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EDIT NEWS: Monty Python - Press Coverage 1971 |
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The Sun, 12th March 1971
MONTY CAN'T WIN THE ROSE SHOW
By PHILIP PHILLIPS
The BBC, I predict, will NOT win the Golden Rose of Montreux this year.
The reason is Monty Python's Flying Circus, named yesterday by Mr Bill Cotton, Head of Lead Entertainment, as the BBC entry for the award.
Monty Python is typical English upper-middle class humour, and as such has practically no international appeal. I even doubt whether it appeals much to Scottish, Irish or Welsh viewers, upper-middle class or not.
The BBC seems to have had its own doubts about Monty, since it has always been screened fairly late in the evening.
Yet a special edition of the show � the work of John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gillian [sic] � will compete against the world's best in light entertainment at the Swiss festival in May.
Mr Cotton says: "Monty Python has a large and loyal following in this country, and its mixture of verbal and visual ideas gives it a unique appeal to audiences throughout the world."
You'll be able to see the special Monty Python on BBC-1 next month. |
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The Guardian, 17th April 1971:
Nancy Banks-Smith
MONTY PYTHON
The symptoms of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (BBC-1) are peculiar. One tends to meditate some three inches, uttering a short, sharp shriek the while. (Pause while I search unsuccessfully from some printable parallel. It does remind me a little of the genius who thought there was a future in heated lavatory seats.)
I have not laughed madly like that since somewhere, who knows where or when, sang, "There's a ferret sitting up my nose" on TV. I strongly suspect it must have been one of the Python lot in some other show. The humour smells the same: insane, surrealist, subversive.
Between Eldrich yells, I sat in stunned incomprehension; thus causing some family friction, as they tended to rush in at each scream but only in time to catch me totally comatose. You obviously get the joke or you don't. There is no middle road. I loved the exploding orchestra and women wrestling in mud (but then I would), the deflating pneumatic chair, the stuffed lion, Joan Bakewell discussing with Michael Dean what makes interesting television, "extracts from our romantic film" (which used the self-erecting chimney joke of "Frost Over London," the BBC's last Montreux success, but to much better effect). And the graphics. And the humming. Let him hum again, let him hum again.
I had not seen much Monty Python hitherto as it is transmitted at a time when viewers who might object are making their "Milo," and daily critics are brewing their belladonna. Newcastle, the Midlands, the South-west, Wales and Ulster have not seen it at all, presumably on the grounds that unless you live in London you have little bushy tails. I hope they take their omission as the insult it undoubtedly is.
It may be that the sharp sensation of Monty Python accounted for my punctured reaction to "Miss England" (BBC-1) "from the ancient Lyceum ballroom." I wish I could find it funny instead of, like a deflating cake, sad, seedy and sinking. I wish the figuregraph, which shows whether the girls are knock-kneed or bow-legged, didn't make me feel ill. I wish I could show a tooth or two at the way they are all from Biggleswick and Biggleswade. I wish Keith Fordyce would stop saying "Wonderful." The fash was presented by Mr Stereo Gold Records, who wore a pale blue shirt, interestingly frilled, with a large bow tie matching his hair, which fell fashionably in sideboards. His chest measurement appeared to be 38 inches, inside leg, say, 32. What a wonderful combination. His ambition is to sell more stereo gold records. What a wonderful philosophy. |
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Daily Telegraph, 17th April 1971:
MONTY PYTHON SKETCHES ARE CURTAILED
By RICHARD LAST
I agree absolutely with the B B C's choice of Monty Python's Flying Circus (B B C-1) for Montreux � it is difficult to see what other candidate could have been preferred � but I am less certain about the television "composite" specially assembled to compete for the Golden Rose.
I would have been inclined to chance one of the original programmes and I will even nominate a choice: the recently repeated episode which contained the now-celebrated "Dead Parrot" sketch, and the one with the bed salesmen who put a bag over his head when anyone said "mattress."
But, of course, one appreciates that the B B C naturally wanted to try and put as many plums in one pie as possible. They were quite right to include the Ministry of Silly Walks, which is a classic if any comedy sketch ever was.
Some of the other items in this assemblage, shown last night, suffered a little from inevitable curtailment. Others, like "Blackmail," a gorgeous satire on the give-away quiz shows, depend rather heavily on knowledge of the original.
