A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (9 August 1974)

 Last in the series, and there a lot of German-themed gags are linked by a pastiche routine of the Kit Kat Klub in Cabaret, with the women of the Irving Davis Dancers dressed as Sally Bowles. John Cleese plays the M.C., delivering an impossibly long introduction clearly inspired by Monty Python's Silly Party election declarations. Dawson appears in drag as Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. Roy Barraclough takes the part of Hitler. There's a lot of material about the war, at its best with Dawson and Cleese as pilots in a knocked-together cardboard Spitfire prop and at its worst when the safari-suited men of the Irving Davis Dancers finish their routine with a synchronised Nazi salute.

 The jazzy guest singer is Marian Montgomery, dressed and groomed with I think may be the least flattering period get-up that I've yet seen in a 1970s light entertainment show. In particular, the non-matching hair extensions add a element of the bewilderingly grotesque, exacerbated in close-ups by spiders' legs false eyelashes. 

 Her unidentifiable song (perhaps entitled 'I'm Gonna Build a Summer House') adds to the sense of the peculiar. It seems to going for a note of sunshine pop whimsy, with daydreamy lyrics about living in a summerhouse of her own imagination. But the impractical details of this house ("I'll fill it full of balconies and stairs that do not end") and specific instructions for its contents ("fill it full of lilac flowers and children with bright curls/ and china pots and crystals and baskets full of bread") have a deranged quality ("to make me quiet inside my head").

 The feverish nature of the song is magnified by Montgomery's performance, looking to camera with a heavy-lidded blank gaze, as if in a valium trance. The final verse appears to be aiming for a note of fantastical affirmative self-discovery but comes across as a case study in depersonalisation -

I'm gonna build a summerhouse - I hope that you know why!
I have to take a piece of me and throw it to the sky
And watch it soar and watch it dance and see a part of me
Up there laughing, knowing that I'm free.