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EDIT NEWS: Monty Python - Press Coverage 1975 - 1979 |
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The Sun, 27th December 1975
OH, THEY'VE RUINED OUR PYTHON!
By CHRIS GREENWOOD
The zany crew of Monty Python's Flying Circus have lost a desperate court battle to stop themselves being seen by a massive American audience.
They were upset at the way one of their shows, due to be seen by Americans yesterday, had been cut.
And they took the American Broadcasting Company to court to stop the show being broadcast.
Judge Boris Lasker turned down their application, but he did make one concession to the Python team.
He ordered ABC to broadcast a message from the Python men disowning the programme
Style
American-born animator Terry Gilliam, 32, who was in court with fellow-Pythoneer Michael Palin, 33, said: "We got the definite impression Judge Laker was a Python fan.
"He agreed that our whole comedy style had been disembowelled by the cuts."
Monty Python became a big success in America following the film, Monty Python And The Holy Grail, and transmissions of earlier shows, without cuts, on Public Broadcasting - the non commercial network.
So American commercial television started bidding for BBC 2's most recent Monty Python show.
Bumper
ABC won, and decided to lump the six half-hour episodes into two bumper 90-minute shows.
It wasn't until the first was shown in October, that the team realised how heavily the originals had been cut.
They assembled a hurried screening of the second - and decided on legal action.
Gilliam says: "They have taken out anything that might have given the slightest offence. Even expressions like 'Good God,' and 'Good Lord.'
"And references to people's naughty bits.
"The end result is a terrible, non-funny hotchpotch."
Another Pythoneer, Terry Jones, 34, says: "I visited the States after the first show had been screened.
"Our fans were disappointed. They take us seriously BECAUSE WE TILT FUN AT THE Establishment.
"They interpreted what has happened as the Establishment getting back at us."
Blank
The problem with the official Monty Python disclaimer was making it sound serious.
Gilliam says: "We insisted on a very straight announcement read over a blank screen."
"But after the court hearing, an ABC executive came up to us, all jovial, and suggested we make the disclaimer a bit of a Python joke.
"We refused, of course. But it shows how sensitive they were to our reasons for bringing the court action."
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Sunday Times Weekly Review, 6th June 1976
[Originally this appeared in The New Yorker. Much of
this is repeated in the relevant chapter of 'Monty Python:
The Case Against']:
Reporting a classic in the annals of American justice: the case of the deleted 'naughty bits' and the artistic indivisibility of Python Art.
By HENDRICK HERTZBERG
MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING ...LAW SUIT
It took five years for Python to make the big jump across the Atlantic. The feeling was that the humour was "too British" - a feeling shared by the BBC, by the BBC's American distributor, Time-Life Films, and by the Pythons themselves.
What were supposedly lumpen American audiences to make of the Python's "All-England Summarise Proust Contest," or "The Semaphore Version Of Wuthering Heights"? Would they understand British slang (peckish, smarmy, berk, git and poof) and peculiarly British references in obscure regional accents, Oxbridge dons, blancmanges, pantomime horses, chartered accountants, and council houses? And outrageous double entendres, female impersonations and nudity were all potentially shocking to Americans, whose network television had not crossed such boundaries of "taste."
So the public television stations in the big coastal cities started picking up the Monty Python series only after their counterpart, in, of all places, Dallas, KERA, had taken a flyer on it in July, 1974. (The public broadcast system in America aims at putting out relatively high-minded programmes, supported by foundation grants and public funds.)
Everyone was astonished when the show turned out to be, by the modest standards of public television, hugely successful. Both the sophistication of the American public and the exportability of the Pythons' sense of humour had clearly been underestimated. Several things, it appeared had been overlooked.
Some "Britishisms" - police constables and Reginald Maudling are two that come to mind - struck many Americans as inherently hilarious. Also, the Python's approach depended less on satiric verisimilitude than on absurd juxtapositions and pure silliness. One doesn't have to know very much about parliamentary government to recognise that it is funny when a Cabinet minister on a bogus news interview falls through the crust of the earth, or wears a tutu, or addresses his remarks to a small patch of brown liquid, possibly creosote.
"Monty Python's Flying Circus" had not been on the air for many weeks before it became the most popular offering in the history of many public-TV stations, including New York's Channel 13. The American Python cult originally nurtured by travellers returned from Britain and by imported Python record albums, soon turned into a mass phenomenon.
The size and character of the Python audience inevitably attracted the interest of the commercial networks. Last spring, Bob Shanks, a vice-president of ABC, discussed with Time-Life the possibility of a compilation to be drawn from thirteen Python episodes that had already been shown on public television. But the Pythons rejected the proposal, because they didn't want anybody cutting up their shows.
ABC persisted, however, and at some point during the summer Time-Life sold ABC the right to show six Python episodes, all previously unscreened in the United States on "Wide World of Entertainment," its 11.30 pm - 1 am time slot.
This time, the Pythons weren't consulted in advance, but they didn't object to the sale when they learned of it, because they thought that the episodes would be shown in full. Jill Foster, one of the Python's British agents, wrote to David Spiller of BBC Enterprises: "I assume that the programmes are made up of all six episodes of series IV and that no alterations have been made to them." She was assured that "each episode will be shown in its entirety."
All seemed rosy, but a month later a light bulb turned on over Jill Foster's head, and she wrote to Spiller once more. "I was perfectly satisfied with your answer until, in my bath yesterday, it occurred to me that out of this ABC slot of 90 minutes, something in the region of 24 minutes will be devoted to commercials," she wrote. "How then I wonder can each episode be shown in its entirety?" Spiller replied soothingly: "We do not know the situation regarding the length of commercial breaks... nor indeed if the programme receiving sponsorship as opposed to spot advertising. We can only reassure you that ABC have decided to run the programmes 'back to back' and there is a firm undertaking not to segment them."
The first Python special went out over ABC on October 3, but the Pythons themselves didn't see a tape of it until the end of November. They didn't like it.
Gone was the start of a sketch in which a member of an awful family of ladies wipes her feet on the bread. Gone was the cat stuck through the wall which acts as a doorbell when a caller pulls its tail. A running cartoon about "The Golden Age of Ballooning" stayed, but gone was the shaggy-dog punch line it was building up to - "The Golden Age of Colonic Irrigation." Gone, of course, was anything resembling "strong" language - including even the Python's favourite euphemism, "naughty bits."
Worst of all was the loss of continuity. The Python shows, for all their rampaging absurdity, are carefully constructed. A non sequitur needs something to not follow from.
One of the Pythons typed a memo in which he said that time after time it was made to appear as if they "had written and performed a short, pointless, and not particularly funny sketch. We want to do everything we can to stop them putting out another show like this."
The second show was scheduled for December 26. When ABC, understandably, declined to cancel the programme, the Pythons decided to make a federal case out of it. They filed a lawsuit asking for a million dollars in damages for copyright infringement and unfair competition against their own uncut work, and a permanent injunction against ABC. And they applied to the federal District Court for a temporary injunction barring the December 26 broadcast, which by then was only 11 days away.
The case in New York of Monty Python v. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc, was, for several reasons, a diverting one. Besides the novelty of television performers suing to block themselves from being shown on nationwide television there was the satisfying sight of high official of a huge corporation being dragged to the bar of justice by a pack of clowns. "I am not sitting here just because I am amused" the judge, Morris E. Lasker, remarked at one point, "although I am amused."
