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EDIT NEWS: Monty Python - Press Coverage 1969 |
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Radio Times, 2nd October 1969
[Here we see a confused BBC trying to sell Flying Circus
as a satire show. How? With a board game, of course.]
This Sunday, the very latest in a long line of late night shows on BBC1 passes 'Go.' After watching all the moves, we didn't dare make any comment ourselves but instead asked TV critic Philip Purser for his. His views are, of course, his own...!
WILL MONTY PYTHON COLLECT £200?
Monty Python's Flying Circus: Sunday 10.55 BBC1
The object of the game... but let's not pretend 'Monotony' is for playing. It's just a way of reminding you of the rise and fall of the late night show, and of some of the people who played it for real kicks, real ha'pence and real telephone calls. Leaving aside a premature ITV attempt called What The Public Wants (either the public didn't or if it did, didn't get it for that long), the saga began with That Was The Week That Was, abbreviated to TW3.
Perhaps because it was the first, it now seems easily the best. It was all so revolutionary � newsy lyrics to the songs that Millicent Martin sang, sketches hammered out on the typewriter that day, pomposity and hypocrisy mocked. David Frost crouched at the centre of operations, with his insolent hair style and delivery that was a sort of running parody of popular communication.
Bernard Levin was severe to all sorts of people, one of whom eventually took a swing at him (and missed) while another, a lady astrologer, squirted him with a plastic lemon.
After a second season with TW3, the next idea was a more relaxed session three nights a week, with the jokes and lampoons padded out with Lots of Good Talk. This was the era of Harvey Orkin, Norman St John Stevas, John St Harvey Orcas and Orkin St Steven Enormas. It was called Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life. Next came BBC-3 and a new compere, Robert Robinson, who addressed everyone by their surnames, which was just as well as most of them were called John � Bird, Fortune, Wells, et al. Al was also known as Eleanor Bron.
The Johns lingered on into the fifth and really the final manifestation of Saturday night satire, The Late Show. Ned Sherrin, who'd produced all the others, then departed for Wardour Street.
A small flame of satire flared up intermittently in the late night reviews which came and went in 1967 and 68, most successfully in The Eleventh Hour. Bernard Braden brought along his own brand. But the emphasis was on the school of hairy comedy of John Cleese and Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden, represented first by Twice a Fortnight and now again by Monty Python's Flying Circus. Last summer, though, there was one last nostalgic reunion of some old TW3 talents in Quiz of the Week. Even Ned Sherrin was back, as a chairman of great charm and wit. Asked why a busy film producer should bother with such a television show he answered with what is perhaps the neatest justification of the whole satire epoch. He said, 'Well, it keeps me off the streets on Saturday night.'
Game devised by WILLIAM RUSHTON
Illustrations by NIGEL HOLMES
[Pictures of six game pieces in the shape of various
TV stars who, I must admit, I don't all recognise. I
know David Frost, Eleanor Bron and William
Rushton. At a guess the other two may be Ned
Sherrin and Robert Robinson, but the last one is
named.]
And, having said that, here are your players. Cut them out, mount them on a ha'penny (told you the game was unplayable!) and proceed to Old Kent TW3. Bottom right, you may seem to see a joker. Not at all. He's soccer commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme, 'compere' of the most successful late night show of all: BBC's Match of the Day.
[The next page is devoted to 'Monotony', a
Monopoly parody with all the placenames replaced
by the names of the TV programmes mentioned in
the article above, including Match of the Day (or
"K. Wolstenholme's Laugh-In"). "GO TO JAIL" is
here "GO TO ITV". Written in the middle of
the board is:]
Monty Python's Flying Circus, BBC1, Sunday is, dare one say it, the new satire show. The merry cast includes John Cleese, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Terry Jones. Most of them have been playing at this game for some time. May many TV studios be built on their property. |
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Ther Sunday Post, 5th October 1969
[Illustrated by "a small head and shoulders shot
of a suited John Cleese, imaginatively captioned,
'John Cleese'"]
A New Pack Of Jokers Tonight!
