EDIT NEWS: Monty Python - Press Coverage 1990 - 99
Primetime, no. 16, Winter 1990/91, page 34-42

[Primetime was an excellent little fanzine, with
proper facts and nice long episode guides, which,
after this issue, merged into The Box magazine. This
article was followed by a piece called "How To
Recognise Different Episodes Of Monty Python From
Quite A Long Way Away", compiled by Andrew Pixley,
Sue Flower and Neil Alsop. It was a lengthy sketch-by-
sketch breakdown of every episode, detailing exactly where
every sketch was then available to buy (videos, records,
films, Secret Policeman's Balls, etc), and was accompanied
by a beautiful colour snap of Graham Chapman in a waiting
room from 'Michael Ellis'. Brilliant though it is, this episode
list has not been reprinted here as all the details are now
available elsewhere, plus I can't be bothered with all that
typing]


FRONTIER CIRCUS

That seminal comedy series MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS recently celebrated its 21st birthday. The occasion was marked by an OMNIBUS tribute on BBC-2, accompanied by re-runs of some classic episodes featuring Silly Walks, the Spanish Inquisition, the Dead Parrot sketch and many other old favourites. PAUL CARR and DICK FIDDY take a look back at the MONTY PYTHON legacy, and on the following pages, you'll find a complete guide to MPFC on TV...

Nothing is ever "completely different". For even if, as seems likely, "nobody expected" MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS any more that viewers of the "trouble at t'mill" sketch expected the Spanish Inquisition, its arrival was not entirely unprecedented.

Like other pioneers, it had precursors - not only in radio shows like I'M SORRY I'LL READ THAT AGAIN and television programmes like THE FROST REPORT, in which prospective Pythons polished their style, but also in series like NOT ONLY... BUT ALSO (recently revived on BBC-2 after more than 25 years) and THE GOONS, which they did not contribute. CRAZY PEOPLE, for instance, the radio show which was to become THE GOONS, was first broadcast 18 years pre-PYTHON.

But even the Goons (Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe) and the Fringers (Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore) can't quite compare with the Pythons' success in almost every medium, from radio to records, from television to cinema, from print to performance - a success in no way diminished by the debt they undoubtedly owe not just to THE GOONS and BEYOND THE FRINGE, but to silent comedy and surrealism, the Theatre of the Absurd and the Marx Brothers. For the Pythons fully deserve their reputation as perhaps the most innovative comedy writers and performers of the last quarter of a century.

The Pythons learned the ropes of TV comedy on THE FROST REPORT, THE LATE SHOW, AT LAST THE 1948 SHOW, DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET AND MARTY - each of which offered them opportunities for both behind-the-scenes and on-screen contributions. THE FROST REPORT was the first to involve John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle all at once - though, with the exception of Cleese, only as writers. Animator Terry Gilliam's first TV hook-up with any of the team was on DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET, in which Palin, Idle and Jones also appeared. What sort of shows were they? Words like "whacky" and "zany" recur in the reviews - alongside the ubiquitous label "satire".

"Satire" was the term deployed whenever Oxbridge men - for they were always Oxbridge and nearly always men (a book should be written on class and gender in relation to British comedy) - took to broadcast comedy in the Sixties. And if Cambridge's famous "Footlights" cabaret and its Oxford equivalent equipped them for the stage, it was broadcasting where they found their comic feet. Of the TV series, though, only Frost's had any "satirical" content - in the sense of regular reference to actual political events. However we describe them, most of the pre-PYTHON shows stand up well to reviewing today, and all of them reveal acorns from which Pythonesque oaks -or larches - were to grow. None of them, however, can quite explain why PYTHON happened when and where it did. For that, we need to look at what was happening in television in particular and popular culture in general.

Perhaps the best analogy with the spirit of PYTHON is that of late Sixties popular music. Just as rock began to split into two apparently mutually exclusive and distinct categories at the end of that decade - pop and progressive, each with its own audience and its own section in the record stores - so was comedy split between traditional "realist" sitcom on the one hand and surrealist zaniness on the other, each with its own channel and slot. The late-night scheduling of PYTHON and the screening of DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET in "children's hour" revealed for perhaps the first time - as contemporary rock did - the break-up of the notion of a homogenous family audience, and with it of consensual comedy. PYTHON was thus television's "youth culture", part of its appeal its very inaccessibility to adults. In that sense, it was TV's very own version of the Fringe, its avant garde. But as in rock, it was an avant garde which emerged "upwards" out of popular culture rather than being absorbed "downward" from the "Arts".

Even the title MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS echoes the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the circus-set track on that album, Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite. Sgt Pepper's was one of the first rock "song cycles" or concept albums - a departure from the conventional collection of discrete songs characteristic of pop's past. Similarly, PYTHON was the first of the comedy shows to replace a series of discrete sketches with a stream of consciousness which embraced them all in a flow (albeit one of crazy inconsequentiality). This strategy was adopted and adapted from THE FROST REPORT's "Continuous Developing Monologue" - a narrative spine scripted by Frost on a topical subject around which Cleese, Chapman, Palin, Jones and Idle wove their own idiosyncratic and inspired lunacy.

The rock/comedy parallel was echoed in the pairing of Pythonesque humour on DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET with the music of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and also by Eric Idle's film pastiche of the Beatles, The Rutles, the financial support for Monty Python And The Holy Grail given by "progressive" bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and by George Harrison's backing (through his company Handmade Films), of Monty Python's Life Of Brian.

The debt of Gilliam's distinctive animation for the series to Dada and surrealism was one shared by much of the album cover art of "progressive" music of the period (of which Sgt Pepper's itself is an excellent example). Finally, the Pythons' success, particularly in the US, both as live performers on the stadium circuit and as campus comedians in the cinema, echoes the itineraries of rock stars.

But if rock offers a cultural parallel, it was television which created a cultural context. The late Sixties was a period of considerable risk-taking in the BBC and although Hugh Carleton-Greene, the then Director-General, left the BBC on April Fool's Day 1969 (some six months before the first PYTHON programme was transmitted), it is his regime to which considerable credit is due for PYTHON's debut.

In his book From Fringe To Flying Circus (the best on MPFC), Roger Wilmut has suggested that the Pythons "were perhaps the last people to benefit from Hugh Greene's influence at the BBC". Wilmut's suggestion aside, it is certainly amusing to imagine the Pythons as a characteristically mischievous parting gift from Greene to the Corporation. He had been DG throughout the Sixties and during that time the BBC became the place for a new liberalism - in serious drama and light entertainment - when everything from one-off plays to sitcom series absorbed the new social realism. It was just this kind of cultural consensus and the assumed aesthetic hierarchy which went with it PYTHON unsettles.

By the end of the decade, a Conservative appointee as Chair of the BBC Governors and a Conservative government meant a retreat from such realism. For the Pythons, however, it was a bugle call for advance along the route they had already mapped out. For the Circus style was, by definition, a much less literal, much more lateral, one that its TV competitors, and the Pythons hoped that the built-in absurdity of the approach might work as some sort of alibi against accusations of bias or blasphemy, obscenity or libel - all of which charges were to be levelled at them soon enough.

A world in which competitions could be held to summarise Proust, and civil servants gave out grants for sill walks, may sound simply crazy. But one in which there are news programmes for parrots succeeded - where "sensible" social realism had failed - in pinpointing British TV news's xenophobia (where reports of foreign disasters are so often followed by the refrain "No Britons were injured"). Similarly, the undertaker-as-cannibal sketch, in which it is suggested that the dear departed might be roasted and served up with French fried and broccoli, was Swiftian in its satirical edge without ever losing its anti-realist vein in revealing an enterprise culture taken to its callously (il)logical conclusion.

If PYTHON's peculiar blend of satire, psychedelia, surrealism and schoolboy silliness is hard to define, it is perhaps easier to describe what the Pythons themselves wanted to avoid. Two connected comedic devices which they were keen to escape were the discrete sketch with a beginning, middle and end, and also the punchline. Topical satire (along Frost lines) they also wanted to avoid, and they were equally averse to the way in which that series had been literally anchored by one performer/presenter. In place of this magazine format, they opted for one based on a Gilliam animation from DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET. It was called Elephants and its "plot" was as follows:

Ignoring a sign saying "Beware Of Elephants" a man is crushed beneath a fallen elephant leaving only his head protruding which some passing football players start kicking around until their own heads too fall off and bounce away into the distance where they appear only as tiny bits of dirt in an ad for soap powder apparently presented by Enoch Powell holding up a clean white sheet on which appears a shoot-out scene between a fort and a gunman-on-horseback whose bullets hit the soap powder packet and the powder spills out like snow indeed it is snow and a stagecoach appears in the wintry scene only to be held up by an outlaw whose cry of "Hands Up" is greeted by a huge outstretched hand which crushed him flat.

