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
The Dog It Was That Died of hindsight, was Clifftops the ideal place to send someone with a tendency to fling themselves from a great height to a watery grave? Of course at the time one didn't realise it was a tendency..." In the closing scene, the whole structure is explained by the agency's unnamed chief, although even this explanation remains dizzyingly complex. The chief sums up by saying, "Purvis was acting as a genuine Russian spy to preserve his cover as a bogus Russian spy. In other words, if Purvis's mother had been kicked by a donkey, things would be very much as they are.