braden, Willie Rushton, Jonathan Miller and Michael Frayn.

I can't recall Braden being discussed as part of the satire boom before, and the most obscure name now is Jeremy Geidt, who is seen in the sketch with John Bird. He went to have an influential career in American theatre and his background was more establishment than that of anyone else in the programme.

Peter Cook is notable bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, while Frank Muir describes Magee as looking like "a bit like a young family doctor in a cough mixture commercial". I'm not sure that Magee's thesis that satire is at once centuries old and a bubble that is about to burst quite hangs together.

Muir is there because this is an off-air recording from a 1992 episode of TV Heaven where he chose the items included.

Thanks to Mario Ricciardi on Bluesky.