It now remains to be seen whether the international jury of Montreux will crease themselves as helpfully as the faithful B B C-1 following. I think they will � though it should be remembered that a lot of British viewers, understandably enough, still don't get point and that a lot more (thanks to a decision worthy of the Minister of Silly Walks himself) haven't been able to see the last series at all. |
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The Times, 19th April 1971:
MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS
BBC 1
Chris Dunkley
For the sake of large, deprived areas of Britain one hopes that the French, the Germans, the Italians and even the Finns find Monty Python's Flying Circus as funny as I do. Friday night's show was the one that will represent the BBC in this year's Montreux Festival of Light Entertainment, and you never know � if it does win an award, dear Auntie might actually allow the show to be seen north of Edgware.
It seems to be an oddly equivocal attitude that leads the BBC to choose this zany programme as its flagship in the most important European light entertainment festival, and yet restrict its operations in Britain to trips round the London lighthouse � as though the good old sophisticated South East is the only area which can be allowed anything like regular exposure to such heady stuff.
Terry Gilliam, the man responsible for the generally brilliant animation sequences in the series, sums up the situation in an interview in the current I.T.: "They're putting us in as Britain's entry to Montreux, then they put us out on the regional spot on Tuesday night and no-one watches it. They're watching farming news. Or they take us off for football or indoor tennis."
The Montreux programme consists of selected sketches from a number of previously broadcast programmes, and no doubt each one is somebody's favourite: a measure of the programme's impact and success is that already a number of individual skits are savoured by Python addicts in much the same way as particular sections of some Hancock shows are repeated by rote years after their original transmission.
I did not consider this the funniest Python that I have seen: there have been editions which hung together better, but that is presumably the price you pay for cannibalising a selection of shows. Individually the sketches were at least as funny on a second showing as in the original, and there had been some admirably wholesale editing of certain parts, notably in the pre-credit Lawrence of Antarctica sequence with its mick-take of Peckinpah-style slow-motion death � the victim here being the world's most dangerous stuffed lion. |
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The Times, 21st April 1971:
Letters:
MONTY PYTHON FILM
From Mr. Bill Cotton
Sir, Keeping the war going between Monty Python's Flying Circus and the B.B.C. seems to be a favourite occupation of The Times and other quality newspapers. Maybe, in the next series, we could feature a sketch about flogging a dead horse.
Certainly the most recent series was not fully networked. However, to say, as you television critic did today (April 19) that the programme was not seen north of Edgware, but only "round the London lighthouse", is inaccurate. Sixty percent of the public were able to see it � including people north of Manchester and north of the Border. That hardly demonstrates a lack of confidence on the part of the B.B.C.
There are two other points to be made: (1) Monty Python will be seen on the full network in July, and all the cast, and many journalists, know that; (2) the B.B.C. is the only broadcasting organisation in the world which could have started the programme, and sustained it. All the cast, and most journalists, know that, too.
Yours sincerely,
BILL COTTON,
Head of Light Entertainment Group,
B.B.C. Television Centre, W.12.
From Mr. A. Kynric Lewis
Sir, The British (or is it English?) contribution to the Montreux Festival is the Monty Python's Flying Circus programme which your television critic in Friday's paper found very funny.
Last Friday evening I watched the programme together with three children. Much of it was very good fun. But on some occasions it was just unpleasant. In the interests of good entertainment, reliance was placed on implied or express references to homosexuality, fornication, and indecent assault on another's genitals.
For a programme or publication to be held to be obscene, it must I think be shown that it has a tendency to corrupt or deprave. I am sure the programme did not have this effect on the children. But, on the other hand, they were upset; and they afterwards required a sort of quiet and implicit reassurance that the standards shown by the programme were not valid.
Perhaps those who made the programme, or those who arranged for it to be shown when children can look at it, do not understand these things. Perhaps they have no children.
Perhaps, also when they have shown it to the French, the Germans, and the Italians at Montreux they will not want the show to be seen "North of Edgware", to use your critic's words. I hope so.
Yours faithfully,
A. KYNRIC LEWIS,
Penrallt, Mill Place,
Llysfaen, Glamorganshire
April 19 |
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Spectator, 24th April 1971:
TELEVISION
BRITISH FUN
Patrick SKENE CATLING
Who says Britain is finished? Just a minute, Mr Ford. It may interest you to know that Britain's Gross National Laughter Index is second to none. Britain is the funniest country in the world. There are so many laughs here, there's a surplus for export. When was the last time you built a really good laugh in Detroit � a stylish fast one that didn't have to be recalled to the factory to make it safe?