Combining both visual and verbal stream of consciousness, parody - particularly of TV itself - taken to grotesque lengths (the game show skit "Blackmail") and an admirably tasteless plunder of everything from adverts to fine art, the Pythons were probably TV's first post-moderns.

PYTHON's fourth and final (Cleeseless) television series came to an end in 1974, the year of their first film "proper". They never perceived their 1971 picture And Now For Something Completely Different as anything more than a string of sketches from the first two series reshot on 35mm. Monty Python And The Holy Grail, however, was a cinema original and was a considerable box-office draw at home and abroad. In the same year, 1974, the series itself finally appeared on American screens (on PBS in Texas, of all places).

The Pythons, meanwhile, continued to write and perform for the small screen. Cleese co-scripted and co-starred in FAWLTY TOWERS, which had its first run of six episodes in the following year, 1975, with a second run of a further six in 1979. Idle also got two runs for his RUTLAND WEEKEND TELEVISION (in 1975 and 1976) as well as a one-off success with THE RUTLES in 1978. Michael Palin and Terry Jones produced RIPPING YARNS, which had two short runs in 1977 and 1979 after the success of the "pilot" programme TOMKINSON'S SCHOOLDAYS.

Of this post-PYTHON television work, while TOMKINSON'S SCHOOLDAYS and THE RUTLES are both brilliant one-offs, most of the rest remains relatively straightforward parody. From anyone else, much of it would have seemed stunning, but from the Pythons themselves it was something of a disappointment. FAWLTY TOWERS, indeed, towers over other post-PYTHON TV if only because of its successful combination of a pre-Pythonesque traditional sitcom format - indeed the idea derives from an episode Cleese wrote for the DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE in 1969 and comparison of the two is instructive - subjected to the excess and savagery of a PYTHON piece taken to its crazily illogical conclusion.

Since the mid-Seventies, some of that savagery seems to have been replaced by a softer parodic tone - through this is more evident in the individual Pythons' own subsequent TV series than it is in the films, and particularly Life Of Brian. But for all the brilliant sequences in these cinema releases - and PYTHON was always at its most brilliant in certain sequences - the 30-minute format of TV better suited their strengths than feature-length.

And this may not be unconnected to the fact that television was always one of the Pythons' main targets, while cinematic conventions have remained (by and large) untouched by their films, except obviously for the utterly brilliant cinema short Away From It All released to support Life Of Brian. Indeed, the conventional narrative structure of the features is a constraint on their invention and a return to the realism they had reacted so daringly against in television.

The impact of the Pythons on the rest of television has been enormously liberating yet oddly limiting. No other programme has put so many catchphrases into popular currency and yet at the same time offended so many of the assumptions of that populace. Like all innovations, the story of the Pythons' influence is also the story of their incorporation. Terry Jones has hosted book programmes, Michael Palin has presented a profile of railways and the occasionally Pythonesque, globetrotting documentary AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS, Cleese has co-authored a self-help book - all areas PYTHON would have savaged in sketches in the early Seventies. Meanwhile, Gilliam's graphic style has been greedily absorbed by the advertisers, and both Cleese and Idle have appeared in a number of different commercials. In fact, advertising seems the biggest inheritor of the PYTHON heritage.

Gilliam has directed for the cinema Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Cleese scripted and starred in the monster hit A Fish Called Wanda and demonstrated his transatlantic appeal with an Emmy Award-winning appearance in the US sitcom CHEERS, Palin scripted Time Bandits and The Missionary for the big screen and EAST OF IPSWICH and NUMBER ONE for BBC-TV and acted in Time Bandits, The Missionary, A Private Function and A Fish Called Wanda.

Not to be neglected, Terry Jones directed the films Personal Services and Eric [sic] The Viking, while Eric Idle turned up in a US ghost sitcom NEARLY DEPARTED and (coincidentally) a US TV mini-series of AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS (as Passepartout to Pierce Brosnan's Phileas Fogg). Graham Chapman wrote and starred in Yellowbeard and worked on a CBS-TV series JAKE'S JOURNEY. In 1989, Chapman met with a very untimely death at a very timely moment - the 20th anniversary of the TV debut of MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS. His contribution to the team was significant, and the honesty and dignity he showed in later years impressed even some of the mercenary tabloid newspapers.

Now what for the Pythons? Their products are controlled by their own company, Prominent Features, creative control being crucial to them since the end of the original show. Indeed, they now own the rights to the TV series themselves. Cinema seems to be the arena for most of their future work, for MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS is no more. It has ceased to be. In spite of repeats, video sales and saloon-bar recitals, it is an ex-programme. And yet something has changed - the small screen landscape will never be the same again, and something is completely different today.

It used to be said - much to the Pythons' pleasure - that one effect of watching the programme was that it was impossible to take whatever followed seriously. It must have been equally difficult for those who produced the programme to follow it themselves. Considering the Pythons' particularly savage assault on al things British, their very success on the international market which made them suddenly and embarrassingly into a British institution could also have been their undoing. There can be no greater tribute than that sort of success - and no tougher act to follow. But if there is anyone in Britain equipped to come up with anything as inventive, it is still the Pythons themselves.


The Guardian, Section Two, 12th May 1994, pages 8-9


The Pythons were, quite possibly, the most inventive comic troupe ever. But did they change the face of British comedy?

A SILLY WALK WITH NO FOOTPRINTS

Adam Sweeting

It seemed like a revolutionary idea at the time, but 25 years after Monty Python's Flying Circus first silly-walked and non-sequitured across British TV screens, it's difficult to remember what it was all supposed to mean. Let us turn to the Guinness Book Of Classic British TV for clues:

"Its influences on the structure and technique of television comedy is almost as staggering as its continues worldwide popularity," ventures an unspecified contributor. "They took the stylistic risks that others have copied, and their manipulation of the medium paved the way for much of the 'new wave' of comedy in the late seventies and eighties." I read this out to Terry Gilliam, once Python's animation supremo and currently in the midst of a pyrrhic struggle for funding a new movie. He wasn't sure.

"Did we?" Gilliam boggled, with a crazed-hyena laugh. "I'm really bad at analysing what we do, and I don't want to. I really don't know if we've done anything that changed anything, ultimately. I kept thinking that Python was going to open the floodgates of comedy. But I don't think it's happened."

Terry Jones is also dubious. Ben Elton, for instance, might acknowledge a debt to Python, but, says Jones, "I can't see how we influenced him. Python was a satire on mankind, rather than on individuals or individual ideas."

Genre detectives will be greatly assisted by BMG Video's upcoming release of two video cassettes, comprising seven shows from the debut series of Python first shown in October 1969 (it's the video-debut of the first series). The Circus's early flutterings emphasise the virtual impossibility of making sketch shows that are both consistent and long-lasting - items like The Man With Three Buttocks can be drop-kicked towards the pedal-bin without compunction. The outlook is brighter for The Working Class Playwright or The Dull Life Of A City Stockbroker. The least date-sensitive component of Python was Gilliam's animations. His collages of Edwardian prurience under assault from psychedelic illogic haven't lost their power to provoke and titillate.

Python can be viewed as the point where the various currents of British post-war humour swirled through the supposedly class-dissolving, mind-expanding rapids of the late sixties. Python's roots included John Cleese and Graham Chapman's collaborations on At Last, The 1948 Show; Do Not Adjust Your Set and sundry contributions to The Frost Report. George Harrison apparently remains convinced that Python was the reincarnation of the disruptive spirit that left The Beatles after they recorded Let It Be in 1969 - hence his financial interventions to bail out floundering Python-related projects like The Life Of Brian, or Gilliam's Time Bandits.

Yet efforts to mount Python on a plinth as TV comedy's counterpart to rock's sixties blossoming are just as misleading as recent wafflings about "comedy is the new rock 'n' roll". If the groups various pre-Python efforts saw them proceeding in logical stages towards the sudden irrational roar of the Flying Circus, their post-Python endeavours represent circuitous routes back to Britain's comic past.

John Cleese sharpened a gallery of classic English types into the turbo sitcom of Fawlty Towers, and brought Ealing to Docklands with A Fish Called Wanda. Jones and Palin delivered Ripping Yarns, and although Jones argues that "nobody had ever done anything like that before", the stories harked back to the kind of Boys' Own Britishness that is currently providing Harry Enfield with so much mileage. And you could draw a line through the Carry On films and run slap into Eric Idle.