Half-way through the hearing, everyone - the judge, lawyers, witnesses, spectators - piled into the jury box to watch TV. Everyone seemed to enjoy the show, which consisted of the uncut version of one of the episodes used for the upcoming ABC special followed by the censored version.
The theme of the episode was trivialising war. Some of its sequences were particularly apt. During a court-martial in which a private accused of taking a German pillbox with feather pillows is relentlessly badgered by a judge asking mindless questions, Judge Lasker turned to his clerk with a delighted grin.
During a skit in which television executives, one of whom is being fed intravenously, agree that the public are idiots (to prove it, they go to the window and watch members of the public walking into walls, falling into ditches, etc.), Shanks, the ABC vice-president, permitted himself a chuckle.
Python itself was present in the persons of two members, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam, who lounged in front of the jury box, pointing out to the judge choice bits that had been omitted from the ABC version. And during the more formal part of the hearing, the dialogue occasionally took a Pythonesque turn, as in this colloquy involving Robert Osterberg, the Python's chief counsel Judge Lasker, and Shanks, who was on the stand.
COUNSEL: If you were to supply your affiliates with a programme that was six minutes short, it would have involved a penal payment.
WITNESS: It would to the supplier, yes.
COUNSEL: How much would that be?
WITNESS: An apportionment of sixty-six into whatever the licensing fee was.
COUNSEL: When you say sixty-six-
WITNESS: Into sixty-six thousand. You deliver five minutes short, you lose-
JUDGE: Five hundred ninety, for example?
WITNESS: Right.
JUDGE: Times sixty-five thousand?
WITNESS: If sixty-five is for ninety, Your Honour, then whatever sixty minutes would be.
JUDGE: It would be that much less?
WITNESS: Yes.
COUNSEL: I don't think we follow each other.
WITNESS: I did not follow myself.
The lawsuit had the virtues of pointing up the immense psychological gap between those two pillars of bourgeois civilisation, the artist and the corporation, and of illuminating some of the assumptions that continually push commercial television towards blandness. These factors were all the more noticeable because there were no overt villains. Everyone involved had, according to his lights, behaved honourably. Each direct and indirect participant had a contract he could point to in triumph as fully vindicating his point of view.
The main witness for Monty Python was Terry Gilliam, the transplanted Minnesotan who creates the animated sequences on "Monty Python's Flying Circus." (Gilliam appears on the TV shows only rarely, but his square-featured face may be familiar from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," in which he played the keeper of the bridge over the Gorge of Eternal Peril, who, before letting Sir Lancelot pass, asks him "these questions three": "What is your name?", "What is your quest?", "What is your favourite colour?")
Gilliam's main concern was that the Pythons' hard-earned reputation for integrity had been damaged by the first ABC special and would be damaged further by the second. "One of the important things to me is that there are a lot of people who have come to believe in Python as a form of honesty, as opposed to what is normally presented on television," he said. "Here is a show that is outspoken, says what it wants to say, does extraordinary things, takes all sorts of chances, is not out to sell corn plaster, or anything. It is out to entertain, surprise, enlighten even, the people that are viewing it." He was afraid, he said, that people would conclude that "Monty Python has finally accepted the standards of commercial television, as opposed to our own standard."
Later, Gilliam talked intensely about another kind of integrity: the show's artistic indivisibility.
"I think we saw that things were very intricately interwoven. Things kept referring back to themselves. At one point, we saw the ladies watching themselves on television watching a television set showing the beginning of the film. It wasn't necessary the funniest part of the show, but I certainly think it was a necessary part. We spent a lot of time, a lot of effort, including that and making the show that shape...
"Our shows tend to be very strong on form. We think of each one as a show, try to interrelate all of these things, so the form is as important to the name of Monty Python as the laughs."
Then he drew an analogy with Manet's painting "Déjeuner sur l'Herbe." If one pays attention only to the nude, as ABC had done by, as it were, removing her, "then you get cheap laughs or cheap sensations out of it," he said, "You have lost the whole concept of the painting, which is the conjunction between the two things, the nude and the very bourgeois picnic setting."
The Manet nude in Gilliam's analogy made her appearance in court in the form of Plaintiff's Exhibit No. 10. This was a list of cuts prepared by the network's Standards and Practices office. It was as wonderfully surreal in its juxtaposition of the insane and the resolutely proper as one of Gilliam's animations - it was a true work of found Python art.
A quick glance through the list suggests that many things were eliminated simply because they were funny, but on closer inspection the list breaks down into five categories of abomination: sexual allusiveness, general verbal misbehaviour, fantasies of violence, offensiveness to particular groups, and scatology. Sex was the commonest offender, beginning with the first item on the list:
Audio commentary over lead-in scenes removed to delete such phrases as "The story of one man's love for another in drag" and "the secret love for bisexuals."
When Michael Palin was on the witness stand, he pointed to this as an instance of ABC's coarsening of what was actually in the programme. Palin, boyish and dapper, has played hundreds of parts on the television show; in the "Holy Grail" movie he played, among other roles, Sir Galahad, the Lord of Swamp Castle, and the leader of The Knights Who Say "Ni." Palin noted that the words in the script were not "the secret love for bisexuals" but "the secret love of Algy the bisexual navigator." There was more:
Sequence of Hamlet in psychiatrist's office. Two cuts, one of approximately 2:52 and another of :03, to delete all graphic references to love-making, such as "she's all ready for it," "You've got her tongue down your throat," "You've got her sweater up."
From sequence of TV talk show featuring three Queen Victorias, four scenes of :15 length eliminated to delete references to "girl on the couch, legs on the mantelpiece" - also continuity cut.
Cartoon sequence of boy flying balloon: shot of naked woman eliminated plus exploding woman.
These deletions cut the heart out of a running joke.
The verbal misbehaviour objected to by ABC seemed even stranger:
In scene in war office regarding trivialising of war starting at approximately 4:40, six seconds removed in four separate cuts to remove expressions "Good Lord," "Good God," "Oh, My God," and "Bastard."
Animated sequence of grumpy man trying to sleep. Nine seconds deleted to remove lines "God!" and two "hells" from "What in hell's going on."
In ant-buying sequence :02 deleted to eliminate word "bitch" from "King George bitch."
Hells, damns, and good Lords have, of course, been acceptable fare on television for some time, so it's unclear why ABC bothered to take them out. "Bitch" and "bastard" are generally considered stronger; had they been all that was cut, it's doubtful whether Python would have complained.
As for the fantasies of violence:
Final skit in [the Python show about trivialising war] of two women watching TV. Several cuts totalling :53 deleted to eliminate repeated scenes of women remotely controlling TV through man dressed in Indian garb. Through increasingly violent electric shocks the man is forced to change channels.
In sequence of headless fighter one cut of :15 to eliminate closeup of sewn-on head and second head being brought in in a bag.
2:01 cut to eliminate fight between hospital patients and attendants in hospital.
These were notably free of the kind of realistic, lethal violence that is ubiquitous on the police dramas to which the networks devote so much of their schedules.
ABC's fear of giving offence to particular groups resulted in these two cuts:
Final 1:38 of skit of television programmers, beginning with entrance of man in wheelchair with sword in head, deleted to eliminate offensive references to handicapped individuals. Also deleted was replay of television programme showing members of military court with backsides to camera.
In first scene between Michael Ellis and his mother :14 cut to eliminate references to tiger: "He used to go through four Jehovah's Witnesses a day."
