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EDIT NEWS: Monty Python - Press Coverage 1970 |
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Sunday Telegraph, 11th January 1970
By Philip Purser:
When Monty Python's Flying Circus was about to make its debut it was hailed � mistakenly, we all thought � in the Radio Times as the latest manifestation in a long tradition of late-night satire. Nonsense! This was hairy comedy, nothing to do with satire. In fact, what used to be thought of as satire was more often a topical lampoon, and "M.P.F.C." has on occasion come much closer to the true definition of the word.
The Great Upper-Class Twit Contest last time had half a dozen chinless wonders cavorting round a sort of assault course during which they had to perform such tasks as insult a waiter, blaze away at a tethered rabbit, spill beer, wrench the bra from a debutante and finally shoot themselves. It was a wildly exaggerated, heartless, scathing very funny comment on traditional upper-class attitudes and habits and it could have been made almost any time during the last 200 years; which is what I understand by satire.
Tonight's is the last edition in the present series, which I trust has been only the first of many. Some of the long-drawn-out sketches have been woeful, notably the military ones. This is an obsession of someone's that must be laid to rest. But John Cleese's increasingly sinister stare (he played Hitler last Sunday; it should have been Hess), the animations of Terry Gilliam, everyone's inventiveness � they will be missed.
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Observer, 18th January 1970
By George Melly:
ADIEU MONTY PYTHON
I won't shake hands � I've just been rubbing lard on the cat's boil.
This remark, falling from the pretty lips of one of the Monty Python team dressed up in drag as a seaside landlady, is the sort of thing that can send me off into hysterics for several painful minutes, and yet other people, even those I know and love, may find it pointlessly repulsive or worth at best a tiny smile.
Humour is a notorious trap for a critic. It's easy to turn solemn on it, to break it on the wheel. It's also impossible to persuade anyone that something's funny when they don't think it is and, televisually, there's a rule which operates as follows: if you see a funny programme in a series and warmly advise someone to watch it, the next edition will be a poor one.
The Flying Circus, too, had its ups and downs. Its free form could lead to longueurs; it was all very well to [decide?] that a sketch didn't need an end but I sometimes got the feeling that they'd forgotten that it did need to end. There was also at times a faint aroma of public-school changing-rooms, a kind of philistine heartiness masking gratuitous cruelty. Still, all in all it's been the best, most inventive funny show for a long, long time.
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The Times, 5th August 1970:
BEST OF BRITISH
BBC 1
MONTY PYTHON'S
FLYING CIRCUS
If there is really such a thing as British humour, which seems at least as likely as the idea of some specifically Latin variety of ardeur or American brand of efficiency, then it is best characterised by Monty Python's Flying Circus, which returned to the screen last night.
For the first five episodes, now showing on B.B.C. 1 after the cult success on B.B.C. 2 , those of us who became addicts last winter will have to stave off the withdrawal symptoms with shows we have already seen. However, to complete the series later in the year we are promised eight new programmes.
Last night's show was particularly well known to the cognoscenti, having been screened not only on B.B.C. 2 but also at the Montreux Festival. It attracted an usually large audience, and perhaps, the loudest audience (certainly the most uncontrolled of laughs) of the festival week.
It is perhaps this, the ability to elicit the real seat-rocking laughter which typifies the best of British humour. It is not easy to describe it accurately to anyone foreign to the show.
But if N. F. Simpson were to write an outline shooting script and give it to the producers of The Running Jumping Standing Still Film, and if they were to employ Pinter to write the dialogue and then hire the Goons to extemporise upon the result after consultations with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore � the result just might be something akin to a Monty Python programme.
That may sound like hyperbole, but it must be remembered that the result of such collision would also certainly be chaotic and inconsistent. So too, is Monty Python. But in its best sketches, such as last night's in which the purchaser of a Norwegian blue parrot fights desperately to convince the pet shop owner that the bird is dead ("It's not pinin', it's passed on; this parrot is no more; it's ceased to be; it's gorn to meet its maker...") the show achieves the one brand of frenetic hysterical comedy which was nearly perfected by the Goons.
It's other notable attraction comes in Terry Gilliam's animation work. It surely cannot be long before the B.B.C. acknowledges his talent, particularly with timing, and commissions some short programmes of his work on its own.