Gilliam., the wandering American, remains the great exception. Though inseparable from the essence of Python, if you consider him solely as the maker of Time Bandits, Brazil and The Fisher King, there seems no reason why he hasn't been loudly hailed as a rule-breaking film-maker touched with genius. Though there are fanciful plans for a 25th anniversary stage show in Las Vegas, the Circus is ancient history.

"We only think about it in interviews," chortles Gilliam. "Then we pretend we're really interested. Unfortunately it's probably the thing that's going to be stamped on our grave. I suppose it says something about how good Python was."

Now in their fifties, the Pythons continue to hop energetically between genres. Terry Jones has made a four-part BBC series called The Crusades, and is looking for finance for a movie project. Michael Palin's play The Weekend has opened in the West End; he'll appear in a new Channel 4 series Palin's Column later this month and he'll co-star in a sequel to A Fish Called Wanda this year. They're all eager to campaign on behalf of the remains of the British film industry, through initiatives like the Impact campaign.

"I think the British government has finally realised we killed the golden goose, and we could be part of the huge export market for film and television," says Jones. "With Impact, we're basically saying bring back the tax breaks that Thatcher wiped out between 1980-85, so there's a reason for investing. The other thing is the 1987 legislation which meant that foreigners over here have to pay British tax as well as their home tax. It killed it, as far as people like Spielberg were concerned, to come over here."

Citizens of Britain, do your duty - buy some Python cassettes, and with luck the proceeds will fuel a New Wave of British cinema. You know it very nearly makes sense.


The Sunday Times, The Culture, 29th May 1994, page 14

["We'll be showing the less-often-seen things," says Dick Fiddy]


A FUNNY THING, HUMOUR

A new video series has been released to celebrate Monty Python's 25th anniversary. But do its old-fashioned, revue-style sketches still make us laugh, asks MARK EDWARDS

And now... it's... Owl Stretching Time... Vaseline Review... The Whizzo Easishow... Gwen Dibley's Flying Circus... Cynthia Fellatio's Flying Circus... Bob Python's Flying Circus... Norman Python's Flying Circus...

Well, they got there in the end; and the title that John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam settled on has entered the language. You can look up "Pythonesque" in a dictionary and find it means "surreal or bizarre". Ask a database to show you all the articles ever published with the words "Monty Python" in them (or "parrot sketch" or "Ministry of Silly Walks" or "And now for something completely different") and most of the pieces it throws up at you will have nothing to do with the programme at all. Journalists have used these phrases as a convenient shorthand, knowing they will be understood by readers - proof of how completely Python and its sketches have entered the national psyche.

Everybody knows the parrot sketch. Even Margaret Thatcher. She once reeled off several subtly adapted lines from it in a speech attacking the SDP (which Cleese, the original parrot complainant, then vocally supported). "This party is dead," she declared. "It has ceased to be..." It's not all that surprising that Thatcher should deliver Cleese's lines well; there are unnerving similarities between classic Python style and that of political oratory. The endless, monotonous repetition of a single point (à la parrot) is a staple of political speeches, and the avoidance techniques practised in Cleese's cheese-shop sketch would sit happily in Prime Minister's Question Time.

Clearly, over the past quarter-century the distinctions between the Python way of thinking and reality have become blurred. Either reality has become more Pythonesque, or perhaps the Python point of view was always closer to reality than we realised.

Did I just say "quarter-century"? Why, that would be an anniversary, wouldn't it? Indeed. Twenty-five years ago last Monday - after some lobbying on their behalf by the then BBC script editor, Barry Took - the soon-to-be-Pythons had their first meeting with the BBC to discuss a new show. Two weeks earlier the team had met for the first time, after a recording of Do Not Adjust Your Set (which starred Idle, Palin and Jones, along with David Jason and Denise Coffey). Three months later, Took was warming up the audience for the recording of the first episode of Monty Python, which aired on October 5.

Last week, the first seven episodes of the first series of Python were released on video for the first time. as part of a year-long series of releases which will finally make the whole series available (series two and three have been available on video before: series on and four have not). In October, the National Film Theatre will be holding a month-long season called Python Periphery. "We'll be showing the less-often-seen things," says Dick Fiddy, who has programmed the season, "because there is a possibility that by the actual anniversary comes around, people will be fed up with the better-known sketches." Quite possibly - because, yes, there will be mugs, T-shirts and even greetings cards, although there are no plans yet to bring out the Whizzo Chocolate Assortment Crunchy Frog ice cream bar, or a range of garden furniture endorsed by Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson.

Python Periphery will include programmes such as the two BBC documentaries on Python first shown in the 1970s, the second German Monty Python special (the first was recently shown on the BBC), the spoof travelogue shorts that accompanied the Python movies, the pre-Python shows such as At Last The 1948 Show (which featured Cleese and Chapman) and The Complete And Utter History of Britain (with Palin and Jones).

What the Python Periphery line-up makes clear is that Monty Python didn't unveil a revolutionary new approach to comedy; rather, it was simply the next evolutionary step in a comic style that had been developing in programmes such as At Last The 1948 show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, and the radio show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again (which starred Cleese and the team that became The Goodies). Indeed, it is not hard to trace elements of the Python style back even further, through The Goon Show and the rapid (often surreal) style of American radio shows broadcast on American Forces radio, back to The Marx Brothers. The clearest reference point for the Pythons was Goon show creator Spike Milligan's television series Q5. So exactly had Milligan mapped out the kind of comic terrain the Pythons wanted to explore that they asked Q5's director, Ian MacNaughton, to direct the series - which he did, apart from the first four shows of series one.

So how exactly has Python alone ended up with the credit for revolutionising comedy? Probably for reasons that have little to do with the comic talents of Cleese, Chapman, Palin, Jones and Idle. First, the show was filmed in colour, which makes it far more watchable now than the earlier black-and-white work of the Pythons-to-be. Second, it benefited from the BBC's decision to put it in a late-night slot (previously reserved for religious programmes). In fact, it even benefited from the BBC's decision to keep moving it around the schedules, and to take it off-air altogether for weeks at a time. All this - added to the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club echoes in the show's name - made Python seem particularly weird, alternative, anti-Establishment... dangerous, even.

Python's reputation as the definitive surreal comedy show was also aided by Terry Gilliam's animation, a linking device which simply gave Python a stronger brand image than any other comedy show. Gilliam's work made Python instantly recognisable - and instantly recognisable as somehow different.

Of course, the writing talents of the team did have something to do with Python's enduring reputation. Their writing was sharper on Python that it had previously been, almost certainly due to the creative tension between the two main writing factions - the Cambridge duo of Cleese and Chapman vs. the Oxford team of Palin and Jones. Jones's and Palin's humour was more visual, and Jones was, of all the Pythons, the most concerned with establishing a stream-of-consciousness approach to programme structure. Cleese and Chapman's humour was more verbal, and Cleese was obsessed both with more conventional structures and with establishing exactly why something was funny. Jones later recalled: "John doesn't like the stuff Mike and I write that can't be explained. I don't think John or Graham ever particularly liked that because it doesn't have any rationale behind it."

Python's reputation as a revolutionary comedy show usually hinges on the idea that it was Python that did away with the punchline. It was not. Milligan had done that years earlier. What made Python great was the tension between one team that wanted to break all the comedic conventions and another that wanted to understand those conventions so well that they could produce great work within them. The secret of Python's comedic genius is roughly analogous to the secret of The Beatles' songwriting genius, where the tension between one excellent confrontation songwriter and another determined to break all the rules made both perform better (and where the style of each complemented the other). A whole half-hour of genuinely surreal humour (as you would get with Milligan's Q series) can wear an audience down. What Python dished up was a much more digestible half-hour of comedy that alternated rule-breaking anarchy with first-rate examples of the conventional sketch structure (Strawberry Fields Forever, followed by Penny Lane).

Apart from the films of Cleese and Gilliam, the former Pythons have not exactly been riding a wave of critical acclaim recently, perhaps because their style of comedy is not currently fashionable. In fact, Python's 25th anniversary comes at a time when their influence on contemporary comedy is smaller that it has ever been before. Python signalled the end of the days of the old variety-based comedy and the beginnings of a new era, when comedy performers would learn their trade on television. The revival of live comedy in the 1980s has led to a new generation of TV performers who have developed their comedic style on stage, and therefore practise an audience pleasing style that owes little to the Oxbridge revue-based style of Python.