B.B.C. are making a bold bid tonight to break ITV's hold on late Sunday-night audiences.
The four Davids --- Frost, Allen, Jacobs and Nixon --- have had things all their own way until now. B.B.C. have considered similar shows, but have taken the plunge and finally decided to concentrate on comedy.
They're pinning their hopes on Monty Python's Flying Circus, a 30-minute nutty comedy series. They've been working for six months on it.
Four of the stars, who are also writing the series, are well established in comedy. John Cleese was a deadpan comic in The Frost Report. Graham Chapman, Terry Jones and Michael Palin all wrote sketches for the last Marty Feldman series.
Watch for clever animated sketches by artist Terry Gilliam. He takes Old Masters and brings them to life.
It sounds good. About eleven o'clock tonight you'll be able to judge for yourself.
[Many thanks to Daniel McGachey for
sending us the above.]
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The Sun, 6th October 1969
[The first review of Flying Circus and the
reviewer hasn't even seen it!]
SUN TV
IN MY VIEW
WILL M. PYTHON FIND TRUE SUCCESS, ETC.?
By RICHARD LAST
At the moment of putting typewriter to paper, the new BBC 1 late show, 'Monty Python's Flying Circus', is still in session, so I can only observe that it might have been worse.
That title, I mean.
Imagine if they'd let one of our contemporary dramatists, the kind who tack the play on as an afterthought, loose on it: Lord Hill hears Huw Wheldon ask Charlie Curran if John Cleese'll make it, as performed by the inmates of the Shepherd's Bush Roundhouse.
I assume the reason that the long line of Late Saturday shows have now spawned a Late Sunday show is fear of the competition on the other channel. Very sensible.
Depression
Frost remains one of the TV programmes it's difficult not to watch, even though he hasn't found vintage form yet (all that flying, perhaps). Saturday's edition, I thought, rather wasted Alfred Hitchcock.
Anyway, I hope M. Python and associates will prove a winner, because the net product of much conscientious viewing over the weekend was largely depression. |
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Observer, 26th October 1969
By George Melly:
Finally a strong recommendation for the latest comedy show in the goon tradition, Monty Python's Flying Circus. The cast, led by the inanely handsome John Cleese, have the right deadpan mania. The material, despite a tendency to prolong a good idea beyond its natural length, is of a high standard, but what lifts the show out of an honourable rut is its extraordinary use of animated cartoons. Terry Gilliam, one of the performers, is responsible for these.
They owe something technically to Max Ernst's collages, rather more to 'Yellow Submarine,' but the way they are used is totally original. Last week, for example, there was a skit on 'Jackanory' in which the stories kept turning obscene. It was very funny in itself, but the introductory and closing logos raised it on to a plane of inspired lunacy. Before the stories dear little cartoon bunnies jumped up and down in a meadow. Afterwards a big hippo gambolled out from behind a bush and stomped them all into the ground. |
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Evening Standard, 5th November 1969
[Nothing changes:]
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MONTY PYTHON? WELL, I'M GLAD YOU ASKED THAT QUESTION...
MILTON SHULMAN / INSIDE TV
Occasionally in the wasteland of television, one sights an oasis to which parched viewers will race with desperate speed and gratitude.
For me, such singular patches of relief from the unimaginative, repetitive, dreary fare offered regularly by the small screen were, among others, the weekly satire shows of a few years back, the Great War, Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, Til Death Us Do Part, the Forsyte Saga, Steptoe and Son and the early Hancock shows.
One never needed to study the transmission times of such programmes in the Radio Times (It is amazing how few of these grand diversions turned up on the commercial channel). They were firmly engraved on one's mind.
For them evenings were set aside, dinner parties refused, social engagements re-organised, business commitments postponed, expectations poised and heightened. They made TV an occasion.
As the small screen settles down � on all channels � to complacency and humdrum orthodoxy, these telly events have become rarer and rarer.
But over the past few weeks, I was beginning to feel again that sensation of euphoric anticipation, that irritation at being invited to do something else late on Sunday evenings other than keep my date with the box.
