The Complete and Utter History of Britain


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 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 TV chat-show and an estate agent trying to sell Stonehenge to a young couple looking for their first home.
Seven programmes were written and produced, but LWT amalgamated the first two episodes into a single "stronger" episode, resulting in a six-part series - the final cut of the first episode being 25 minutes like the others.
For many years the entire series was believed to have been wiped. However, copies of the first two episodes have now been found, as have 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 show, complaining after a showing of surviving episodes that the pacing was off and the soundtrack all wrong.

Episodes

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.