'Coming into court with unclean hands'
All in all, there were more than forty cuts, ranging from two seconds to four minutes. Bob Shanks - a lanky, toothy, modishly dressed man, worldly almost to a Mephistophelian degree - argued that the tone and values of the material were undamaged by the cuts: "If one had not seen the original, one would not miss the items that are gone."
BC's lawyer, Clarence Fried, consistently maintained that Monty Python had no standing to sue, because it had ceded all rights to the BBC, but Judge Lasker was unimpressed by this argument.
He was even less impressed by the closest thing to a dramatic surprise that the hearing produced a sudden accusation by Fried, late in the afternoon, that the Python's were "guilty of coming into court with unclean hands." Fried - a natty turnip of a man whose comedically serious face was punctuated by a pair of pince-nez - fairly shook with indignation as he told the judge, "I will have testimony, if Your Honour wants it, that the attorney representing this group said, "We are going to sue ABC and we are going... to have this case in all the papers, we are going to take ads in Variety." Fried continued, "I didn't understand the importance of that statement until I saw the article in Variety that they are opening in three weeks in City Center."
Fried's contention that the lawsuit was a publicity stunt for a stage show quickly went by the board, though, when Osterberg pointed out that the projected Monty Python engagement at City Center was scheduled for four months later (it was to be for three weeks, not in three weeks). No more was heard about "unclean hands."
Lasker listened more sympathetically when ABC outlined what, in terms of "the equities," as lawyers say, was the heart of its case: that while the Pythons would be damaged only in what Fried called "their own imagined way" if the programme went ahead as planned, ABC would suffer tangible harm if the injunction was granted. It would cost ABC money - nearly half a million dollars by ABC's reckoning; about a hundred and fifty thousand by the Judge's - to pull the Python special off the air. Also, millions of TV Guides listing the show were already in the supermarkets. Taking the show off at this late date, ABC argued, would make the network look inept, humiliate it in public, and irritate its affiliates beyond measure.
Being damaged by being made richer
Gilliam had argued that if the programme was broadcast then the Pythons would lose money. But his contention - that in terms of what he uneasily called "crass financial matters" Python would suffer because the ABC special would be so bad it would discourage people from buying Python record albums and going to Python movies, "which, in fact, is where we make our money" - was unconvincing. It flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Yet the Pythons really had no choice but to make this argument. The legal system simply lacks the conceptual tools to take account of odd folk who consider that they are being damaged by something that is making them richer.
At the outset, the Pythons had taken it for granted that their chances of winning the case were slim. They had merely wanted to reassure their fans that they hadn't sold out. As the day in court wore on, however, the Pythons and their lawyer had begun to discern a glimmer of hope.
Judge Lasker had conducted the hearing even-handedly, but his comments and rulings from the bench had suggested a certain sympathy with the plaintiffs. He had let it drop that he had seen a half-dozen Python shows on Channel 13, that he had seen the "Holy Grail" movie - in short, that he was something of a Monty Python fan. Yet ABC had convincingly shown that it had meant no harm, and ABC had a lot to lose. So when Judge Lasker retired to his chambers to sketch out his decision, he left behind him an atmosphere of suspense.
The court reconvened some thirty minutes later, and Judge Lasker remarked wryly, "I have not had the benefit of talking to all my scriptwriters, or having this material edited one way or another." He need not have apologised. His decision, with its alternating good news and bad news for everyone in the room, was equal to the theatricality f the occasion.
"I find that both of the parties here, as I said at the outset of the hearing this morning, have proceeded in good faith," Judge Lasker began. The Pythons, he went on, "sincerely hold the view that they are entitled to have their work shown as they created it," while ABC, in cutting the shows, manifestly believed "that it had the right to make those changes and that it was serving the interests of the public as well as of its own company in doing so."
He observed parenthetically that procedures probably ought to be tightened to avoid similar misunderstandings in the future, and he continued, "The law favours the proposition that a plaintiff has the right under ordinary circumstances to protection of the artistic integrity of his creation. In this case I find that the plaintiffs have established an impairment of the integrity of their work.
"That the reasons for the changes which were made in good faith and for what may be considered sound professional requirements does not minimise the loss in aesthetic or philosophic punch. Furthermore, the cut of twenty-two minutes out of ninety minutes, which comes out near the border at which one might say that the cuts, if not fatal, certainly made it very difficult for the patient to live in good health. Finally, the damage that has been caused to the plaintiffs is irreparable by its nature."
Hope was stealing across the faces of the Pythons. Lasker gave them the bad news all at once, like a bucket of water in a vaudeville turn: "Nevertheless, there are important reasons why I will decline to grant the injunction as requested." It was not clear, he said, "who owns the copyright on the programme we are talking about as distinct from the script."
But one thing was clear: "ABC will suffer significant financial loss if it is enjoined... and some irreparable damage... to its relations and affiliates, an implication of sloppiness of management - which I do not believe would be justified under the circumstances - and, finally, being put in an unfavourable light with the public and the government."
"The motion," he said, "is denied."
That seemed to be that, but Lasker was not through. "However," he said, "I am willing to consider - although I do not know precisely how to phrase it - a motion for more limited relief, I have in mind the possibility, if the plaintiffs would like to make such a motion, for some kind of statement to be made on the show. I am telling ABC right now that I would, and I would be likely to grant such relief, as long as it was sensibly phrased and did not, of course, consume too much of the time of the programme - and I don't see why it would."
This unexpected, Solomonic twist left the court room momentarily stunned. "My silence is not to be taken as any agreement or otherwise," Clarence Fried managed to say. As for the Pythons, they began, after a few minutes, to imagine that they had won something of a victory. They stayed behind in the court room with their lawyer to work on the text of their proposed disavowal.
Judge Lasker, still wearing the robes of office, came into the room, shook Gilliam and Palin by the hand, and told them shyly that he was one of their greatest admirers. Gilliam remarked to a friend wonderingly that one of the ABC people had asked him if he would mind making the disavow funny.
On Monday, Judge Lasker ordered ABC not to proceed with the broadcast unless it included the following announcement, which had been written by the Pythons and toned down by the judge: "The members of Monty Python wish to dissociate themselves from this programme, which is a compilation of their shows edited by ABC without their approval." The announcement was to be shown on screen for twenty seconds, and read aloud, at the beginning of the programme, and repeated in full during the first commercial break.
Inviting actions from all the other minions
ABC's lawyers, their wits by now recovered, instantly rushed to a three-judge Appeals Court panel to file a motion of "stay pending appeal" - in effect, to cancel Lasker's order. Since the motion, in theory, was only procedural, the judges heard no witnesses and viewed no tapes. They listened to the lawyers argue for half an hour, and granted ABC's motion.
When the programme was shown three days later, an attentive viewer might have noticed a small legend flashed on the screen for three seconds: "Edited for Television by ABC." This was the only indication that something odd had been going on, and it had been put there "voluntary" by ABC, no doubt to draw some of the sting should the Pythons pursue their litigation - which, so far, is exactly what they have done.
Five months later, they are still in court. One horse has obviously got away, but enough remain in the stable to make it seem worth while to keep trying to close the door. A few weeks ago, the Pythons won a court order stopping ABC from rebroadcasting and bowdlerised Python programmes until the case is settled. That could take years, and the Python's patience (and money) may not hold out. ABC is worried (in the words of one of their legal briefs) that a Python victory "would only invite actions for injunctive relief by every writer, artist, cameraman, director, performer, musician, lighting engineer, set and dress designer, editor and sound effects man... [whose] part in the composite undertaking was not according to his liking or artistic sense." If the Pythons do ultimately win their case - and stranger things have happened in American courtrooms - then ABC's nightmare could come true. For the aesthetically (if not financially) downtrodden minions who create programmes for the commercial networks - and for the millions who glumly watch them - that would be a happy day.