The programme that roused this intense loyalty was BBC-1's Monty Python's Flying Circus.
I realise that the humour of this quirky show is hardly likely to send the BBC's rating charts zooming to dizzy heights. For this is unashamedly, determinedly a minority programme.
Its peculiar appeal is not easy to describe. Its nearest relatives are the Goons and the Son of Fred, from whom it inherits its zany, anarchic quality.
Illogical
But it also has an odd surrealistic element of its own which pushes jokes beyond the merely illogical into the realm of dream-like impossibility.
"Why are those sheep in trees?" was the question the programme opened with a few weeks back.
"My considered opinion is that they're nesting," came back the reply. "They think they're birds. When they leave the trees, they do not so much fly as plummet." And from that starting point, they considered the prospects of what might happen if sheep could fly, including an illustration of a flying sheep lined with seats inside like a passenger aeroplane.
On another occasion, the programme began by asking us to study a larch tree and then, by some arbitrary, circuitous route, arrived in a courtroom where one of the chief witnesses was a stockbroker in a coffin.
"Are you in the coffin?" asked learned counsel. There was an answering knock from the coffin.
"You are, in a manner of speaking, dead?" asked counsel. There was no knock.
"Are you considering the question or are you just dead?" asked counsel, anxiously. There was a long silence. "No further questions, milord," said counsel. "May I now call Cardinal Richelieu, a character witness, milord."
Another absurd trick it has cultivated to hilarious effect is standing the accented order of things on its head and juxtaposing old values in reverse situations.
Restaurant
Thus a group of Supermen � in Supermen uniforms � are amazed at the exploits of a bicycle repair man. Instead of Wham! Pow! Zonk! which were the captions when Superman performed we have Clink! Screw! Bolt! Inflate! as the bicycle repair man carries out his daring activities.
When a customer in a restaurant mildly complains that his fork is dirty, it results in a series of traumatic reactions from the staff, ending with the chef in a hysterical frenzy and the manager committing suicide.
A TV Epilogue on the question of belief introduces a Humanist and a priest who, the chairman tells us, are going to fight and not argue about the existence of God.
A three-round wrestling match then begins and the announcer tells us: "We'll be bringing you the result of this discussion later on in the programme."
The chief fault of Monty Python's Flying Circus it that it occasionally reveals an inability to recognise a good joke from a bad one, and will stretch unpromising ideas to almost unbearable limits.
Thus last week it almost crushed my enthusiasm and loyalty forever by transmitting a number of dismal skits that were little more than broad, obvious slapstick.
Interminably John Cleese, as a shrieking army instructor, tried to teach his men what to do if they were attacked by villains armed with pieces of fruit. It was a painful idea painfully extended.
So was the next longest item which consisted of a parody of a TV adventure series in which the chief villains were dentists. On this level, no parody can complete much with the real thing on programmes like The Avengers or The Man From Uncle.
Nevertheless, I was determined to watch it again last Sunday to see if this deterioration was only a regrettable lapse. But when I switched on at the usual hour, there was Christopher Isherwood talking to Derek Hart and no Monty Python's Flying Circus.
When I called the BBC Press Office to complain about this deprivation, they could only tell me that BBC-1 is stuffed with such goodies that this programme had to be postponed. I volunteered to name them at least 30 other BBC programmes which were better candidates for being pushed around or extinction than Monty Python, but was greeted only with a hollow laugh.
You will not be seeing Monty Python next Sunday either, because its slot is being taken by a discussion between Prince Phillip and the American Press.
I am assured that the 13 programmes of the series will eventually be transmitted but on the basis of this sort of hiccough scheduling, it is going to take us into the next year before we see them all.
Humour
Some series are, perhaps, little affected by arbitrary re-scheduling. But a cult show like Monty Python needs continuity and regularity of transmission so that its special quality and taste can be nurtured and cultivated. Long gaps between programmes discourage loyalty and appreciation.