If the BBC's entry for this year's 'Golden Rose Of Montreux' doesn't win it, we shall know once and for all that a Rose isn't a Rose isn't a Rose and the Common Market's a rotten egg. This statement is no mere vainglorious chauvinistic rodomontade. I accept, though I cannot endorse, the verdicts of the judges of Eurosong and Unisoccer and Cosmosex and all the other internationally televised rites of the global village. I don't care who wins the table tennis, if we can all use the telephone. But BBC1's special edition of Monty Python's Flying Circus last week was something else.
The programme was specially conceived (imagine the heaving conjunction of talents), written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, and also presented Carol Cleveland, David Ballantyne, John Hughman, Stanley Mason, Helena Clayton and Derek Chafer, with animations by Terry Gilliam, and the whole Thing was produced by Ian MacNaughton, and I thought it was funny.
Gilliam's animations set the tone, which might have been achieved otherwise only if J. B. Morton, Heath Robinson, Rowland Emmett and Ezra Pound, as coeval adolescents, had been taken behind the five courts of some penal school for boys and inflamed with slanderous erotic anecdotes about machinery. Add to this notion, if you can, a certain amount of subversively radical dogma about orthodontics. And, while you're at it, you may as well consider the implications of a sequence in which Michelangelo's David was depicted wearing a fig-leaf, which was removed by a prurient masculine hand, to reveal the face of a blue-nosed film censor.
The anthology of sketches included 'It's the Arts', 'The Ministry of Silly Walks', 'Blackmail' and 'The Romantic Movie'. The complacent commentator on the arts slowly subsided in an Italian plastic chair that was slowly leaking, while he showed 'The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights (1970)' (bigger flags represented more exclamation marks in the dialogue) and 'The Exploding Version of The Blue Danube' (the conductor used a detonator for musical emphasis, eventually blowing up the entire orchestra). The walks are already too famously silly to require further comment. The blackmail sketch was about TV private-eye films which can be stopped by their exposed victims only with telephone calls promising bribes. The romance was mainly symbolic � a factory chimney, an Apollo lift-off, the steamy labour of a railway engine, the collapse of the factory chimney, a crowd of middle-aged woman applauding. There was a good Gilliam bit about a humanoid caterpillar that crept over leaves to a house and got into bed until an alarm clock rang: from the grey chrysalis emerged a veritable Liberace of a butterfly. One or two moments reminded me of Cocteau and his camp inventiveness and facility, but when I delved a millimetre beneath the surface of Monty Python I found, much to my relief, that there was nothing there. |
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Sunday Telegraph, 3rd October 1971:
By Philip Purser:
Sir Lew Grade's venture into lunatic comedy, The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine (A.T.V.), is as if he had attempted to package cricket matches for the international market or turn the Last Night of the Proms into a 39-part series. Something unpredictable and peculiarly British has been institutionised. Of nearly a dozen sketches in the first show � nearly all of them still went on too long � only the aristocrats' nature reserve was really inspired and consistently funny.
There were other good moments: a tour de force by Marty Feldman, eyes popping, hair streaming, as a cymbalist, attempting to crush a fly during a performance of Bizet; a brilliant visual effect in a dance number where he became a cinema organist and the dancers the organ itself, even taking on authentic Odeon decor; some quieter moments by Orson Welles and Spike Milligan and the recurring presence of Bob Todd, who is now one of the two best comedian's foils around (the other is Julian Orchard).
But you didn't need a long memory to see what was lacking. The repeat of Monty Python's Flying Circus the previous night (or two nights previously outside London) displayed the real escalating fantasy of the genre at its purest, one sketch sparking off another, the inane board meeting suddenly turning into a joke about film and reality. Or compare the quick, spiteful TV game show here � an incriminating film with the bribe money ticking up on the screen until the victim phoned in offering to pay � with the laboured and none-too-original "Holocaust" of Marty Feldman's. The vital spark is diminished, the improvisation gone. |
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Radio Times, 8th September 1971:
[A short piece about Carol Cleveland, accompanied by a photo of her by a parrot cage!]
IT'S MONTY PYTHON'S VERY OWN GLAMOUR GIRL
'You don't want me to change into a bikini or hot pants or anything, do you?' asked Carol Cleveland. 'I get very tired of being sexy.' We assured her that we didn't and she sat back, obviously relieved. Carol is the girl the lads in Monty Python's Flying Circus (back this week, BBC1 Thursday) bear in mind when they want to inject a flash of glamour into their lives.