© 1976, New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
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The Listener, 29th July 1976
William Horsley
MONTY PYTHON'S JAPANESE CIRCUS
Since the spring, Japanese television audiences have been exposed to Monty Python's Flying Circus... and the issue is in doubt. 'Aggressive satire... despite the language barrier, a first-rate work,' said the Asahi Newspaper; 'an excellent satire, comedy and sex programme from England,' chimed in the Sports paper; but the Tokyo Newspaper complained: 'It's not funny when all the jokes have to be explained.' The publicity for the Japanese version boasts that Monty Python will be the seed for a rebirth of comedy in Japan; but one Japanese professional broadcaster, after seeing it, said he 'couldn't see the point.'
Well, humour is the most difficult thing to export. The most remarkable thing is that Japan wanted Monty Python in the first place. In a Confucian society, it is not usual to send up society, and while enjoying all the formal freedoms, Japan's television stations generally play safe in their programme policy, for the sake both of the status quo and their own ratings. Monty Python, with its moderate success, has thrown a few of these assumptions into question.
A good deal of Monty Python was bound to go over the heads of the Japanese, anyway. Despite prodigious efforts at learning, the country is predominantly non-English speaking. When you add to that peculiarities like Yorkshire accents, gay talk and the conventions of British undergraduate humour, Japan is bound to be put on the defensive. What is Lord Trevelyan's face doing in the middle of the nude statue? Why is that line of women looking under the Scotsman's kilt? Why does Queen Victoria's husband speak in German? One can't help sympathising with the Tokyo Newspaper which asks in reply to what would happen if you tried to translate Japanese humour on British television... 'Samurai and Son: the story of a noodle-merchant and his efforts to join Mitsubishi'?
But leaving aside the purely English references, some of the difficulties have been of Japanese's own making. First of all, the title. The Monty Python team have declared that the title was carefully chosen because it meant nothing in particular. Dissatisfied with this, the producers of the Japanese version combed the dictionary for possible interpretations, and came up with the title: 'The Gay Boy's (Monty) Dragon (Python) Show'. And the programme was billed as 'a kind of intellectual guessing-game for adults' - a chance for the audience to identify Queen Victoria, Charles Curran or Peter West?
Again, the Japanese find it incredible that John Cleese, Eric Idle and the rest should actually be Oxbridge graduates - part of the 'privileged élite'. This takes a good deal of explaining on the programme, and the qualifications of each of the actors (John Cleese was a lawyer, Graham Chapman a doctor, etc.) have been meticulously detailed.
This ponderous but earnest approach is all but built into the Japanese television production system. Mutsu Inc., the company representing BBC sales in Japan, has had to do business not only with a commercial station (Tokyo Channel 12), but with separate companies for voice-dubbing and studio production. The programme was sold to the peak evening entertainment slot, Golden Time, for 52 minutes from 10pm, and each edition of Monty Python must be mixed with advertisements and extraneous material, locally produced.
In Japan, there are a great many conventions governing what is broadcast. One is that virtually all foreign material should be dubbed into Japanese - a habit that distresses the purists and the native speakers of English. Another is that any 'difficult' foreign material should be thoroughly explained to the Japanese audience - hence the unwanted and erratic studio gloss on Monty Python. And the last is the convention, sponsored by NHK, Japan's public broadcasting corporation, against broadcasting anything that could offend particular segments of society. As a result, several of the Monty Python skits have had to be cut, including the 'Ministry of Silly Walks' - which won an award in Monty Python's own version of the Emmy awards - and 'Prejudice', a parody of a 'popular quiz show'.
Still, there has been much to please Japan's television audiences - among the most successful skits was the other programme parody, 'Blackmail', where compromising film is shown on the screen until the party concerned phones in to pay the required sum; then there was the 'Exploding Blue Danube' (with dynamite) and, of course, the risqué animations of Terry Gilliam - especially appreciated by the Japanese under-15s. The repeated talk of transvestism and queens was puzzling, but this has been put into perspective by the recent political sex scandals of Britain and the United States.
Japan appears ripe for more adventurous forms of wit. When Monty Python was first offered six years ago, no station would take it on the grounds that the television audiences 'doesn't like to be surprised'. In the meantime, a variety of native 'late, late shows' have started up, with an irreverent look at the news, and energetic muck-raking of current sex-and-violence scandals. With the money scandal of former prime minister Tanaka, and the present Lockheed affair, perhaps the nation is more prepared to have some of its values turned upside down.
But the fundamental problem is a conceptual one - the question of exactly what part of human behaviour is ridiculous. In Monty Python, Robin Hood steals flowers from the poor to give to the rich, the Olympic hide-and-seek takes 17 years, the dentists all speak like Al Capone, and the television announcers all break down in self-pity.
To try to explain why is, as the Tokyo Newspaper says, hopeless. The Japanese weakness has been in failing to see that there was anything funny unless everyone was laughing. But, then, not everybody in England enjoys Monty Python either, let alone in France. As for Japan, after importing railway trains and labour unions, they are prepared at least to have a stab at Monty Python.
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Films and Filming, August 1977, page 44
[From their 'q & a' section. Readers would send in
a question about cinema and Monthly Film Bulletin editor
David McGillivray would research and answer them. His
answers weren't always 100% correct but, be fair, this was
before IMDB and all that.]
Here in the US it is very difficult to obtain information about the Monty Python team. What films have Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Connie Booth and Carol Cleveland made together and individually? And have you ever heard of an actress named Lyn Ashley? If so, has she done any movies?
All of the above, with the exception of Lyn Ashley, were in And Now For Something Completely Different (1971) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974). Chapman has also been in The Magic Christian, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, Doctor In Trouble and The Statue; Cleese in Interlude, The Magic Christian, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, The Statue, The Love Ban, Romance with a Double Bass and a series of industrial shorts; Gilliam is in the forthcoming Jabberwocky and claims to have been in Cry Of The Banshee (if he did appear he was not credited); Idle was in a short called Albert Carter Q.O.S.O.; Jones and Palin are both in Jabberwocky; Booth had uncredited walk-ons in I Start Counting and The Revolutionary, and a larger role in Romance with a Double Bass; Cleveland has appeared in dozens of films since the early Sixties including Strictly for the Birds, Moon Zero Two, The Adding Machine, The Return of the Pink Panther, Vampira and the forthcoming Brutal Syndrome. Everyone, with the exception of Idle and Booth, is featured in Pleasure at her Majesty's, a documentary shown at the recent London Film Festival and on television. Lyn Ashley is the former Mrs Idle and she has appeared in Mister Ten Per Cent, I'll Never Forget What'sisname and Quest For Love.
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Daily Mirror, 28th December 1977
MIRROR TV
Star Spotlight by Pauline McLeod
PUTTING THE LAUGHS BACK IN BRITAIN
Funny man Graham Chapman thinks seriously about his laughter-filled
life, but gets silently hysterical... with fear. Because Graham, a
founder member of the hilariously funny Monty Python team is terrified
of the taxman.
He knows what he'll be doing until at least January 1979... and he'll
probably still be suffering from sleepless nights and counting tax
demands instead of sheep.