But if Python humour is out of fashion at the moment, it is still, as the videos reveal, very, very funny. As the noted intellectual Gavin Millarrrrrr once commented: "The point is frozen. The beast is dead. What's the difference?"


Evening Standard, 1st July 1994, page 31

[The picture, of the Pythons looking depressed
it seems, not included]


By Geoffrey Phillips.

Forget the moon landing, there is a much more significant 25th anniversary being celebrated this year. A giant stride for comedy - the arrival of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The very first show can be seen again on BBC2 on Sunday. Cue, the, Picasso on a bike, Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson and the funniest joke in the world. And lots of pigs. Out of this world. At the time our picture was taken, of course, the Pythonauts had not yet learned always to look on the bright side.


Guardian, Section 2, 4th July 1994, page 5

[Can someone translate this for me, please?]


By Hugh Hebert

Another 25th anniversary, Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC2), the very first, now fragile episode. It still has its moments. Like when you realise the Funniest Joke In The World sequence - the joke being that it isn't remotely funny - was a source for some of the dim meteorites that have since appeared from the fringes of the comic universe to crash on television. But Terry Gilliam's animations can still surprise and delight.


Daily Telegraph, 4th July 1994, page 17


NOW FOR SOMETHING DULL

TELEVISION / A rerun of the first Monty Python series

Telling someone of the fortysomething generation that Monty Python wasn't all it was cracked up to be is as futile as telling someone in their sixties that Winnie the Pooh is a load of hokum. You can't do it. John Cleese, Graham Chapman and the rest were canonised years ago, but their haloes shine brighter than ever, burnished rather than dulled by the passage of years.

Were we fools, beguiled by novelty for novelty's sake, or were we right to get so excited? BBC2's return of the very first series of Monty Python's Flying Circus will give everyone the chance to find out. Last night's opening episode certainly tickled the nostalgia bone, but did it tickle the funny bone as well? Not for me. Compared with the recent Steptoe repeats, which had a zest and an inventiveness and a humanity which were genuinely timeless, much of the humour was ponderous, even facile.

It was the programme's slick inconsequentiality which really wowed the original audiences, the jumping from one sketch to "something completely different" by means of surrealistic linking devices. Last night, as a zany leitmotiv, a teacher crossed out pictures of pigs on a blackboard; it was nonsensical, but it was charming. But with humour of this sort, it is pace, pace and again pace that counts - far more than in conventional comedy. The audience should feel dazzled by scriptwriters who are always one step ahead.

Where Python always disappointed, even when it was first shown, was in failing to sustain the necessary tempo. The cast would swing into a new sketch, delight you for a minute or two with some absurd comic conceit, then recycle the same joke over and over again. The worst culprit last night was a leaden and overlong sketch about an Englishman teaching Italian to a classful of Italians; but that same tendency to repetition could be seen in John Cleese's famous interview with Sir Edward/Ted/Eddy baby/sugar plum, the distinguished film director.

There were some delicious moments - Picasso in a bicycle race - and the programme's robust cynicism about modern art and its practitioners was altogether admirable. But the extended sketch about the joke that was so funny that it killed everyone who heard it only underscored the disappointing reality: that this was comedy more to make people smile than to give them a heart seizure.

It was Terry Gilliam's animations, curiously - which one remembered as the bread in the sandwich - that had weathered the years best. They displayed a wit and an originality only fitfully present elsewhere.

MAX DAVIDSON


Daily Mail, 4th July 1994, page 31


By Peter Paterson:

Amid the mountain of knowledge we have now amassed, like it or not, on the inner workings of the Prince of Wales, I seem to recall that he is a devotee of the Monty Python show, or Flying Circus as it is officially known.

If so, it was appropriate that hard on the heels of his return to Caernarvon Castle to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his installation as the (Welsh Nats please note) traditionally English figurehead of the Principality, that the Beeb should be reshowing, 25 years after its debut, the brief oeuvre of Monty P.

The understanding by John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman that brevity is the soul of wit and that they should not outstay their welcome, gives this revival a marvellous freshness. Monty Python's first outing, shown last night, did so much damage to the whole concept and practice of TV arts shows that I'm astonished they ever recovered to be as awful as they still are.


The Times, 4th July 1994

[Parts of this 'borrow' heavily from the Sunday
Telegraph's article of the 17th September 1989.]


TELEVISION REVIEW
SNAKE IN THE GLASS

If you want to know how suffocating a grip pythons can establish on your life, just ask John Cleese, or Michael Palin, or Terry Jones. Neil Armstrong's moonwalk? That was decades ago, wasn't it? And the Prince of Wales's investiture? That too. But Pythonmania still feels like something recent although, like them, Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC2) is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The debut broadcast shown last night - more familiar to most of us through previous repeats - did often seem a bit antique. How young they looked, and so eager!

Maybe that's because Cleese, Palin and Jones, along with Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam and the late Graham Chapman, will never be allowed to forget their early triumph. They are doomed to remain former Pythons first, actors, authors or film-makers second - even though what they achieved later was frequently much funnier than the sketches that made them famous.

Also, Monty Python never relay died. It is the undercoat beneath much of the glossier comedy of the past 20 years: this is easy to overlook when watching Python repeats which may have lost some comic bite - either through repetition or because, like butterflies, they were never intended to fly into old age.

The first ever episode was broadcast on Sunday October 5, 1969, following Omnibus on photojournalism, a detective dram starring Hannah Gordon, and a theological commentary by Malcolm Muggeridge. Any audience still awake at 10.55pm and not discouraged by what the Radio Times billed as a "satire show", was introduced to a glorious stream of sketches and animation, rarely punctuated by punchlines - then wildly unconventional, now just convention.

But was this debut all hilarious? Memory, mixed with desire, prompted you to answer yes. But nostalgia can play tricks with comedy. Rewatching the old sketches last night, your mouth often prepared to laugh at a routine which did not, so many years later, make you clutch your sides after all.

We saw Jones as the composer Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson being quizzed by Idle., Picasso painting while riding a bicycle, a Cleese Mozart looking "at some famous deaths", "the funniest joke in the world", and an Ionesco-style sketch in which Jones taught Italian to an evening class full of native Italians: all amusingish but rarely hilarious, even if gulped down with a warming nostalgia chaser. Gilliam's animations, on the other hand, felt strangely timeless, as inventive as anything being produced today.

Many of those Python sketches now recognised by shorthand - the dead parrot, the lumberjack, the cheese shop, "nudge, nudge, say no more" - will continue sparkle on the 14th viewing. The jokes that shone dimly on their first outing will no doubt now seem that much dimmer. It is a tribute to the Pythons' originality and comic skills that so much survives at all.

Monty Python
changed the course of postwar comedy, and it is absolutely right to make a fuss of them still. Anyone who liked it when it was first served up as a turkey would have been happy to see it served up again as curry last night.

Joe Joseph


Mail On Sunday, Night & Day magazine, 10th July 1994, page 29


By Hunter Davies:

Goodness, is it really 25 years since the first Monty Python's Flying Circus? (BBC2, Sunday). Answer - yes, and it shows. And is it really the 25th time they are being repeated? Probably. And why not, it's part of our culture, a landmark programme's breakthrough in oh get on with it. I still enjoy them, as I enjoy the Goons, and not just for the memory. My memory is that I loved Hancock, but hearing him again I don't. Even worse is Tommy Handley. Whatever made the whole nation laugh at him? Well there was a war on. Funny how fun dates. Even more than hairstyles.

The point about Python is that they began a style of TV humour, so looking at them now, we can see where we've been, and see what's come out of them since. Taking the mick out of TV arts interviews in programme number one was a new idea, as TV arts interviewers hadn't been around very long, but nobody has done it better since. Not even the Late Show and Jeremy Isaccs. Hold on. That's supposed to be real.

Yes, much of it now seems very slow, awfully sixth form, and most sketches go on too long - but then have you watched much supposedly new sitcom TV humour recently? Well then. At the time, I didn't like Terry Gilliam's animations, didn't think they fitted in, preferring the sketches, but now I find them charming. Just like the whole series, even if it does feel like it's crept out of the Ark.


The Daily Telegraph, 16th July 1994, page 24


By Stephen Pile:

Even the repeats of Monty Python's Flying Circus 25 years on feel more dangerous. It is fashionable nowadays to say how unfunny these programmes seem. All comedy from Shakespeare to George Formby belongs to its age and looks pretty rough a few decades later. But Monty Python looks surprisingly fresh to me. We have left behind the anti-establishment zeitgeist that inspired the Pythons and their somewhat intellectual Oxbridge angsts do not speak to us in the same way now that we are bankrupt, unemployed and fearful. But, boy, have they got an agenda and, even now, they are charismatic performers. You can feel the risks.