With all channels devoted to an offend-nobody, safety-first policy in the field of comedy, it has become very difficult for anything but the most stale and predictable forms of humour to reach the air.
When something like Monty Python comes along which manages to be funny in an unusual and adult manner without running foul of the hierarchy's fear of satire it ought to be respected and cherished by the BBC.
But it is symptomatic of the insensitivity of the top echelons of the BBC that when they have something like this minority-oriented show that their instinctive reaction is to give it bottom scheduling priority and treat it as replaceable fodder for anything else that comes along. |
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New Society, 25th December 1969
ARTS IN SOCIETY
Monty Python's Flying Circus
Richard Boston
There have been plenty of funny programmes on television this year. There was the moon landing, for example, with Richard Nixon in a performance as President of the United States which outpassed even those of Fredric March, Henry Fonda and Peter Sellers: we will not soon forget his delivery of the line addressed to the moon men: "This certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made..." Then there was that deliciously rib-tickling film about the royal family, with the man playing the part of the American ambassador wambling [sic] on with some inspired nonsense about the inconveniences occasioned by the refurbishing of the appurtenances.
However, not all the funny things of television this year have been taken from real life. A lot of them have been on Sunday nights on a BBC1 programme called Monty Python's Flying Circus.
The programmes always begin with a wild-eyed, wild-haired, ragged Ben Gunn castaway figure who appears as a speck in the distance and makes his way towards the stationary camera past various appalling obstacles and hazards: falling down mountain sides, dodging through minefields, buffeted by main road traffic (only to reach the safety of the pavement and be knocked down by a pram). When he arrives in front of the camera he says hoarsely "It's..." and we cut to graphics while John Cleese completes the announcement in the fake-genteel accents of a fairground barker: "Monty Paython's Flaying Circuss."
It's the best announcement since Tony Hancock used to pant out "Huhuhuhhancock's Half Hour." And Terry Gilliam's brilliantly animated graphics immediately give the show a distinctive character that distinguishes it from all the other comedy series. The images pass too quickly for one to catch many of the details, but they include Queen Victoria being bounced up and down, quite a few nude statues that dance about, and an enormous foot that comes down from the sky and crushes who or whatever is below.
As an example of the way the programme works, I will try to give you some sort of account of the episode that went out on 7 December. After a caption that announced that the theme this week was to be "Full frontal nudity," there were a couple of comments from men in the street � vox pop, as they say in broadcasting. The first men said, "Well, speaking as a public opinion poll I've had enough of the permissive society," and a disgusting-looking man in a raincoat (almost certainly a flasher) was seen embracing a tree and commenting that he hadn't had enough of the permissive society. A caption comes up and says, "In this performance the part of David Hemmings will be played by a piece of wood."
Quite funny, perhaps, but in cold print not devastating. But the gags are delivered with such pace that before you've had time to decide whether to laugh or merely smile the next joke is on you. I am told that Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In has this kind of pace, and that may well be true. On the only occasion I have tried watching it I switched off after five minutes: the jokes came fast all right: trouble was, they weren't funny. Anyway I know of no British comedy series where the jokes come as fast as in Monty Python.
When I talked to John Cleese recently he said that he realised more and more the importance of technical matters in comedy. A scene can be ruined if the camera stays on for three seconds after the last line is delivered and the actor is left staring from the screen with whatever was his last expression frozen on his face.
But let me get back to the episode of 7 December which continued with a scene about the army. Private Watkins has only been in the army for a day and he is telling his colonel that he wants to leave. His grounds are that the army is dangerous, there are real guns and tanks and grenades and machine guns, and someone's going to get hurt.. "Apparently sir, a bloke was telling me, if there's a war and you're in the army you have to fight."
