That Was the Week That Was the BBC's director-general Hugh Carleton Greene that Frost had a "hatred" of the Prime Minister, which "he finds impossible to control". The programme also attracted complaints from the Boy Scout Association, upset by an item questioning the sexuality of its founder Lord Baden-Powell, and the government of Cyprus, which claimed that a joke about Archbishop Makarios, the country's ruler, was a "gross violation of internationally accepted ethics". Historians have identified "TW3" as breaking ground in comedy and broadcasting. Graham McCann said it challenged the "convention that television should not acknowledge that it is television; the show made no attempt to
This Was a Man business and slowness of tempo'. The production failed to receive the critical praise of his previous works. By 8 December Coward wrote ' This was a man is drifting along… some of the critics ( the principle ones) have said very good things about it but I fear too late to save it.' Following a period of intense success the comparative failure of "This Was a Man" had taken its toll on Coward health. By 14 December Coward wrote 'that I have been living on nervous energy for years and now it has given out and that I must go