Chris Dunkley |
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Radio Times, 3rd September 1970
[Complaints about the scheduling of the Series 1 repeats in
summer; the following are extracts only.]
'While the rest of the country is watching Monty Python, we are getting some queer programmes about Geordies.'
� John Davis, Middlesborough
'Why can't the South get the Music Hall and pipes we've got so sick of hearing?'
� B. Aitkin, Whitehaven
'The nearest I could get to the Flying Circus was a frustratingly vague silent shadow�'
� J.A. White, Sudbury
'We do not all sit in pubs drinking Brew IX � you must regard us as loyal but ignorant labourers who do not know what we want. Equal rights for the Midlands � we need a good laugh up here.'
� Trevor Sposton, Birmingham
'The BBC tried hard to discourage MPFC addicts from watching the initial shows by putting them on at about 3am. Are we to be ignored again?'
� Michael Paul, Weymouth
Pat Beech (controller, English regions) replied: 'To get any sort of showing, regional programmes must replace something in the schedules. Whatever [is dropped], someone is bound to be disappointed.'
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Daily Telegraph, 16th September 1970
By Sylvia Clayton:
I welcomed the return of Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC 1), whose earlier series, recently repeated, had shown more inventive energy than all the other comedy shows put together.
Last night's edition had for me only one item in which the team's gift for wild improvisation was used to full advantage.
This was a multiple portrait of the Piranha Brothers, leaders of a gang whose protection racket had terrorised London, though one of them, mentally unstable, imagined he was being pursued by a giant hedgehog.
The feature satirised beautifully the reverence that commentators give to success in crime as in any other field, and the "This Is Your Life" style of tributes by friends and acquaintances, together with the totally pointless conclusions drawn by experts.
Elsewhere some of the surrealist comedy had, I felt, degenerated into a rather studied silliness, though the animation and design by Terry Gillian [sic] and Ken Sharp remained fascinating.
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Times, 16th September 1970:
BARGAIN FOR THE BBC
BBC 1
Monty Python's Flying Circus
Monty Python's Flying Circus, undoubtedly the funniest British comedy series since the old Goon Show, returned with a new series to B.B.C. 1 last night. The programme, which started a year ago, owes much to the Goon Show, to another and more recent radio show, Sorry I'll Read That Again, and to Do Not Adjust Your Set, a Thames Television children's programme of two years ago. Various members of the Python troupe wrote and presented these last two shows, and in Monty Python their ensemble comedy seems to have reached its fullest flower.
The show is, as the credits say, conceived, written, and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Gilliam is the man who does the surrealistic (rather yellow submarineish) animated cartoons which open the programme and crop up at regular intervals thereafter.
The programme creates a comic universe in which one sketch leads into another and various jokes from a sketch will run throughout the entire show. Taken individually the sketches are, perhaps, not great comedy, certainly other programmes like, say, the current B.B.C. series Broaden Your Mind, have equally good sketches. The difference is that Monty Python makes this tremendous good use of runnings [sic] gags to create a wholeness that is rather more like a zany, modern comic novel than what we normally associate with television comedy.
There has been a feeling that the B.B.C. does not truly love the programme. Certainly such an original and energetic show must puzzle the greyer figures at the B.B.C. and last year Monty Python was taken off the air for a few weeks when some supposedly more important programming was deemed necessary to the public good. One also wonders why the increasingly puff-riddled Radio Times failed to give this new Python series a plug. But in the end Python is on the air, and it is obvious to any viewer that this is not a cheap show to mount. It would, however, still be an incredible bargain to the B.B.C. at twice the price.
Stanley Reynolds |
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Radio Times, 15 October 1970
[Lovely behind-the-scenes piece - perhaps carried in
response to the moans in the 'Bargain For The BBC'
Times piece above?]
'THE IDEA IS THAT EVERYONE INTERFERES WITH EVERYONE ELSE'S BUSINESS'
by Anne Chisholm
Now that Monty Python's Circus is flying again, with a series that seems to be even loonier than the first, it's a good time to see just how the show gets off the ground, and stays there.
There are two main ingredients in its success. First, scripts are not written by scriptwriters but by the actors themselves, who get together to develop each other's ideas and fantasies.