There then enter a couple of civilians, Mr Dino Vercotti and Mr Luigi Vercotti, who are obviously Mafiosi. "You've got a nice army base here, colonel," one of them says, adding (as he knocks something off the mantelpiece), "I wouldn't want anything to happen to it." On learning that the colonel has 7,000 infantrymen, 600 artillery and two divisions of paratroopers, Dino says "It would be a shame if someone set fire to them." His proposition to the colonel is that in return for 15 bob a week no armoured divisions will get done over. The colonel rejects the proposal on the grounds that it's silly, silly. "The whole premise is silly and it's not well written, I'm the Senior Officer here and I haven't had a funny line yet. I'm stopping it... the sketch is over." Watkins says he wants to leave the army, and the colonel replies, "I stopped your sketch five minutes ago." He starts barking orders to the cameraman: "Close up. Zoom in on me. That's better."
This shows very clearly another characteristic of the show that give it the edge over most of its competitors. This is the avoidance of punchlines. The sketch about the man wanting to leave the army would have been terrible if it had had to build up laboriously to some droll denouement that would have spun the joke out. It ran for as long as it sustained itself, and then merged into the Mafia sketch.
Cleese himself is not keen of punchlines, which he sees as part of a tradition of television comedy that derives from stage performances, where something is needed to herald the blackout of lights or the fall of the curtain. This may get a big laugh from the studio audience, and therefore please the producer, but Cleese is against studio audiences and, rightly, is interested in the reactions of the bloke with his feet up watching the box in his drawing room. This is why he prefers a "manic flow," rather than clearly separated items, each ending neatly.
The army sketch was followed by one of Eric Idle's beautifully performed exercises in what might be called the mot injuste. Playing the part of an art critic (critics are frequent butts of the programme) he starts, "I'd like to talk to you tonight about the place of the nude in my bed..." Hastily he corrects himself, "...in the history of my bed... art... in the history of art. The nude in the history of tart... call-girl. I'm sorry. I'll start again. Bum... oh what a giveaway. The nude in the history of..."
So the programme goes on, reeling from one burst of nonsense to the next. The most important reason for Monty Python's success is the material and performances of John Cleese. He is an extremely friendly, polite and helpful person to meet, but when he gets in front of a camera he is transformed. His parts vary from the thuggish to the aristocratic, but always he seems to be restraining an extreme violence which may break through at any moment, and often does. He also seems much bigger on the screen than in real life.
When he was on radio in Sorry I'll Read That Again, John "Otto" Cleese, as he used to be called, had a thing about getting ferrets up his nose. Nowadays many of his best parts seem to involve characters that one would tentatively diagnose as suffering from some form of brain damage. In a recent programme Eric Idle is applying to join a mountaineering expedition that Cleese is leading. "One at a time," Cleese says as Idle enters. "There's only me, sir," says Idle. Cleese claps a hand over one eye and says, "Ah, so there is." His double vision produces some interesting results. The aim of the expedition is to climb both peaks of Kilimanjaro. When Idle points out that Kilimanjaro has only one peak., Cleese clasps a hand to one eye, studies a map and remarks: "Well that'll save time." The object of the expedition is to see if they can find any trace of last year's expedition which was lead by Cleese's brother � they were going to build a bridge between the two peaks.
At a recent Monty Python rehearsal I saw another Cleese character who appeared to be a suitable case for treatment (in fact he got a lobotomy in the course of the sketch). The scene was a drawing room into which Cleese, hat pulled down, raincoat collar pulled up, strode to make the typical Agatha Christie type police officer announcement: "The house is surrounded. I must not ask anybody to leave." Realising his mistake he tries to rephrase the sentence and gets a double negative. As his sentences grow increasingly convoluted they develop into a marvellous piece of tortuous verbal nonsense, which is only stopped when Cleese (as through striking a radio set that has a faulty connection) gives a severe bang to the side of his head with the heel of his hand.
There are still some more episodes of the present series to come, and there is talk both of repeating this series and of making a new one. Let's hope so. Monty Python is the most successful translation of the Goon Show from radio to television there has yet been. |
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Daily Mail, 27th December 1969
HOW MONTY PYTHON SNARED THE TRENDIES
WITH A HIT TV DIDN'T KNOW IT HAD
by BARRY NORMAN
Fashions never last long in TV. Once the mass audience cottons on the trend-setters switch their attentions elsewhere. Thus, as far as being a cult in concerned, The Laugh-In has pretty well had it now. The show the trendies are following this season is Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Goodness knows why � or rather, goodness knows how. It's very funny, of course, and subtly different enough to be an acquired, rather than an instant taste.