Observer Review, 17th July 1994, page 25

[Interestingly this one praises the same sketches
that made those reviewers laugh back in 1969 when
this show first aired]


By John Naughton.

And why Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC2) still makes him laugh. Some of the sketches have dated, and some have been so much imitated that they now look like clichés, but it is interesting to see how the material stands up, so to speak. Last week's repeat, for example, had a wonderful inversion of the Nigel Barton sketch where a young lad who leaves Hampstead to become a coal miner is ridiculed for his namby-pamby ways by his Socialist, playwright father. 'There's now't wrong wi' gala luncheons, lad', roars this paragon at one point. 'One day,' shouts his distraught son, 'you'll realise there's more to life than culture...' This was then capped by 'A Question of Belief', a terrific Epilogue spoof in which a Catholic theologian and a bearded rationalist professor decide the existence or non-existence of God by wrestling for it. (God exists, you will be pleased to learn, by two falls and a submission.)


Times, 21st September 1994, page 23


PYTHONS STILL FLYING HIGH

After 25 years, Monty Python remains something completely different

In October 1969, the BBC decided to brighten up Sunday nights by replacing an overtired religious programme with a comedy sketch show. It found a bunch of polite former Footlights types who had dabbled in the Frost shows, and a few things on ITV, and left them to get on with it.

What the BBC - not to mention viewers who hadn't realised that their beloved Sunday night clerics had been silenced - made of what came next has only been partly recorded. Switchboards, as they say, were jammed with calls demanding that the irreverent, unpredictable, and sometimes profane show be removed immediately.

BBC bosses, meanwhile, kept silent - largely because nobody in the comedy department seemed to know much about the show, and because none of their close advisers could tell them whether it was funny or not. Monty Python's Flying Circus had landed.

To be fair to the mandarins, there wasn't much against which to match Monty Python. This was the year, after all, that also saw the launch of Stars On Sunday, Mr and Mrs and The Wombles, and there was little precedent for television shows that featured football matches between Bournemouth gynaecologists and Watford Long John Silver Impersonators, were interrupted mid-sketch by angry brigadiers complaining about bad taste, or had uncomfortably animated figures being squashed - for no particular reason - under gigantic feet.

Younger viewers weren't immediately convinced it was funny either. What they did understand, though, was that this was a show that made no concessions to their parents' tastes, and that was enough to keep them interested until they had worked out where the combined wit of Messrs Cleese, Palin, Idle, Jones, Chapman and Gilliam was coming from.

And their support was enough to convince the BBC that, despite its own reservations, Monty Python should not be grounded.

Curiously, audience figures rarely edged much over the two million mark - not in Britain anyway. In America, however, Monty went mega, which gave the dollar-hungry BBC another good reason to keep it going. Thanks to the Beatles et al. young Americans were suckers for anything with an English accents, and they were also tired of being told that only Jack Benny, Bob Hope and George Burns were fit to be laughed at on television. For millions of them, watching Monty Python fitted nicely into a set of habits that included long hair, protesting against the Vietnam War, dropping acid and dropping out of college.

More weighty recognition of Python's place in the comedy pantheon came in 1972, when it won approval of the broadcasting Establishment by way of a Bafta award. But still the BBC refused to embrace it wholeheartedly - as the late Graham Chapman recalled, even towards the end of its successful life, the Python production office was banished to "a shed near the front gate".

Apart from the later films, and various Python groupings who can still be persuaded to turn out for the right charity, it was all over by 1974. There had been just four series - the last of them made without the assistance of John Cleese, who by then was turning his mind to Fawlty Towers - but they were enough to place Python in the annals of all-time great comedy, where it remains 25 years on.

That is hardly surprising, given that so much which followed, from Fabulous to Hale and Pace, owe the language of their comedy to what the Pythons created.

After a short, sharp court battle in 1976, the BBC gave the Python team the foreign rights to all their shows, in the belief that they were well past their sell-by date. Tell that to the cable, satellite and video companies from LA to Lagos, who still fight each other to a standstill for the chance to buy into the Python legend.

PATRICK STODDART


Guardian, Section 2, 22nd September 1994, page 7


COMPUTER GAMES
THE CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN

Jack Schofield on something very silly - a CD-ROM celebration of Monty Python

Monty Python's technological leap on to CD-ROM was celebrated yesterday with a launch party in London, and silver discs should reach the shops in time for next month's 25th anniversary. It is, of course, a Complete Waste of Time - that's the title, not a comment.

Although CWOT features all aspects of Monty Python, it is dominated by Terry Gilliam's animated graphics. Remember how these often had a cut-and-paste construction and jerky, wooden animation? That turns out to be almost ideal for converting to the low resolution screens and jerky animation facilities provided by Microsoft Windows. Although the CD also offers video clips from the TV series, these have the "talking postage stamp" appearance also common in Windows, which makes them subordinate to Gilliam's graphics.

It's hard to tell from the unfinished beta test version what the final CD-ROM will be like, because many elements are missing. However, there is one "Big Game" where you enter into Inner Space, find the Secret of Intergalactic Success and win a Pentium PC. It's based on "clues hidden in every scene" to provide "a fiendishly complex master puzzle deep within the programme"; so deeply hidden, in fact, I couldn't find it. Presumably you have to complete the minor games first. These include The Gopher Game, The Pig Game and The Chicken Game, and they are more like parodies than authentic arcade games.

In the Gopher game, for example, Gilliam's familiar galaxy of cut-out heads pop out of large holes in the ground and you bash them with a hammer. The high score is encouragingly displayed as 7,432,179. I got to 29 before giving in.

Other games are hidden in four "scenarios" such as the Exploratorium and the Exploding TV Room. These reminded me of children's CD-ROMs such as Sesame Street and Richard Scarry's BusyTown: click on almost anything and something amusing happens. The effects are different, of course: a policeman's eyes bouncing out on spidery red threads, for example, or semi-dressed dancers high-kicking.

Beyond games there is the Desktop Pythonizer. This provides a selection of screen-savers, "living wallpaper", icons, Python sayings and sound effects you can add to your keyboard. With OLE (object linking and embedding) you can play bits from the video clips in other Windows programmes. Several members of the Python team have recorded extra audio material - hints, directions, trivia questions etc - but these had not been added to the pre-release version.

The screen-savers include Hopping Elephants, Man With Baby Carriage and Queen Victoria. Living Wallpapers include Dancing Girls (small fat ones) and Michelangelo's David - where a long arm comes in from the side of the screen to try to snatch his fig-leaf. According to Terry Jones, typesetter of Computer Fetish magazine, the Pythonizer is "an essential customisation tool that will set new standards for ease of use and computing excellence. A must for loonies."

No Python celebration would be complete without digital video and sound clips, and "more than 30 classic sketches" are promised. These include Dead Parrot, Nudge Nudge and Argument Clinic. You will also be able to sing along to the Lumberjack Song, Spam, etc.

Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time has been developed by Gilliam and a Los Angeles-based software house, 7th Level. It was founded last year by Bob Ezrin (record producer), Scott Page (saxophonist with Pink Floyd) and George Grayson (former president of Micrografx). Their idea was to produce CD-ROMs based on Hollywood's idea of entertainment, rather than the computer world's. If Hollywood is taken broadly enough to include BBC TV, they've succeeded. It won't appeal to everyone, but there must be more than enough PC-using Python fans to guarantee success.

Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time needs a PC with a 486SX processor, four megabytes of memory, Microsoft Windows 3.1, 256-colour SVGA graphics, a double-speed CD-ROM drive and a sound card. (It runs on a 25mhZ 386, but slowly.) It will be distributed in the UK by Longman Logotron at £54.99 including VAT.


Independent, 15th December 1995, page 23


WHAT CAME OF THE ODD PYTHON OUT

Twenty-five years after the Flying Circus took British humour into a new orbit, James Rampton meets Carol 'cleavage' Cleveland, femme fatale of the act.

Who's the seventh Python? It's one of those questions - like who was the fifth Beatle, or the Third Man? - beloved of pub-quiz bores. The answer is Carol Cleveland, also known as the Python Girl.

If your memory still needs jogging, she was the one who spent much of the four series of Monty Python's Flying Circus - 25 years old this year - in a state of semi-undress. Remember the woman being unrobed behind a screen by Eric Idle in the Marriage Guidance Counsellor sketch? Or the woman whose clothes were ripped off by each as she was chased across the desert by a man-eating roll-top desk in Scott of the Sahara? That's Carol.