Secondly, they do not try to appeal to everyone; their humour is aimed at a specific audience. 'It's a bit like when the Goon Show first came on,' says Graham Chapman. 'Youngsters seem to like it but parents are puzzled.'
'The nature of the show,' claims John Cleese,' is that everyone interferes with everyone else's business. It can get a bit chaotic. It uses up a huge number of ideas compared to most shows. After the writing is done, it becomes very technical, and we sometimes find that some of the ideas don't work. It's a fairly complex show and it does get confusing.' Cleese stands out because he has the best known face, but he accepts the role of spokesman with some reluctance.
The shows are not written as separate entities: individual sketches are worked on until there is a mass available from which to draw on.. Occasionally a theme emerges from the material chosen for a show; it's not deliberate, but when it happens they try to make the most of it.
For this series, the team has put in eight months writing, re-writing, filming, rehearsing, dubbing and editing. They meet to write in twos and threes, or all together, several times a week.
Rehearsals take place in a suburban club hall in East Acton, not far from Television Centre, but totally different in atmosphere. Apart from Hammersmith Hospital and Wormwood Scrubs, East Acton is quiet and leafy, with pretty semi-detached houses and rows of well-kept gardens. The hall is a large bare room decorated with travel murals in faded pastel shades - the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canal and Westminster Bridge. The cast has come to feel quite fond of it.
Morning rehearsal starts with Ian MacNaughton, the producer-director, at one end of a long trestle table covered with scripts, ashtrays and coffee cups. The cast, wearing jeans, tee-shirts and elderly sweaters, leaf through the scripts, giggling occasionally.
John Cleese is late: when he lopes in, waving eagerly, there are derisive cries of 'Sorry! You're late. We've already got somebody else...' He sits down, looks at his script, says glumly, 'There's an awful lot to learn in this one.' Various people offer to take over.
Rehearsal under way, Ian MacNaughton capers about waving his arms like a mad conductor, people wander round with pints of beer and packets of nuts. 'The worst thing about this show,' says Terry Jones, returning after going through a sketch to find his glass half-drained, 'is that people keep drinking your beer.'
John Cleese sits by himself making appalling faces and twisting his incredibly long legs into grotesque postures. Michael Palin and Graham Chapman lie on their backs on tables doing exercises with expressions of acute pain.
Each member of the cast has a particular style. 'Mike and I,' says John, 'have 1920s faces. Eric has a very 1970s face. Graham looks like a Roman emperor.' Michael certainly excels at parodying the juvenile lead: he seems the sunniest, always cheery. Eric Idle is the quietest and most elusive: 'I do the sexy bits,' he says, sidling away from the questions, showing the whites of his eyes.
Graham, tall and pale, can look as impressive as the Duke of Wellington, with a mad glare in the eyes. Terry Jones, dark and bouncing, is the worrier, the one who most often thinks of the way a sketch could be improved at the last minute. 'Graham plays a lot of heavies: I seems to play authoritarian parts most of the time,' says John, looking as if this suddenly worries him.
Although they deliberately avoid undergraduate humour - they growl if you mention satire - they were all at Oxford or Cambridge. 'Oh, we're a right upper-class lot here,' says Eric, 'except for Terry Gilliam, who tells us he was at Occidental College, California, whatever that is.'
Terry Gilliam, who does the beautifully macabre animations, is small and innocent looking, with long hair and glasses: he usually comes into the proceedings fairly late, after a show is more or less in shape. He also enjoys appearing from time to time in small parts in the show.
Watching the editing, in a Television Centre basement room, is like entering a scene from a space movie: amazing electronic machines whirr and blink while efficient-looking young technicians crouch at huge instrument consoles. 'They edit it almost by committee,' one confided. 'It's chaos when you get them all down here arguing about it.'
When it comes to studio performances, the whole complicated process comes magically together - until you sit up with Ian in the darkened control room and hear him agonise profanely over almost every transition from sketch to film to animation. The audience sits patiently as he asks for one section to be run back and repeated: John Cleese obligingly entertains them with some particularly awful grimaces.
It's a long way from that first studio performance last year, when they all suddenly felt that they might not get a single laugh, and that Monty Python would never make it. But it's a feeling that has never left them: 'You don't get more confident,' says John, 'and it wouldn't be a good thing if you did. We need to feel a bit insecure.'
