In 1971, a most unusual TV show was produced. Thirteen or fourteen episodes were shot of The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine starring Mr. Feldman and many of the top comic actors in England. Several folks involved in Monty Python's Flying Circus were involved in this one, including Terry Gilliam, who contributed animated titles and bits of business. The show was produced in England for American television and one of its producers was Larry Gelbart, who was then living in the U.K. The writing staff included American Sheldon Keller (one of Gelbart's friends from his Sid Caesar days) and the also-American team of Barry Levinson and Rudy DeLuca, plus some British writers plus Feldman.

I was very intrigued by this show and over the years, I discussed it with Larry, Sheldon, Rudy and even briefly with Mr. Feldman. I never quite got the whole story and I'm not sure any of them knew it. Here's about as much as I know…

Involved in the deal was Greg Garrison, who was best known for The Dean Martin Show and its genesis had something to do with the fact that Garrison had produced a summer replacement series for Dean the previous year called Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London. Done over there because it was cheaper, it featured Feldman more or less equally billed with Charles Nelson Reilly.

This was years before the Monty Python shows had made any dent over here. By way of reference: The first season of Python was produced for British television commencing in October of '69. They weren't really seen in America until the release of the motion picture And Now for Something Completely Different in August of '72.

I seem to be the only human being alive who remembers this but The Dean Martin Show used some footage from Python before that. There was one episode where they showed the "How Not to Be Seen" sketch but with Dean introducing it, then narrating the footage. I think Python's "Funniest Joke Ever" routine was also used and one or two others, redubbed and severely edited and laugh-tracked. I've always assumed that was part of a deal Garrison made that was connected in some way with the Feldman show he did.

ABC was promised that stars familiar to American audiences would appear on it. To start flying such folks over was not in the budget so initially, Feldman came to Los Angeles to tape a few spots with, for example, Orson Welles who was a frequent and always-available guest on Garrison productions. The sample below has Marty appearing for a moment or two with Welles, who narrated a segment that was shot in England. Relations between Feldman and Garrison ruptured and Marty stopped coming over…or speaking to Garrison when the producer-director went to England to supervise the show he was allegedly in charge of.

The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine was delivered to ABC in this country around July of 1971, the idea being that it would go in as a replacement for some show that started in September and was quickly axed. ABC hated the show and at one point was not going to run it at all. They finally found a spot for it and it debuted with almost no promotion on April 12, 1972. By this stage, the shows had been furiously recut by Garrison, trimming it from an hour to a half-hour and inserting comedy spots that had nothing to do with the series Feldman believed he'd made.

During the run of The Dean Martin Show, there were several comedians who taped monologues for it — a process which almost never involved meeting Dean or even facing a live audience. Then, as was Garrison's style, their eight minute spot would be cut down to four when aired on the Martin show. In order to get more American content into Mr. Feldman's abbreviated Comedy Machine, Garrison went to his vault, pulled out some leftovers and inserted them into the Feldman show, introduced by an off-camera announcer. One of the things Marty Feldman told me the one time I met him around 1976 was, "I keep meeting people who were on my show who I never heard of."

He was absolutely livid talking about that series…so much so that I somewhat regretted asking him about it. From his viewpoint, top comedy writers and performers, including people like Spike Milligan, had produced a superior one-hour program…and Garrison had chopped it into incoherent half-hours, ruining most of the sketches with clumsy truncations so he could insert bad stand-up acts.

Gelbart and the other writers shared his view that a good program had been butchered…though unlike Feldman, they were not still fantasizing about acts of violence on the personage of Greg Garrison. Sheldon Keller thought Garrison wasn't a bad guy; that the problem was they'd delivered a show that ABC didn't understand and which the ABC audience probably wouldn't understand. Sheldon's view was that while Garrison ruined it, he only did what he did to try and salvage a show that ABC wasn't going to air. I would imagine that if I'd ever gotten to ask Garrison about it, that's roughly what he would have told me.

And that is really all I know about it except that Gelbart thought the full hours, which aired intact on the BBC, competed favorably with the Best of Python. British comedy authorities I've asked about it have said it was a good show but not quite that good. I do not know if those hours exist anywhere and would be thrilled if someone reading this would write, tell me that they do and tell me how to get copies of them.

The clip below is all I've seen of the show since it originally aired. This is about eleven minutes and I think it's from the United Kingdom telecast and the only Garrison involvement was to direct what Orson Welles did…

Jonathan Chait explains why he thinks Barack Obama has been a great president. I wouldn't go quite that far. There are areas in which Obama has disappointed me. But I agree with Chait that Obama has been good and that past Obama supporters who are now disappointed to the point of not voting for him were probably expecting something that was never going to happen and was really never promised.