Now a very well-preserved 52 with not a hair or a stroke of make-up out of place., Cleveland lives alone (her marriage ended 10 years ago) in an immaculately tidy terrace house in Brighton. In among the tasteful tribal artefacts and pot plants, there is only one visible sign of the Python days - a picture by Terry Gilliam hanging above the dining-room table. A 50th birthday gift, it depicts Cleveland as an extravagantly-coiffed, voluptuous barrage-balloon supporting a foot-shaped basket containing the other six Pythons. The caption reads: "For Carol. How The Circus Kept Flying. Happy Birthday."

Reclining on a sofa in the world's smartest tracksuit, Cleveland admits that she has been attacked by feminists for going along with the sort of sexism that even Benny Hill might have blushed at. "They did have a go at me on a couple of occasions - though not as often as you might think.

"I remember being surrounded by a group of them waiting outside the stage door when we did the show in New York. Tough, lesbian-style ladies. (Puts on impeccable Noo Yoik accent). 'How can you let them do that to you?' 'Do what?' I said. 'Treat you like a sex object, it's so degrading.' I just looked at them and said, 'Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it.' That shut them up.

"I didn't resent it because I was just having a great time... It wasn't that the other pythons were anti-giving me more to do: they were always apologising for not having better material to offer me. But they just weren't good at writing interesting parts for young women.

"I'm sure it's to do with their public school upbringing," she continues in her understanding manner, proffering tea and a neatly arranged plate of biscuits. "Young men like that grow up thinking there's only two types of ladies: the young, giggly, sexy girl and the old bag. And they played the old bags. I did eventually play men and nuns and old women, but the public just remembers the bra and suspender-belt."

At the outset of her career, Cleveland did not seem destined to be known for that winning mixture of lingerie and laughter. After a childhood in California and three years at Rada, she made her name as a leading lady in such ITV 1960s classics as The Saint and The Avengers.

Only when she moved to the BBC did she start to show her "comedic talents". She worked with major comedy stars of the time, including Roy Hudd, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett and Charlie Drake. "Somewhere along the line," she recalls, "I seemed to be established as a glamour stooge, someone to be the butt of their bawdier jokes... The Pythons were looking for someone to play the roles they couldn't play themselves. In other words, a real woman - or, as Michael (Palin) so charmingly put it, 'real tits'. As I had the nickname at the time of Carol Cleavage - my dear friend from Rada, Lynda La Plante, started that - I obviously fitted the bill.

"After the third episode, the fellers realised that not only did I look the part, but that in order to bring any humour to these stereotyped ladies I'd have to send myself up. Which I was more than happy to do."

Monty Python went on, of course, to become as big as the Beatles in the States, prefiguring the cliché of the century that comedy is the new rock 'n' roll. They mirrored the Fab Four in playing the Hollywood Bowl, which Cleveland describes as the pinnacle of her career. "We'd lose count of how many curtain calls we'd take. They'd just carry on, screaming and yelling. The girls would throw their knickers and home-baked cookies and flowers on the stage. Unfortunately, no one ever threw a jockstrap at me, which was one of my major disappointments."

In the immediate aftermath of Python, Cleveland rode on the back of its success, on the stage. "For a while, I was a thriller queen. I was always the wife who got bumped off. I think they were trying to tell me something." In recent years, she has continued to appear in the theatre but television work, aside from a few commercials, has dried up.

But Python persists. Like rock 'n' roll, the sketches will never die. They may seem dated but they are kept alive by endless BBC re-runs and groups of anoraks huddled together at parties reciting the Dead Parrot sketch. If they wanted, the Pythons could emulate certain cast members of Star Trek and find full-time employment at cult TV conventions in obscure American universities. Indeed, Cleveland has just returned from six weeks in Los Angeles at a Python 25th Anniversary conference, at which the fans knew far more about the programme than she did.

The show's continuing popularity is still helping to pay Cleveland's mortgage. "Thank God for the repeats," she laughs. "Python has saved the day many a time."

But in other respects the programme is a millstone. In the eyes of casting directors, it's a case of once a glamour girl, always a glamour girl. "That image just sticks. I can't shake it off... To tell you the truth, I'm really somewhat pissed-off because I feel my age, and with my experience, this should be my time."

This is a familiar problem for actresses of a certain age. Your assets one day are your impediments the next. Cleveland's answer has been to write a one-woman show about her life in glamour, Carol Cleveland Reveals All - premiered at the Brighton Festival in May and projected to go to Edinburgh next year - charts her history from teenage pom-pom girl and beauty queen (Miss Teen Queen, Miss Camay, Miss Californian Navy), to model., Playboy Bunny and actress. It opens with a reworking of "The Lumberjack Song": "I'm a glamour girl and I'm OK/I work all night and I sleep all day." In a touch that you might call Pythonesque, the show also features a show-stopping number about Cleveland's hysterectomy, "The Wombless Woman Song": "I may be missing something down below/But, believe me, you'd never know."

Meanwhile, Cleveland reflects more in sorrow than in anger on her fate as the only Python regular not to go on to fame and fortune. She stills sees the others occasionally. "John (Cleese) was quoted as saying that he's going to make sure there's a part for all the Pythons in his follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda. I'm going to take him up on that... But, apart from my one-woman show, there isn't much else happening at the moment. I did so much, but it does seem difficult to get the foot back in the door."

Oh, Carol.


Playback Collectors' Special, 1995, page 4 - 5

[A one-off "Collectors' Special", launching a magazine that
I don't think had any issues after this. Quite impressive
though: one or two-page-long articles on the most
important TV shows ever, categorised by genre, and with
some beautiful full-colour stills. Andrew Pixley writes for it,
as do Chris Howarth and Steve Lyons, and Mark Gatiss,
writing about The Quatermass Experiment. The first entry is:]


MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS
BBC
46x30 minutes
Four seasons and one special 1969-74

Conceived, written and performed by (seasons in brackets)
Graham Chapman
John Cleese (One-Three)
Terry Gilliam
Eric Idle
Terry Jones
Michael Palin
and featuring
Carol Cleveland
Connie Booth (One-Three)
Neil Innes (Four)

"Dear Sir, I wish to complain in the strongest possible terms about the song which you have just broadcast, about the lumberjack who wears women's clothes. Many of my best friends are lumberjacks, and only a few of them are transvestites. Yours faithfully, Brigadier Sir Charles Arthur Strong (Mrs)"

It was all Barry Took's fault. The comedy producer took five ex-The Frost Report writers - three (Chapman, Cleese and Idle) Cambridge graduates, two (Palin, Jones) from Oxford. He put them together, lit the blue touch-paper, and stood well back. All were established performers: Cleese and Chapman (alongside Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor) on Associated Rediffusion's At Last The 1948 Show Idle, Jones and Palin (alongside David Jason and Denise Coffey) on Rediffusion London's Do Not Adjust Your Set (with animations by Terry Gilliam). Spike Milligan should also take a share of the blame; it was his Q5 which freed the comedy format from an over-reliance upon skits with strictly regimented set-ups and punchlines. Jones was most taken, Cleese least so. John Howard Davies and Ian MacNaughton, Q5's producer and director respectively, were soon recruited onto the project. It might well have been Owl-Stretching Time; The Year of the Stoat; The Venus de Milo Panic Show; Bunn, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot or even something different every week. Then came Baron von Took's Flying Circus which mutated into Gwen Dibley's Flying Circus and thence...

What was transmitted late in the evening of Sunday 5th October, 1969 was something very far removed from traditional Reithian fare. A raggedy old man in the sea struggles his way to shore, runs towards the camera, collapses and says, "It's..." Cue credits, and a television annourcer [sic] sitting on a pig. Cue squeals.

Cut to a blackboard covered in pictures of pigs; a hand appears, crossing one out. Then Mozart begins awarding points for famous deaths, starting with Genghis Khan ("Bad luck, Genghis")...