Working on Monty P (that's what she always calls it) is fantastic fun, says Carol, and of course it was a very lucky break in her career, but she is getting a bit worried now in case people think she's just a pouting face. She'd like, she says, to do something serious, something that would really tax her ability.
'I'd really love to play a plain little thing sometime. Tennessee Williams�I love Tennessee Williams, ever since I saw Baby Doll. To do a play by him would be incredible.'
Carol arrived back in Britain from Pasadena ten years ago, did a stint at RADA, then went straight into television and films, by-passing the normal repertory route. 'From the beginning I felt I wasn't cut out for the stage at all. My voice, you see � it's very low, and I'm sure it wouldn't carry.'
A couple of days after we met, she was married to acting instructor Peter Brett, at two ceremonies in Marylebone � one civil, the other religious. 'I felt I wanted to get married in church because Peter's been married before and I wanted to get the lawful bit over with first. Am I wearing white? Oh no, he'd die if he saw me walking down the aisle like that. No, it's more a sort of pale yellow.' |
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The Sun, 13th November 1971
[This is the winner.]
WEEKEND TV SUN
8-PAGE PULLOUT FREE EVERY SATURDAY
IN THE CRAZY COURT OF KING PYTHON
By KENNETH EASTAUGH
The five most outrageous men in television sat round a kitchen table in a house in East London, putting the zing into the zany explosions of their imaginations.
I was sitting in on a script-writing session for the new series of Monty Python's Flying Circus, to be shown by the BBC next year.
The table was littered with scripts and doodles, and glasses of home-made beer brewed by the host, Terry Jones. His four Python pals were John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin and Eric Idle.
"Excuse us for a minute," said Cleese, "We're trying to work something out."
He looked at Palin and said: "How about The Under-Secretary For Doing Tiger Impressions?"
Palin didn't think so... and he had strong opinions, because the script they were vetting was one he had just written with Terry Jones.
Growls
"Why not The Man From The Ministry For Deep Growling Noises?" said Palin.
They tossed the line among them for ten minutes, almost settled on The Under-Secretary Of State For Hiding From Noel Coward, but, at the last minute, substituted the name of playwright Terence Rattigan.
Why Terrence Rattigan?
"He's one of our latest figures," said Cleese. "We just like the name."
Jones and Palin, Cleese and Chapman, work in pairs. Idle works alone.
The [sic] prepare scripts then meet at one of the team's houses to, in their own words, "give each other's scripts the stick."
Jones was not taking part in the script discussion. I asked why.
"I had to answer the door for you," he said, "I've lost the thread."
Cleese said: "You can go out to the loo, and when you come back find you're not in the show."
Teams
Chapman, aged 30, Cleese, 32, Idle, 28, Jones, 29, and Palin, 28, teamed up because they were tired of writing conventional scripts.
"We wanted to write for ourselves," said Chapman, who is a qualified doctor.
"We felt we would have more chance of getting everything accepted." All are Oxford or Cambridge graduates. Once they meet with their individual scripts it takes them a week to put a show together.
The one they were working on was their 33rd. *
Said Cleese: "We are all much ruder to each other now than when we started, and I think that is a good thing. It produces better, more honest, stuff."
Their shows, they say, are composed of the sort of stuff that other series throw away as being too way-out.
Said Cleese: "When we wrote for The Frost Report or other TV series, there were always absurd ideas being put up and laughed away as too ridiculous."
"Well, that's the stuff we use." "We're also original," said Idle. "Let's not be too modest."
The team is irritated by the BBC's treatment of the series.
"They put us out late and, for a long time, we were not fully networked," said Jones.
"One week they didn't put us on because of a documentary about a ship," said Cleese.
"The nice thing about us from a BBC planning point of view seems to be that we can be cancelled at a moment's notice," said Idle.
"And tell viewers to stop sending us scripts," said Idle.
"We get four a week and never use them," said Cleese.
Then they remembered the exception... singer Kenneth McKellar.
"He sent us an idea we would like to use," said Cleese, "But we want him to do it himself in the show. It's the only outside idea we've ever been interested in."
Could Python be getting a new recruit?
* It was in fact the 32nd of the BBC shows (Series 3, Show 6) - although they were probably counting Fliegender Zirkus in that little lot. The line they eventually settled on for the sketch was the Under-Secretary for making deep growling noises, grrr".
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© 1971 various authors | |
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