Romney senior adviser Russ Schriefer just said, "We feel we are in a very good place, that this race is exactly where we had hoped it would be a week out."

I am not discounting the possibility that Romney could still win. I am discounting the possibility that anyone in his campaign really said, "Hey, you know what would be great? If a week before the election, we were a couple of points behind in several key swing states!" Not just them but anyone involved in a presidential election hopes that a week before Election Day, they'll have an insurmountable lead and the other side will be working on concession speeches. Isn't that what you'd hope?

Does FEMA serve this country well? As Kevin Drum notes, it depends on which party has the control of the White House. There's no operation — be it Federal, State or Private Enterprise — that can't be inefficient with the wrong people in charge and not enough money to accomplish its goals.

The work of the devil…

And it'll be at least tomorrow before I get around to writing at length about The Book of Mormon, which Carolyn and I saw this evening up at the Pantages in Hollywood. It was at least a third as good as everyone told me was, probably more than half. It couldn't possibly have lived up to its rep but I don't hold that against it. More when I don't have to stay up all night writing a script.

Going to see this tonight.  Hope it's even a third as good as everyone keeps telling me it is…

Hey, remember that Al Jaffee book that was briefly priced on Amazon for $14.24? The one that was originally $120 and was marked way, way, way down? I ordered two at that price and they came…and I'll write more about it tomorrow when I have time but I thought the book was a colossal disappointment, unworthy of the good name of Jaffee. It was worth what I paid but not a whole lot more.

Amazon is still changing its price every few days. It recently went from $78.75 to $57.35 and if it gets down below twenty bucks again, you might want to snag one. I'll tell you what I didn't like about it when I get a moment.

Last May, the TV Academy did an evening with folks they called "The Ladies Who Make Us Laugh." They were Bonnie Hunt, Margaret Cho, Caroline Rhea, Carole Leifer, Elayne Boosler, Lily Tomlin and Mary Lynn Rajskub. I wasn't there for it and truth to tell, I've only had time to watch a little of the festivities. But here's a video of that event in case you have an hour and 47 minutes to spare…

Disney is acquiring Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion. I don't really care that much about what it means for Star Wars or anything of the sort. I figure most of everything will eventually be acquired by Disney and if it isn't, it'll be acquired by Time-Warner. Then at some point, either Disney will acquire Time-Warner or Time-Warner will acquire Disney and we will effectively be living in a Communist world.

What intrigues me right now is that number: $4.05 billion. If the buyer pays $4.05 billion for something, that's because the seller turned down $4 billion, turned down $4.01 billion, turned down $4.02 billion, turned down $4.03 billion, turned down $4.04 billion and maybe then said, "Tell you what. Make it $4.05 billion and you've got a deal." And when they turned down the $4 billion, you just know they said, "What? You think we're crazy? You're trying to starve us."

Despite a killer deadline yesterday, I found myself intermittently watching a real killer named Sandy. DirecTV set up a special channel that hopped around from local station to local station in the path of the event some called Frankenstorm. It was an interesting way to watch TV news with the finger of some stranger somewhere on my remote. Whenever it would get dull or repetitive on one channel, they'd just switch to another.

I tried watching that channel this morning because it's too sad — a lot of reporters out in the field showing us devastation and asking people, "How does it feel to lose everything?" I wish TV news wouldn't do that. I know it's part of the story but it's the part of the story we all know and understand and don't need to see played out over and over. There are no unique answers and I often feel that the news crews are there to exploit suffering and to maybe get in the way of things. Those people have enough to think about today without having microphones thrust at them.

Some of the news coverage yesterday seemed helpful and at times, heroic. A lot of it seemed needlessly dramatic — reporters standing in harm's way, telling us that if we had a lick o' sense, we wouldn't be where they are. Then they'd give us information that could more easily have been dispensed from inside any newsroom with a good roof. At some point, it stops being eyewitness news and becomes a stunt show. I sensed that the person at DirecTV changing channels for me sometimes felt that way and would opt to leave the channel risking its reporters' lives and go in search of one offering useful data.

But mostly, I turned it off myself and tried to get back to the script that had to be written before bedtime, the one that pushed that bedtime past 4 AM. It was tough because I found myself thinking over and over: This kind of thing happens and will happen again. There must be a way we can conserve more resources for these moments. And maybe since even the most extreme deniers of Climate Change did listen to the nation's most prominent meteorologists about what Hurricane Sandy would do, and since those meteorologists were dead-on right, maybe we should all be listening to what those meteorologists think about Climate Change.