It was, frankly, barking mad; the BBC, rather at a loss to know what to do with this strange new addition to their schedules, persistently shifted its transmission time, sometimes dropping it altogether. Ratings climbed from one to three million by the end of its initial thirteen-episode season; boosted, no doubt, by the now tiresomely legendary Parrot Sketch ("It's probably pining for the fjords"). The second season consolidated its success; the final show's Undertaker Skit, with its cannibalistic pay-off ("Look, tell you what, we'll eat her - if you feel a bit guilty about it after, we can dig a grave and you can throw up in it") incurred the wrath of Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners' Association for the first time, and the scene has been edited out of some subsequent repeats. By the time they came to record the third, Bill Cotton, Head of Light Entertainment, and Duncan Wood, Head of Comedy, had compiled a list titled "Thirty-two points of worry"; mostly, it seems, that characters' hobbies shouldn't include "Golf, strangling animals and masturbation" (from the Summarise Proust Competition). It was all getting a bit much. Cleese, with his self-confessed "low boredom threshold", left. The remainder limped on through a patchy six-part fourth season. On 5th December, 1974, television Python came to an inglorious end. They'd colonised publishing (The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok et al) and records (The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief etc). The cinema beckoned, as did a multiplicity of sublime satellite projects far too numerous to list. The full complement played the Hollywood Bowl for four nights in 1980, and were last together in the same room for the recording of Steve Martin's introduction to the twentieth anniversary compilation, Parrot Sketch Not Included. Sadly, Chapman died shortly after.

AB (Alan Barnes)


Evening Standard, 5th May 1995, page 14


AND NOW FOR SOMETHING DISTINGUISHED
from LISA O'CARROLL in Montreux

Monty Python's Flying Circus is to be honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at tonight's prestigious Golden Rose Festival in Montreux. The jurors have created a special award in recognition of the legendary comedy troupe founded by John Cleese, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.

Jones, who will collect the award, directed five of the Monty films including the controversial The Life Of Brian and Monty Python And The Holy Grail.


The Guardian, 10th August 1996, page 30

[ An interview with Terry Jones, accompanied by the
now-traditional What Modern Comedians Think About
Python piece which for some reason always sounds like
the stream-of-consciousness of a bunch of five years olds
("And then the BBC didn't like them, and then they made
some films, and John Cleese was very tall, and I liked him,
but they weren't really very funny, but I liked the one where
the man dressed as the lady, and...")]

SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

It was 1969, we had got together as a team and starting writing sketches for a BBC series. All we needed was a name. A Horse, A Spoon, And A Basin was a runner for a while, but it wasn't quite right. My personal favourite was The Toad Elevating Moment, which arose from Graham Chapman's fevered brain. Mike Palin suggested something along the lines of Elsie Parfitt's Flying Circus, named after the woman who played the piano at Southwold Women's Guild. We finally decided on Bun, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot.

Then, just as the programme title was due to go in the Radio Times, the BBC said, sorry, it's too silly. They told us it had to be something Circus because that was the working title on the manuscripts. OK, John Cleese said, something slimy like a Python. Eric Idle decided we should have some name reminiscent of a seedy music hall entertainer, like Monty. I rushed home and told my brother that after months we had finally got ourselves a title, Monty Python's Flying Circus. He said it would never stick.

The Python team was split into two camps: Oxford and Cambridge. Mike and I had met at Oxford University and had started writing together for the BBC. Terry Gilliam became an honorary member of the Oxford team. John, Graham Chapman and Eric were the Cambridge team. We believed we could create the funniest show around, but we weren't quite sure how. John and Graham also wrote together, and in the early days they were responsible for the more cerebral, linguistic bits like the Parrot and Cheese Shop sketches. Mike Palin and I went for the sillier, more visual things like the Spanish Inquisition and Spam. But eventually we started parodying each other - for example we wrote a sketch naming all the stars in the Zodiac which was actually a piss-take of the parrot sketch - so you couldn't actually tell who had written what. Eric always wrote by himself: Wink, Wink, Nudge Nudge was typical Eric.

There was also a split about the form we thought the programme should take. The Cambridge team wanted a simple sketch show. The Oxford team wanted it to have a shape that would make it different. This elusive shape came to me one day after I'd watched a cartoon by Terry Gilliam in which one thing merged into another. We were also great admirers of the Goons, who showed us that we had been thinking in clichés, that sketches could start out one way and end up in a totally different, illogical place. I suppose we tried to exploit TV like the Goons did radio. Last but not least, Laurence Sterne was a great influence. In Tristram Shandy, he took a novel and buggered around with its form. One chapter, headed something like A Chapter In Which Nothing Happens, consisted of a couple of blank pages. Inspired.

Although we worked in teams or individually, Python was collaborative, anarchic in the true sense, in that there was no one ruler. People say that John and I were fighting all the time, but I don't remember it like that. We'd argue about scripts, but we weren't fighting. By the end of the second series, John was bored, but we hadn't fallen out; he just wanted to do his own show.

Perhaps it seems astonishing today that the BBC let us into their studios, but in the late sixties/early seventies there was a totally different climate. The producer was still the driving force and the BBC took pride in never censoring anything. The heads of programming never asked to see a show beforehand, and comment was reserved till the meeting after it had gone out. But even in the short lifespan of Python, we could see the culture changing. By the second series the heads wanted to see the shows before they went out, and by the third they even wanted to see the scripts.

It was a logical progression for us to make films like the Holy Grail. The trouble with TV is that you can't perform and be behind the camera at the same time. But we realised that to protect our material we'd have to direct.

Recently, when I was making a documentary series about the Crusades it struck me how much the ancient chroniclers nicked from Python. We were filming in northern Syria when we discovered that in the 11th century one of the Crusader kings tried to impress on another leader how tough his men were by getting them to jump from the top the castle. Naturally, they all killed themselves. Pure Python.

Would we do anything differently today? Well, perhaps we'd make it less boysy. I suppose Python was pretty sexist - Carol Cleveland was the token, occasional woman and she just played outrageous bimbos - but we didn't understand sexism then. We did try out actresses for bigger parts, but it always seemed funnier when I shoved on the old frock and raised my voice a few notches.

People tell me that we made a hugely important contribution to the history of comedy, but I'm not so sure. Things always seem better, more important, in retrospect. While Python could attract nine million on a good day, a sitcom like Till Death Us Do Part could hit 20 million. The films were successful, but they were never blockbusters. What were we trying to achieve? Silliness. We tried to create something that was unpredictable, that had no parameters. Perhaps the fact that Pythonic is now in the dictionary is a measure of our failure.

Terry Jones was talking to Simon Hattenstone. The 21st anniversary video of Monty Python And The Holy Grail with the "missing 24 seconds" is released on August 19

PYTHON IN PERSPECTIVE

STUART [sic] LEE
Monty Python was the promise of fifties, post-war, surrealist, Goons-type humour fulfilled on TV. They were important in a similar way to punk. Not many people copied them, but they opened up the possibilities. They abandoned punchlines, didn't satirise specific figures and used techniques from other artforms like Buñuel's films. There are only about four minutes in every episode which are less than terrible, but even when it doesn't work it is really admirable. They were hated at the time, the BBC never scheduled them properly, but now they are really proud of them. I don't think the programme would get made today.

JACK DEE
I've always thought of Monty Python as the Beatles of comedy because they liberated it. I know Cleese saw the Goons as being particularly influential, but I never found the Goons that accessible. Certainly the roots of my comic interests are firmly planted in the Python era, and I understood them even as a child. My favourite sketch is Lumberjack.

FELIX DEXTER
I loved the fact that they didn't perform "jokes", but rather, routines which were abstract. My favourite of the Python team was Eric Idle - it was obvious he wasn't a patrician who viewed comedy as an artform. I enjoyed the graphics they fused with the sketches, as they acted as a visual extension of their style. The main appeal of their humour was that it was childish, just plain silly.

RHONA CAMERON
They were the first people to do an intellectual piss-take of British standards. By attacking middle-class uptightness which we're all subject to, they also took the piss out of themselves. Chris Morris is the best contemporary solution to what they were trying to do. Basically they were repressed public school boys giggling at sex. Mostly we don't need Oxbridge types on the circuit, they're a real pain, but they were the only ones to do the high brow stuff well. They were all talented and it was an unusually effective combination. I like it most when they play women because it's deadpan and not camp. The Grim Reaper sketch is great. What really, really irritates me is that they're always quoted by drunken students.

DYLAN MORAN
Monty Python made everybody who didn't think they were funny feel they should apologise for it. A lot of the sketches didn't work or were repetitive to the point that you wanted to shriek at the television. When they did work, they were poetry. And the laughter was often sudden, dark, hysterical. You felt grateful to them and their blessed perversions. They showed me it was possible to do exactly what you want before a mass audience. My favourite scene is John Cleese in the cheese shop chasing away the Greek dancers.

MARK THOMAS
Monty Python were very important but not as important as The Goons, who were more anarchic. Monty Python occupied a space that was made for them by the brilliance of The Goons and Peter Cook. They were funny because they were critically aware that they were biting the master's hand - taking the piss out of the people who had employed them. When I watched them back in the seventies there was the feeling that I was watching something a bit rebellious. The Life of Brian was almost a precursor to the Pistols - taking the piss out of religion.

