633squadron writes:
> I am sure I saw it with Marty Feldman on TV, long before Monty Python ever
> came out.
I saw it on the same show, I think. In 1970, there was a summer replacement show for The Dean Martin Show called The Golddiggers in London. O.K., several terms here need to be explained for you youngsters. It used to be common for TV shows that lasted a while, particularly variety shows, to have a summer replacement series tied to them. The host of the show would want to take the summer off, but the network wanted to keep the viewers of the show faithful during that time. So there would be a similar series which would last for just the summer which would be tied to the regular series.
The Dean Martin Show was a popular long-lasting variety show. Each summer it would be replaced by a summer show. The dance troupe that always performed on the show was called the Golddiggers. (Ah, yes, another thing that needs to be explained is that variety shows would often have a troupe of young female dancers who would fill in between acts with dance numbers.) The summer show that year was actually filmed in London, so it was called The Golddiggers in London.
I don’t remember all the acts that appeared on the shows, but there were comedy sketches that starred Marty Feldman and Charles Nelson Reilly. Presumably Feldman was there because he wrote the sketches and Reilly was there because he was a friend of Dean Martin. He certainly never did anything else half as funny. They had some screamingly funny sketches, one of which was a variant on the old-men-discussing-how-terrible-things-once-were sketch. I often wonder why this series is never rerun, since there were great sketches on it.