But it crept onto the screen, more or less unheralded, late one Sunday night a few months ago, and has been unpublicised ever since.
'Well,' say the BBC, bitterly, 'how can you describe it? It's so televisual.'
Actually, it is hard to describe. Anarchic, certainly. Surrealist. Sometimes preposterously silly.
It's also the only comedy show on TV whose sketches rarely arrive at any kind of conclusion at all but are simply abandoned as soon as the cast tires of them.
'Well,' say the creators, 'why should a sketch always have a beginning, a middle, and an end? It's so boring. And very restricting.
'This way we can do all sorts of stupid things if we want to.
'Besides, we can't always think of an ending.'
The show is devised, written, and acted by John Cleese and Graham Chapman (who created At Last the 1948 Show) and Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones (who were responsible for Do Not Adjust Your Set).
For information about it one gravitates automatically towards Messrs Cleese and Chapman, for no better reason perhaps than that they happen to be taller than the others.
'We simply got together and decided we'd like to do a show of our own.' says Mr Cleese.
'In particular we wanted it to be designed solely for TV � the kind of show you couldn't possibly do in any other medium.'
To that extant � but to no other � they admit to being influenced by The Laugh-In. More direct influences, they say, were Spike Milligan and Peter Cook � the former for his visual, the latter for his verbal, comedy.
The result of all this � immensely aided by Terry Gilliam's superb cartoons � is the kind of show in which a Cabinet Minister can unaccountably fall a mile through the Earth's surface while delivering a party political broadcast.
('Tell me, Robert,' say the pundits back in the studio, 'is this the farthest a Minister has ever fallen?)
When the programme started the Radio Times described it, with misplaced self-confidence, as 'satirical,' a word that sends Cleese and company into paroxysms of rage.
'We're not satirical at all,' they say. 'The only intention of the show is to be funny, to make people laugh.'
Easy
This being so they are, naturally, edgy people. Comedy, says John Cleese, is an act of faith. You have to believe that what you are doing is funny.
'You see,' he explains, 'we've really no way of telling whether it's humorous or not until the show is over. Everything we do is designed to make the viewer laugh � not the studio audience.
'One of the worst things about most TV comedy is the way it plays to the studio audience. Comedians and producers nearly always compromise at the last minute.
'They'd rather get an easy laugh from the people they can see in front of them, than take a chance on amusing people who are sitting by themselves in their own homes.
'TV comedy, as a rule, is obsessed by the studio audience.'
Monty Python, Etc. - the title, incidentally, is quite meaningless - not [sic]. It goes for broke every time. Either it amuses the fellow sitting alone with his TV set or it doesn't amuse anyone.
So far it has succeeded beyond everybody's expectations.
The BBC has treated it quite shabbily, frequently switching its time-slot, occasionally dropping it entirely in favour of other, safer programmes.
But now, with only three of the 13 episodes to go, the Corporation has conceded defeat. The show, it admits, grudgingly, has caught on.
Therefore it will be repeated at a peak viewing time starting next May, and a new series is being discussed.
Such rewards are merited. For, starting with an audience of barely 1� million, Monty Python has seen its viewing figures touch three � and even (once when it went out quite early through some bureaucratic oversight) four � million.
Brave
Magnanimously, however, Mr Cleese says: 'The BBC was really rather brave to give us a chance at all.
'Nobody knew how we'd be received and I don't think we'd have been given such scope � the use of film and cartoons, for instance � if we'd gone to a commercial station.'
It will be interesting to watch the programme's progress over the next year.
Original comedy is always slow to get off the ground (even Marty Feldman, at his peak, has never exceeded a viewing figure of eight million).
Monty Python is even less predictable and, therefore, more uneasy, than Feldman. It will be encouraging if it gets the mass audience it deserves. |
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