TW3: that was the start that was That night, before going on air, we were gathered in the TV Centre hospitality room when the telephone rang. It was the director-general, wanting to speak urgently to our producer, Ned Sherrin. After a brief exchange, Ned handed the phone to me. Sir Hugh, having read the script, asked me: "Do you really think we should broadcast this sketch?" "Definitely yes," I replied. I think it's what our viewers would expect. An hour later, the sketch went out as written, and the BBC switchboard was swamped by more complaints than it had ever received. Until that time, the BBC had always been looked to as a bastion of traditional values. Politicians were treated with deference. Bad language was unknown. The BBC was not interested in doing anything remotely 'controversial. But as the Sixties arrived, social, moral and political attitudes in Britain were dramatically changing - and a key reflection of the new mood was TW3, watched late every Saturday night by 12 million viewers. The show was designed as a revolutionary act by a small group of young executives who wanted to shake the BBC out of its suffocating respectability. They included Sherrin, Donald Baverstock, soon to become controller of programmes, and Alasdair Milne, later to become director-general. These young turks had noticed how a conspicuous sign of the new mood of the time was the satire boom, centred around Beyond the Fringe, the revue starring my old Cambridge friend Peter Cook, and the new satirical magazine, Private Eye, of which I was the first editor. They wanted the BBC to bring this new style of irreverence to a mass audience. Everything about the show was to be revolutionary, from the freedom with which it addressed politics and morality to the idea of showing on screen the audience, lights and cameras in a darkened studio, to create an air of gritty informality. Having also known Frost at Cambridge, I was invited to become the show's resident scriptwriter, putting together sketches with him and then turning up at the studio on Saturday to write jokes on the day's news for him to work into the show that evening. Before the first programme, I met the TW3 team and their senior sponsor, Grace Wyndham-Goldie, the BBC's head of current affairs. So much drink was consumed that the evening ended with this revered figure being carried to her taxi by Baverstock and Milne. Much of TW3 was pretty amateurish and nothing like as brilliant or clever as legend has it. By far the most professional cast member was the singer Millicent Martin, whose catchy song commenting on the week opened every show. The other two star performers responsible for their own lines were the fearless interviewer Bernard Levin and a superbly talented cartoonist, Timothy Birdsall, who was to die of leukaemia in May 1963. Tim and I used to read through that night's script in Frost's dressing room, scornfully commenting: "This is awful, they can't put out this stuff." They did and the viewers lapped it up. Surprisingly, in light of its now legendary status, TW3 ran for only eight months. Its second season was curtailed when, after the row over our Home/Disraeli sketch, the BBC axed the show because an election looked likely. But in all sorts of ways the mould had been broken, and TW3"s legacy lived on, not least in that tradition of satirical humour which was later to spawn Spitting Image and Rory Bremner. The wider legacy of TW3 was that it marked the beginning of a profound shift in the culture and values of the BBC. TW3 ushered it into a less reverential age, since when we have become accustomed to its coverage being dictated by a Left-of-centre party line on pretty well every issue of the day. That liberation from the old values has brought some good things worth having. But the programme marked the moment when the BBC's denizens began to become inflated by their self-importance, to make their own rules and to set their own agenda. It was the time when the BBC began to get carried away by a new kind of hubris. The inevitable nemesis may have been a long time coming, but in the unholy shambles of today, that nemesis has unmistakably arrived.