He reckons he should be a very rich man but says he is broke.
In February he starts shooting on his first "solo" film. Called "The
Odd Job", he has spent the last 18 months re-writing the script from
an old TV comedy and has put up the £350,000 he needs to produce the
film which will star himself and fellow loonmate Keith Moon.
This film could promote the re-birth of British comedy.
"We have all the facilities and the best technicians but we make no
use of them. I'd like to see the days of the Ealing comedies again.
"I originally had either Peter Sellers or Peter O'Toole in mind for
the part of Arthur - which I am going to do now - but Sellers wanted
to make it too much like Clouseau and Peter O'Toole had personal and
health problems.
When that's finished he'll start work on another Monty Python film in
April.
"At the moment we're still arguing about the title but it will
probably be called 'The Gospel According to St. Brian.' And yes, I
play Brian, the most boring part of the lot, with all the straight
lines.
Don't be fooled - the plot is so outrageously funny, it can't fail to
be a hit.
"I'd like to do another TV series - we work better as a team than as
individuals.
"I thought John Cleese's series 'Fawlty Towers' got very good critical
acclaim which was undeserved. He was living on the reputation of
Python. I thought the series was dreadfully predictable.
"Don't get me wrong. I think John is enormously talented and I love
working with him.
"I think the BBC are as much to blame for trying to split us up. They
have tried to put us in separate packets so they'll get more value for
money."
Chapman also hopes to put a play into the West End and also get down
to work on his book: "A Liar's Autobiography."
Why the title? "Well, it's the truth about me with a little bit of
invention thrown on."
[Huge thanks to James Hayes for sending us this one.]
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Evening Standard, 15th February 1979
[A letter.]
PYTHON AND THE ART OF PARODY
Cerebral humour tends to dry wit, cunning pastiche and wry parody.
The belly laugh favours the ludicrous, the vulgar and outrageous.
It is a rare and happy occasion that combines elements of both, and such an occasion was the week's vintage Monty Python's Flying Circus (Monday, BBC-2).
It is unfortunate, though hardly surprising, that Python almost universally means silly walks, dead parrots, skating vicars and screeching women called Mrs Sartre.
What is often forgotten is the art at which the Python team are most adept: Parody of genre.
This week (albeit following "Spot The Looney") we had the Pathological Alan Whicker syndrome sequence in which various front-men vied for possession of the microphone - and this is the wickedly accurate pastiche performed with quite uncanny observation, in which Python truly excels.
The media spoofs here always have been the programme's strongest point, and never mind the Spanish Inquisition.
Howard Michael Walker
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The Guardian, 20th June 1979, page 11
TONIGHT
Peter Fiddick explains why the Python comedy team is worth a bit of incestuous congratulation on BBC-1
MONTY VIDEO
Ten years later they are the best-known comedy team in the world.
When I first heard Iain Johnstone say it I didn't believe it. There just had to be a couple of other names. Take Eric and Ernie - but then, the Americans never did. Take... er... The Goodies? Mike and Bernie Winters?
To say "British comedy team," of course, is to limit the competition to one of the smaller ponds in the showbiz fun-par, and has been so ever since the situation comedy troupes - hired guns rather than creators - took over television's main arena. An Oscar for the Best Performance by the Pre-Pubescent Brat of a Hollywood Star might these days offer hotter competition.
Even so, British comedy of any sort has notoriously found it hard to travel, especially to get within sniffing distance of the rich pickings across the Atlantic. Bruce Forsyth, butchered on Broadway, might derive no consolation from the thought, but he is at least among the select band who got the chance to be victims.
And the Pythons are famous against all these odds and quite a few others. Iain Johnstone's documentary, marking "more or less" the tenth anniversary of the first Monty Python's Flying Circus, spells out the remarkable facts:
"The 45 television shows have been sold to more than 20 countries from Zambia to Pakistan from Japan to Germany. It is also constantly being re-run across America. The group has sold more than a million records and more than one-and-three-quarter million books. Their previous film, Monty Python And The Holy Grail, has made them a gross to date of nearly $10 millions."
They didn't actually get every last cent of that, between the six of them, but they are, without doubt, among the fatter cats of the comedy business, and when Johnstone took his camera into their satirical camp it was pitched on Tunisian sands alongside the set of their latest $4,500,000 movie.
It is certainly a different class of labour from their beginnings. It might be in your memory that Monty Python's Flying Circus was a BBC-2 show - experimental comedy, overgrown-undergraduate humour.
Even in their heyday, there was little thought of this manic mixture getting international fame - well, the Golden Rose of Montreux, maybe, but not America, not movies.
The rest, as a Python sketch looking for one of those characteristically abrupt endings has undoubtedly said, is history. But what strikes me as interesting watching the Famous Six caper for the cameras with more or less successful spontaneous wit - John Cleese being made-up for the movie and interviewed by Johnstone simultaneously, Michael Palin "wanders" past: "Good luck with the make-up sketch" - is not where it leaves them, but where it leaves us.
Between coming together for the movies - and such special events as next week's charity shows in aid of Amnesty International - they do other things, back on the old steam telly.
Eric Idle made Rutland Weekend Television, Michael Palin, apart from his own film, Jabberwocky, which Terry Gilliam directed, did his series Ripping Tales [sic], also for BBC-2 with Terry Jones. Perhaps most notably, John Cleese hit a new peak with Fawlty Towers.
But apart from those dozen or so hotel comedies, there is nothing, ten years on, to set the spirits alight as they still are by a re-run of those original originals.
It is not the Ministry of Funny Walks, the Upper-Class Twits Race, that visit of a pair of sub-Coronation Street housewives to quiz Jean-Paul Sartre. The texture and structure remain unique - and the combination of Terry Gilliam's graphics to that stands out more clearly than ever because television has found no comparable use for animation since.
Somehow, it's back to the spirit of the Footlights. And the spirit of Python passes to Kenny Everett, who would scarcely even claim to be the same.
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Radio Times, 16th - 22nd June 1979, page 72 - 77
[The cover of this issue was Palin's It's Man on the beach.
This whole issue ties in with Iain Johnstone's 'The Pythons'
documentary that week, itself made to tie-in with Python's
tenth anniversary. And dig this article's title.]
The Pythons, Wednesday 9.25 BBC1
And Now For Something Completely Different, Friday 10.50 BBC1
Ten years ago a brand of comedy hit our screens. In The Pythons, its creators try to explain what it was all about. Here, Ernie Eban takes us through those early days.
TI TUM TI TIDDLE TI TUM TI TUM TI TUM TI TUM TI TUM
Stepping out unrhythmically in the water towards the sandy shores of Shell Bay, South Dorset, is a wasted, bearded, exhausted old man in a tattered suit and tie. His breath is heavy, his gurgles ominous, his coughs almost terminal. He lurches forward, a ragged, wretched wreck of a human being, victim of some dreadful disaster with an achingly urgent message... ready, it seems, to take his last breath and with it to pronounce on the nature of the horror pressing close. '...It's...'
'It's' is the first title of a possible series yet to be conceived, written and performed by six men eating lunch in the Light of Kashmir restaurant in Hampstead. It is early May, 1969, and they are reaching agreement on the kind of comedy they are not going to conceive, write and perform. They will have no front man, no dancing girls; no resident musicians, no stars and no respect for traditional comedy conventions. For their second title, they choose 'It's Not'.