[NB: Five of the Pythons are photographed for this
article. By each of their pictures, there is a caption:]
JOHN CLEESE: Suffers from a dull throbbing pain at the back of the head
GRAHAM CHAPMAN: Britain's No1 in the hop-step-hop-hop-and-get-disqualified event
MICHAEL PALIN: First engagement - 'Martha Cratchit' for Birkdale School
TERRY JONES: Won wide recognition as a professional butterfly-eater
ERIC IDLE: Without doubt, the hottest showbiz property in Lusaka today
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The Sun, 3rd November 1970:
GENTLE CLOWN PUTS THE BOOT IN
By WILLIAM GREAVES
It will not have escaped the notice of anybody who enjoys laughing, without knowing why, that Monty Python's Circus is flying tonight (BBC 1, 10.15).
We won't be required to think too much, and we need not bother looking for hidden messages.
It will, of course, be frightfully silly. Daft at times, stupid from start to finish, infantile, zany, and a waste of time. And very funny indeed.
The Circus crept from under a BBC stone last year, and slipped unnoticed into the evening programmes so near the end of Sunday night that it was almost Monday morning.
Those of us who discovered it there found a sort of throwback to the days of meaningless comedy, a refreshing reminder of the simple laughter we enjoyed before Private Eye and That Was The Week.
Yet Monty Python is no carbon copy. Its techniques are new, and its humour unpredictable. There is no knowing what might happen tonight.
Crush
Except, of course, that somewhere along the line Terry Gilliam will be putting the animated boot in.
You will remember, will you not, the boot? That soul-less foot that descends like an income tax inspector to crush everybody and everything, through the bottom of the screen.
Terry, a long-haired, loveable American who wouldn't � I am assured � hurt a fly, and who looks after the animation in this particular mad house, sees it rather differently.
He said: "I think of it as the foot of God coming down from the Heavens and crushing everything it doesn't approve of." |
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Evening Standard, 23rd December, 1970
THE PYTHON (AND OTHERS) WHO ESCAPED THE NET
MILTON SHULMAN/inside TV
Since there is more wrong with British television than is right with it, this column tends to be preoccupied with its failings rather than its virtues.
Yet inevitably, considering the mass of hours that have to be catered for, individual programmes of high talent and achievement slip through all administrative net that seems devised to discourage adventure and suspect brilliance.
Since we are all supposedly bubbling with good will at this time of the year, let me record some of the peak moments of pleasure that I can recall over the past few months that I have not previously noted.
Undoubtedly the one programme that holds out some hope that the BBC is not irrevocably committed to a policy of sinking even deeper into the mediocrity ooze is Monty Python's Flying Circus.
A wondrous example of nonsense and anarchic humour � a unique line of traditional English comedy stemming from Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and the Goons � its success depends upon a blissful disregard of all the rules of TV humour.
Skits do not end but meander through the half-hour, intruding on other ideas and situations with no regard for sense of propriety.
If the Spanish Inquisition takes their fancy, you might find red-caped cardinals on a Clapham bus or diving into the Thames.
No centre
It has no fixed satirical point or comic centre but can invent a Government Department of Funny Walks and make it hilarious.
Last week there was a quiz show with the main participants being Mao Tse-tung, Lenin, Karl Marx and Che Guevara. The winning prize, naturally, was a lounge suite.
"The struggle of class against class is what struggle?" asked the chirpy quizmaster, which was followed up by the more relevant question: "Coventry City won the FA Cup in what year?"
Next week we were promised on this quiz show a contest between four heads of state of Afro-Asian nations against Bristol Rovers at Molineux It may not be profound satire but it says all that needs to be saying about the BBC's present obsession with sports and quizzes.
Adding a further bizarre element to the wild contributions of John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman are the cartoons of Terry Gilliam which for weird, off-beat invention have not had their equal since that joyous animated film, The Yellow Submarine.
The phenomenon of Monty Python deserves to enter that pantheon of brilliant TV humour which includes the Ned Sherrin satire shows, Hancock's Half Hour, Till Death Us Do Part, Marty and Steptoe and Son.
It is a sign of the drab conventional minds that are now in charge of the BBC that this gem of TV imagination is not seen in five of the BBC regions. Indeed only London and Scotland can see it. |
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© 1970 various authors | |
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