Forty years ago, at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival, four young men walked on to a stage and produced a flow of staggeringly inspired comic genius. In Beyond the Fringe, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett created a satirical revue which amazed the critics and the public, selling out night after night. Soon the satire virus The Establishment Club, 'London's first satirical nightclub', opened its doors in Soho; a scruffy yellow pamphlet calling itself Private Eye became available in certain London coffee bars. Eventually even the BBC woke up to the fact that comedy was changing, and inaugurated the satirical Saturday night television programme That Was the Week That Was. For a few months everyone wanted to be a satirist. Carpenter has talked to the people involved, including Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Ned Sherrin, Richard Ingrams and the late John Wells. He has woven their stories together with a wealth of comic material - including sketches from Beyond the Fringe which never made it to London, much of the hilarity from That Was The Week That Was, and fascinating stuff from the BBC archives - to create a narrative which brings vibrantly alive this key period of British life.