By the end of May, these six men have been brought to the BBC on the basis of a series of memoranda headed 'The Circus'. Most of these have been written by a catalytic comedy adviser, Barry Took, who has been urging for some time that they be let loose on the Corporation airwaves. They see the then Head of Comedy, Michael Mills, who feels that they are minority material. But he also feels that they should be broadcast as soon as possible. Since he has no slots on the minority colour channel, BBC2, for the next six to nine months, he suggests to Paul Fox, then Controller of BBC1, that this new group should go out on the majority black and white channel. Paul Fox agrees and the group are given a slot that turns out to be towards the end of broadcasting hours on Sunday nights. Neither this time, nor the budget they are offered, are quite what they have in mind, but they accept and go on to meet their assigned producer, Ian MacNaughton. He will stay with them for the series except for the first few studio recordings which will be handled by John Howard Davies. Both have recently worked with Spike Milligan: John Howard Davies on World of Beachcomber a year before and Ian MacNaughton on his series Q5. They are now about to work with a group which, one day, the legendary Goon himself will claim proudly as his grandchildren.
This line of descent runs back as far as the first exposure of five of them while still in school uniform to the Home Service's The Goon Show. It can be followed all the way from graduating out of Oxford or Cambridge, to changing behind the organ in hotel cabinets and to writing and performing their own shows on ITV: John Cleese and Graham Chapman in At Last The 1948 Show and Terry Jones and Michael Palin in The Complete and Utter History of Britain and then in Do Not Adjust Your Set with Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam.
It is from Panorama City, California, that Terry Gilliam set out seven years before to find work with the Goons of the American Comic Book world, the creators of Wonder Wart Hog, Fritz the Cat and Melvin of the Apes. He has now joined the group complementing visually their thorough and comprehensive grounding in every kind of conventional comedy. They are going to dump the comedy rule book and kick off the tradition that has attached a ball and chain to every idea they have ever had, and rid themselves of the 'tag' or 'punchline' - the laugh at the end of a joke or sketch.
But these six men believe television can tickle the eye as well as the ear. Television in their hands will tell stories with pictures so that comedy can fly from idea to image around, about, down, up, across, through here, there and back again. A demonstration of such a flight path is etched into the minds of Michael Palin and Terry Jones. It is a Terry Gilliam animation for Do Not Adjust Your Set. It is not for the squeamish...
A man out for a walk ignores a sign reading 'Beware of Elephants'. He carries on walking. An elephant falls out of the sky, squashing him into the ground. Only his left is left sticking out. A soccer team arrive and start kicking his head around as if it were a football. After a while they move onto headers. Their heads come off one by one. All we see are heads bouncing around on the ground.
We move away a little and the heads seem to become part of thousands of tiny dots darting about. We move away a little more and realise that these dots are little bits of dirt being examined through a magnifying glass. Enoch Powell appears and tells us that we can remove this dirt by using a soap powder that will make things whiter than white. As white as white can be. As white as the sheet he now holds up in front of us.
On this sheet appears a man on a horse pulling a cannon. He is fired upon from a fort way up in the hills. He returns the cannon fire and blasts away the fort and background. Through this hole Enoch Powell appears again, continuing his commercial and holding up a box of the soap powder. The man on the horse fires again, knocking a hole in the box through which the soap powder falls like snow.
It's Christmas and a stagecoach is riding through the show when suddenly it is held up by a man on a horse. 'Hands up, everybody,' says the outlaw. 'Everybody?' squeaks a tiny voice from inside the coach. 'Everybody!' shouts the outlaw. And then an enormous hand comes up out of the top of the coach and squashes the outlaw flat...
Nobody in this group is particularly squeamish about bidding farewell to PBTRNT, a term formulated by fellow-writer Barry Cryer to identify the technique for saving an otherwise funny sketch from the scrapheap for lack of the obligatory punchline. In many an earlier script for David Frost, Marty Feldman, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Dick Emery and even Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, they have been known to resort to that technique whose initials stand sometimes symbolically and sometimes literally for 'Pull Back To Reveal No Trousers'.
With Terry Gilliam's animations there is no need for no trousers nor for a punchline every time, but there is a limit to how often his cartoons can be used. What is more important perhaps is that he, Terry Jones and Michael Palin feel the whole show should work like 'Beware of Elephants'. Graham Chapman and John Cleese are not so sure. They are prepared to go for what is called a 'flow of consciousness' linking but only because it gives them the freedom to be funny without having to worry about beginnings or endings. Everything can be strung together afterwards.
And everything is: in the first script for a new comedy series now called Owl Stretching Time which arrives at the BBC on Thursday 19 June. Throughout this script, ideas are delivered from sketch to sketch like postcards. Sometimes the messages are read out by announcers, as in 'And now for something completely different... a man with three buttocks'. 'Now look, Mr Frampton... it's quite easy for anyone to come along here claiming they have a bit to spare in the botty department... but the point is... our viewers need proof.' 'I been on Persian radio.' 'Sometimes only the pictures are seen: freezing frame on Gladstone throwing cakes at Queen Victoria, for instance; then making that image a picture on the mantelpiece in what appears to be a working-class household but turns out to be, in the course of a son and father argument, the home of a wealthy playwright. (Dad: ''Ampstead wasn't good enough for you... you had to go poncing off to Barnsley and your coalmining friends'. Ken: 'Coalmining is a wonderful thing father, but it's something you'll never understand. Look at you.' Mum: 'Oh, Ken, be careful! You knows what he's like after a few novels.')
A couple of times Terry Gilliam's animations take over...
René Descartes is sitting thinking. Bubbles come from his head with 'thinks'. Suddenly he looks happy. A thought bubble appears: 'I think, therefore I am.' A large hand comes into picture with a pin and pricks the thought bubble. It deflates and disappears. After a second, René disappears too.
This animation has linked the announcement of something completely different and a discussion between housewives in a supermarket about their preference for French philosophers. This has ended with 'Would you swap René Descartes for, say, Hegel and Martin Heideggar?' 'No. I'll keep Descartes. Definitely.' This has emerged out of a demonstration in gibberish French on how to arrange passengers and luggage inside the body of a sheep, on the assumption that sheep can fly. This has in turn developed from the opening sketch: a conversation between a farmer and a city slicker as they watch sheep nesting in trees and failing to make it as aviators. ('Now witness their attempts to fly from tree to tree. Notice that they do not so much fly as plummet.) Arriverderci PBTRNT. Before the sketch comes a caption reading 'Part Two'. Before that Colonel Bashford and the Band of the Grenadier Guard will be performing 'The Liberty Bell' to the accompaniment of Terry Gilliam's opening animation. This will interrupt a desperate bearded old man who will take an awfully long time to get no further than saying '...It's...'
This same old man will be driven back where he came from at the end a little after an apparently airborne sheep is shot by a television announcer. The announcer is doing a wind-up to an extremely stylish sketch on men who dress up as mice and watch blue cheese movies at their secret orgies. This is done in a style somewhat reminiscent of Panorama ('And that was all.' 'And what was your reaction?' 'Well I was shocked. But... gradually I came to feel that I was more at ease... when I was with other mice.') Earlier on there are some real mice which squeak the notes of 'The Bells of St Mary's' when pounded with a mallet and wedding bells about to ring when a very gay Lochinvar snatches away the bridegroom.
