The BBC Two sketch show It’s Marty ran for just 12 episodes between 1968 and 1969, yet, without its trail-blazing, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a year later, might have proved too much for the national sensibility. Its star was one of Britain’s great clowns, Marty Feldman, whose face, with its long chin and eyes bulging in a minimum of three directions, gave notice that there was surrealist trouble ahead, a warning which, perhaps to their owners’ advantage, the Pythons’ ordinary good looks never did.
Among Feldman’s most famous sketches were The Loneliness of the Long Distance Golfer, an international football match in which a Paraguay potentate pursues the Queen into the back of the net, and a skit that has Toulouse Lautrec ask a model