Political Satire,That Was The Week That Was,and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

Abstract

The political satire boom in the United States and the United Kingdom experienced a brief, albeit notorious success on British and American television, most notably represented by That Was The Week That Was. In the United States, the satire boom largely evaporated with the assassination of President Kennedy. This article examines the transatlantic history of this iconic programme during the Kennedy years and how that transatlantic exchange manifested in the midst of the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s death with the British satirists’ hastily produced tribute episode a day after the American president’s assassination, its broadcast on NBC twice in the days following the assassination, and the Anglophilic response by American audiences to the programme in voluminous letters sent to the BBC.