Another couple are parted by a marriage guidance counsellor they are consulting ('And what is the name of your ravishing wife... Wait don't tell me. It's something to do with moonlight - it goes with her eyes - it's soft and gentle, warm and yielding, deeply lyrical and yet tender and frightened like a tiny white rabbit.' 'It's Deirdre.') A third couple are joined but this time neither in matrimony nor adultery. They are a humanist and a priest who are to settle an age-old controversy during the Epilogue. ('Tonight, instead of discussing the existence or non-existence of God, they've decided to fight for it. The existence or non-existence to go to the winner. The argument will be determined by two falls and a knockout or a submission. All right, boys, let's get to it...')
Nestled enticingly among all these goodies are some 'middle-aged lower middle-class women (Pepperpots)'. They are called Pepperpots not, John Cleese insists, because they have perforated skulls but because in Graham Chapman's eyes they are so similar in their little bonnets to some plastic pepperpots that used to occupy the tables of a large transport cafe on the old A1 near Cambridge. In human form, they have high-pitched rough-reverberating screeches for voices to express their strangely logical minds. They greet the mention of Nietzsche with hoots of derision and have no respect for Baron von Liebnitz's 'identity of indiscernibles'. ('Say that in the High Street and you'd be laughed out of town.') When it comes to Mice-men they are more precise. ('Well... I think they should be kicked in the upper lip... there with a steel-tipped toecap.') Like nearly all the parts in this script the Pepperpots will be performed by the six men that conceived and wrote Episode One of Owl Stretching Time which is, needless to say, entitled 'Sex And Violence'.
By the waters of the River Thames some three weeks later, a simple gardener is pushed suddenly into a wheelbarrow full of steaming horse manure by a Queen. Round the corner, men in Superman costumes, distraught beyond expression over a puncture to a bicycle, are rescued by a mysterious being in brown overalls. Within the next ten days, five tall middle-aged women are threatening a man trying to do a butter commercial in a crowded shopping centre; a radio newsreader, complete with desk, chair and dinner jacket, has been wheeled out of a television studio by masked marauders; Barnes is minus many milkmen and Cardinal Richelieu has been chasing nudes on wheels. In this same period, Toulouse-Lautrec has been spotted painting a canvas near the Kingston by-pass while riding a tricycle, and several men dressed up as mice have spent a better part of a blazingly hot day in the same house out of which a Police Inspector has been seen to stagger, and die. Everything has been filmed as written in the first three scripts of a comedy series, now called Bunn, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot.
Three scripts later, it is late August. A cat has been confused, the Unknown Joke finally laid to rest and the last remaining relative of the greatest name in German Baroque Music, Johann Gambolputty de Von Ausfernschpledenschlitterascrenbonfriedigerdingledangle-
dongledungleburstein Von Knackerthrasher-Applebanger Horowitz Ticolensicgrandernottyspeltinkle granlichgrumblemeyerspelterwasser kurstlichhimbleeisenbahnwagengutena bendbitteeinnurnbergerbratwurst legerspetenmitzwiemachelubehundsfutgumber aberschohendankekalbs fleischemittleraucher Von Hauptkopf of Ulm has died halfway through an interview. It takes 17 seconds to say his name and three days to complete the filming for each episode, while the performers leap rapidly between their creations in front of their busy production crew. But that is only part of the story.
Waiting in Studio 6 at the Television Centre are 150 props including one pair of knickers, one body of a sheep, two revolvers, four white mice, two long thin French loaves, a handful of straw, six judo mats, a small bunch of holly, two copies of the Daily Express and six clumps of tall grass. A camera crew under John Howard Davies has 90 minutes to record the 30-minute videotape into which five minutes of the edited location filming and two-and-a-half minutes of Terry Gilliam's animation will be slotted. It is time for Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, John Cleese and Graham Chapman to adopt the personalities of nearly 40 different characters, their costumes, their make-up, their voices, on film and videotape in front of a live audience of 400 for the first time in a new BBC1 comedy series called Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Terry Gilliam: My only memory is just the audience arriving there and people thinking that they'd come to see a circus... We arrived, and there was this queue of people outside waiting to come in - all keen. And the BBC was calling it a circus so I think it was just a family audience and old age pensioners coming to see the lions and the clowns.
Michael Palin: It was a feeling, of not exactly jumping off a cliff on a dark night, but certainly being slowly pushed off. You really didn't know quite what you were getting into and there was a great silence from the audience at a lot of points, which gave one the feeling 'My God. There's something wrong.'
Graham Chapman: I didn't really care about the studio audience, provided people were looking happy at the end y'know - I liked the material so much.
John Cleese: The beginning, with the old man coming towards the camera, wasn't symbolic - we just liked the idea of wasting the audience's time. I mean provided you do it in a way that makes them laugh. The whole thing to involve someone in a very lengthy walk or movement towards camera and culminate it in them simply saying 'It's...' Wait a minute, I'll tell you something else. It was also... Yes, it was also our irritation that at that time, everyone, everyone who ever got a comedy show called it... It was always called 'It's John Cleese' or 'It's Michael Palin'.
Michael Palin: It's always very difficult to start or end a show. I mean, Python was hopelessly adrift on beginnings and endings and we'd all been working for two or three years on shows where sketches were thrown out unless they had beginnings and endings, and so were slightly more self-conscious in our own approach to the shape of a show, I think. And the more we could sort of confuse people, the easier it would be to get away with the fact that we didn't have any beginnings or endings, we had no profound statements to make at the beginning and no need for summing up at the end. I think the 'It's Man' helped to start to splutter into life in a rather confusing way so at least people wouldn't say 'Ah yes. Now we know the show's begun'.
You know like documentaries will always begin 'Tonight we're looking at'. Or a man standing in front of a building with a microphone. The 'It's Man' fitted into that extremely well because it was obvious that he had fled some unexplained terror and the terror was never explained. You just saw the end of an event - a man in deep trouble. And happily it did turn neatly into an ending in that he would implore the audience for help. 'Let me into your homes, please. There's this large one-eyed man following me.'
And obviously the answer was 'No, you silly person. Get back to your television show.'
This photograph of an unspeakably lovely and talented young lady, called Carol Cleveland, is extremely misleading. It appeared on page 24 of the RADIO TIMES and referred to the first electronic transmission of Monty Python's Flying Circus at 10.55 on Sunday 5 October, in the last autumn of the 60s. The caption reads 'Eeks!' whereas Carol's first words in 'Sex And Violence' were 'Baaaaaa'. At no point subsequent to that did she either squeak or say 'Eeks!' This misleadership goes even further when one realises that 'Sex And Violence' was not the programme broadcast that night. The first Python broadcast was the second one written and recorded - 'Whither Canada'. Both programmes were conceived, written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. They were produced by John Howard Davies in the studio and Ian MacNaughton on location. Here is a message from Ian MacNaughton presently located in Bavaria...
'We just thought if it makes us laugh, it might make somebody else laugh. I think that's the only way to do comedy.' | |
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The Listener, 28th June 1979
[Interesting Edit News in this. The Spanish Inquisition's
'Oh bugger' was cut in Scotland, apparently, and as for
Vercotti New Town...]
Iain Johnstone
MONTY PYTHON: THE EARLY YEARS
Python, pi'thon, n.: a large snake that crushes its victims: an utterer of oracles: one possessed by a spirit.
Chambers Dictionary
Paradoxically it was the BBC Programme Contracts Department that called them a 'circus'; they themselves were still undecided, tossing around titles like 'A Horse, A Spoon and a Basin', or 'Owl Stretching Time' or 'Bum, Whack, It, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot'. Their uncertainty in the final choice was underlined by the fact that the early episodes always carried a subtitle: 'Whither Canada?', 'Man's Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the 20th Century', 'The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Goes To The Bathroom'.
After rendering the BBC's 'Circus' airborne, they attributed it for a while to Barry Took, and it was very nearly Gwen Dibley's Flying Circus. Nobody can quite pinpoint the origin of Monty Python but all agreed on its connotation of showbiz sleaziness. It is doubtful if anyone looked up a dictionary for a definition of 'python', but it is certain that future compilers of dictionaries are going to have to append a new meaning to 'Pythonesque' for the word is now common English usage on both sides of the Atlantic. Not an easy task, for it describes a set of events that are more than bizarre, yet less than surreal.
The Oxbridge-educated five - Chapman, Cleese, Idle, Jones and Palin - had all established reputations for themselves as comedy writers, not least on The Frost Report in 1966 and 1967, before they joined up in 1969. The sixth, American cartoonist Terry Gilliam, had not. 'Being American,' points out Cleese, 'he has a very small vocabulary. In a writing meeting he came out with the finest misuse of the English language I've ever heard. Somebody suggested we should have coffee and Terry said: "Yeah, let's boil up a whole bunch of water." We spent three days trying to put two words together that went worse than "bunch" and "water" but none of us could.'
But Gilliam was instrumental in setting the house style. Terry Jones had worked with him on Do Not Adjust Your Set. 'I remembered one of the cartoons he'd done called "Elephants". He said he was a bit worried about it because it was just chain of consciousness and he didn't know how it was going to work. In fact it was fantastic - it just went from one thing to another. Seeing that, and seeing Spike Milligan's Q4 where he didn't have beginnings or ends to sketches, he just suddenly broke up the forms, we saw that you could use the two together, use Terry's flow of ideas and marry them into sketches like Spike was doing.'
Gilliam had met Cleese in America several years previously and it was Cleese who put him in touch with the producer of Do Not Adjust Your Set. Gilliam felt immediately at home. 'It was odd to get involved with a group of people who were very similar to the groups of people I was working with in the States. Suddenly to come all this distance and find these people who were on the same wavelength.'
When the Python team assembled, the English five were content to let his fantasies run free. 'It amazed me. They would leave gaps in the scripts saying: "Gilliam takes over from here and gets us to this point." I'd go away and do them and they really didn't know what I was doing until the day of the show. I'd arrive with tins of film under my arm and it would be put in and amazingly it seemed to work. Whenever I tried to explain what I was doing, they'd all look away and look quite embarrassed assuming I'd really goofed this time.
But Gilliam's appetite for abstract visual humour seemed to spread over into the sketches, never more so than in 'Visitors' where Victor and Iris are settling down for a quiet romantic evening at home only to be interrupted by Arthur Name, whom they met in a pub three years ago, who promptly changes their record, Brian Equatal [sic] and his wife Audrey, who sits on their cat, killing it. Ken Shabby, who brings in a goat - 'Oh, sorry, it's done two's on the carpet', a group of singing Welsh miners and Gilliam himself as a naked fairy.
That was as much the essence of Python's humour as anything more deliberately satiric. As Cleese says: 'We've always found it slightly unsuccessful to say "Right, today we will write a sketch that clearly exposes the folly of human existence" because then you finish up with a very boring bit of material. But once we start writing in a chemist's shop or wherever, after about a minute something crops up that inevitably comes out of our attitude to things in general.'
Cleese used to write with Graham Chapman: they had been partners since Cambridge Footlights with John holding the pen, largely, says Graham, 'because I'm fearful of my spelling and grammar so I'm inhibited about writing things down'. Michael Palin and Terry Jones had been writing together since they left Oxford and continued to do so. Eric Idle was the loner. At script meetings he found this a disadvantage: 'It was much harder because I had to convince four people whereas they had a person in the market selling it with them.'
His difficulty in getting material into the early shows is publicly parodied in the introduction to his classic 'nudge-nudge' sketch which begins with Michael and Terry as schoolchildren insisting that they want to see a sketch of Eric's. Despite going it alone with Rutland Weekend Television, Idle still appreciates the discipline of writing with the others. 'It's such a tight, anal little group. You can't wing or busk anything. It's always "Get it right, get it right". There's always one mind that is worrying and niggling at it and won't let it go.'
Initially, there was a distinct difference in styles between the other two pairs, as Chapman observes: 'I think John and I are more interested in the words, John particularly in the way they're spoken, whereas Mike and Terry have a more keen visual eye and are more interested in the way a thing looks.'
'Over the years,' says Terry Jones, 'we started writing parodies of each other's material. John and Graham write a parody of one of our sketches, it was about a stunt man going to work which got used. And we wrote something about horoscopes, horological prognostications, going through a sort of Roget's Thesaurus which was meant to be a send-up of one of John's and Graham's sketches but actually got taken seriously. It it's Roget's Thesaurus it's obviously Cleese material, a piece of Cleeseity. Take the parrot sketch, you just have to look up "deceased" in Roget's Thesaurus.'
The 45 shows used up material voraciously, but they could probably have made another series out of the sketches that were written and then discarded at script meetings. 'There were,' says Palin, 'one or two sketches that were standard rejects. The classic one was called "Vercotti New Town" which Terry and I had written. It was about the Vercotti Brothers - the two who tried to sell protection to the army - trying to set up a New Town in Scotland. They tried to get people up there before they'd built anything and said "Well, you can just choose your plot. There's very clean water about a quarter of a mile over there, we don't want to spoil people with telephones and television. At the moment they've got space, they've got open air, they've got freedom." You can understand why that ended up in the wastepaper basket but we kept getting it out and baiting the others by reading "Vercotti New Town."'
They also kept baiting the BBC. Irked by being placed in poor time slots - 'it was seen by insomniacs and intellectuals and burglers,' maintains Palin - they would refer to this and other irritants. In one sketch Cleese played a BBC comedy producer who remarks ruefully: 'I wanted to be in Programme Planning but unfortunately I have a degree.' Knowing how little faith the head of the Light Entertainment Department had in their enterprise, they made their eighth programme 'The BBC Entry for the Zinc Stoat of Budapest'. But it would probably have been fatal if the BBC had welcomed and applauded every notion. They needed the arguments with Paul Fox as to the propriety of doing a sketch about a man who bottles wee-wee instead of wine (Paul Fox won) and the decision to deprive viewers in Scotland of the punchline of the brilliant 'nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition' edition. (It was 'Oh, bugger' - although this presumably will have to be excised from all LISTENERS sold north of Hadrian's Wall.) The moment the Beatles became generally loveable marked the end of their cult status; the Pythons never became generally loveable.
Possibly hindsight endows them with a more hilarious past than was actually the case. Some of the 45 episodes were fairly flat and the ideas singularly failed to chime. Inevitably, it is the best shows and sketches that tend to get repeated. But it is their absence that lends enchantment to their reputation. How I wish I could turn on the television tonight and watch Welsh miners fighting over the date of the Treaty of Westphalia or observe Herr Hilter and Ron Viventroff presciently fighting the Minehead election or even thrill to the sound of Jackie Charlton and the Tonettes singing 'Yummy, yummy, yummy' inside a filing cabinet.
Alas, as a television series, Monty Python is no more. Deceased - but not bereft of life.
Iain Johnstone produced 'The Pythons' (BBC1) |
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