DOMINIC HOLLAND
I'm not a huge Monty Python buff. Some episodes I don't find funny and some I don't get at all. There's a space in comedy now for people who are not that funny but are different and clever and it's PC to like them. Monty Python were the first to start this trend. But I do really like the Ministry of Funny Walks sketch because of its sheer absurdity. I'm a major John Cleese fan - his standards are impeccable and I think A Fish Called Wand was the best British comedy in 15 years.

LYNN FERGUSON
Monty Python opened up the sketch show format to include absurd, probably drug-induced things like knights and dragons. One of my favourites in Robin Hood stealing lupins - very bizarre. Everyone who was into evil, satanic music loved Monty Python. They used TV for comedy in a new way. What Dennis Potter did for drama on TV, Monty Python did for comedy, at a time when everyone else was going down the Morecombe & Wise road. Most people aren't clever enough to get away with "intellectual" comedy. They were apolitical, going after pure humour, with no subtext. They were funny first and clever afterwards. Everybody loves the Parrot sketch. You keep thinking they did this brilliant sketch and then you remember oh shit, they did that as well. It's a bit like that with Bob Dylan.

JEFF GREEN
The Life of Brian is my favourite film of all time. I die laughing at the scene "Are you the Judean People's Front? No, we're the People's Front of Judea." The British are world leaders of the surreal - think of Eddie Izzard, Reeves & Mortimer, The Young Ones. But when we face the Americans joke for joke, we're not that hot. Monty Python were the ultimate in surreal, quirky British humour. But they did make it big in America - the only other person who managed that was Benny Hill.

Interviews: Justina Hart


The Box, No. 1, April/May 1997, page 20

[Oh dear. A terrible, rubbish, rotten Loaded-but-with-
telly type magazine. A lot of this mag ended up in the
recent "Rough Guide To Cult TV" book. They like Michael
Palin though: there's an interview with him in issue four, and
in issue two he's voted the 18th coolest person on television,
just after Lady Penelope and just before Jools Holland (The
Prisoner is just below that at number 20, which is ludicrously
low. Number one was Dylan the rabbit from The Magic
Roundabout, by the way. That should sum up just what this
magazine is all about, maaaaan).]


WHAT HAVE THE PYTHONS EVER DONE FOR US?

MONTY PYTHON
PARAMOUNT
8.30PM (rpt 11.30PM) WEEKDAYS

Anyone who grew up in the 1970s can't watch a 1990s comedy series such as The Fast Show or Reeves and Mortimer without thinking the same thing - that it's like Monty Python only not as funny. As Reg of the People's Front of Judea might have said in Life of Brian: 'Apart from reinventing the whole format of TV comedy and inspiring generations of comedians around the world, what have the Pythons ever done for us?'

All four Python series are currently being shown for the first time on satellite and cable. Don't miss the two rarely-seen 50 -minute specials made for German TV and shot on location.

A few years later, when there were problems financing Life Of Brian, the Pythons considered using the two German shows as the basis of a film. Fortunately, George Harrison came up with the cash for a proper movie.

John Cleese says the Pythons were 'six writers who used to perform because they were less likely to screw it up than six other performers who might have been brought in'. There's absolutely no truth in the rumour that ITV is planning to reshoot the series using Paul Merton, Brian Conley, Philip Schofield, Bradley Walsh and Robson and Jerome.

PAUL SIMPKIN

THE MAKING OF A SKETCH
THE MINISTRY OF SILLY WALKS

Graham Chapman and John Cleese had decided to write a sketch about someone who was as stupid as a human being could be yet by birthright would become a government minister.

Civil servants, realising his utter ineptitude, would create a specially insignificant department for this minister to run. They were thinking of stupid names for this department (they got as far as the Ministry of Floods) when a very tall man walked up the hill outside Cleese's house.

Cleese was confused because the man was keeping his body perpendicular to the pavement whereas most people lean forward when walking up a hill. 'How is he doing that?' Cleese blurted out. They ran outside to find out but the man had disappeared.

They spent the rest of the afternoon thinking of ever more ludicrous ways in which someone might walk up the hill in that manner and decided that their incredibly stupid man could be the Minister of Silly Walks. When they were shooting the sketch, Cleese suddenly decided to add the goose step to show how the man must have been walking up the hill.


The Times, 9th March 1998, page 3


PYTHON COMEBACK

Giles Whitell reports from Aspen as the comedy circus prepares to go flying again

Five middle-aged men and an urn offered hope of a big new showbusiness comeback yesterday. Monty Python's Flying Circus is taking off again.

The ashes supposedly belong to Graham Chapman, the wildest Python, who died in 1989 but was bought along when the team reunited in public for the very first time in 17 years at a comedy festival at the weekend. Solemnly placed on an ornate chair, the urn was frequently told to be quiet by Michael Palin, then knocked over by Terry Gilliam. The contents were vacuumed up by a stagehand.

Their extraordinary reception at a festival in Aspen, Colorado, where they had top billing while the entire cast of Cheers applauded from the fifth row, encouraged the surviving members to go ahead with an idea for a thirtieth anniversary tour of Britain and the United States next year.

Palin, 54, said: "It would be crazy not to try and take advantage of the groundswell of support we have seen. Coming here has concentrated our minds on the fact that there is still an audience."

John Cleese, 58, Eric Idle, 54, Terry Jones, 56, Gilliam, 58, and Palin driven to the Wheeler Opera House in a fleet of stretch limousines and reminisced to a packed house for two hours, with screenings of the Lumberjack Song and the Fish-Slapping Dance, and a soulful rendition of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life from the film The Life of Brian.

Idle said: "I had an idea for a film last year and everyone individually said 'Yes'. but then we all got together in England and the first thing John said was, 'There's no way I'm doing another film.'" Cleese said: "The trouble with a film is that we would have to get together for six to eight months to write it." A tour could last up to ten weeks.

The team made a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 1981. Fans and promoters have long since talked up a Monty Python comeback as comedy's equivalent to reuniting the surviving Beatles. It remains an uncertain proposition. Idle said that Cleese "is the kind of guy who changes his mind". Cleese, who was moving with a slight limp, was heard to rule out a reprise of his energetic turn as Minister of Silly Walks.

Asked if current affairs would be used for new topical material, Palin replied: "We were never topical. We always tried to be surreal."

All five men are still best known in America as Pythons. Their television revues, which started in 1969, took hold on college campuses in the early 1970s and remain cult favourites. They are clearly ready to perform. Their weekend tribute began with six people trooping on to the stage. When moderator Robert Klein asked how the group formed, a young man began to answer the question, until the real Pythons chased him off stage with a hail of flying fruit.

Cleese told how the initial reaction to their humour had been lukewarm. An audience selected by the BBC to watch the first show was made up of pensioners, "and they thought they were going to see a circus", Idle said. The BBC had decided that the show must have circus in its title, and the cast could not agree on anything else, so they went along. They threw in Monty Python as an afterthought, because it sounded like a bad theatrical agent.

Their innovation stemmed from the experience of the members, who "had done just enough comedy to be fed up with all the comic conventions of the time". They avoided the latest news because "by the time we started, satire had been hammered, absolutely flogged". Palin said: "We wanted a show where you didn't know what was going to happen next."

There were many taboos in the 1960s that no one really cared about, so there was little risk in breaking them, Cleese said. He added that it was always a pleasure to be around Chapman, his writing partner, because "he just adored bad taste". Palin and Jones wrote together. Cleese occasionally tried to get the group to switch partners, but with little luck. They "fought like cats and dogs about the writing because we cared so much about it".

He added: "We can compromise... because...

[The rest of this article is missing, except for these
sidebarred biographies:]


THE TEAM THAT FOUND BIGGER FISH TO FRY

John Cleese went on from Python to secure his position in the pantheon of Britain's great comic actors with Fawlty Towers. He played further chaotic characters in Clockwise, A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures, made a fortune from video training films and wrote books with his psychotherapist. He was reported to have made £305,000 for four days' work providing the voice of a gorilla for Disney's George and the Jungle.

Michael Palin has appeared in fellow Pythons' films - Brazil, A Fish Called Wanda but now is the doyen of television travellers with programmes such as Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole and Full Circle. The spin-off books have sold hundreds of thousands and he also wrote the bestselling novel Hemingway's Chair.

Terry Jones's film work consists of various combinations of directing, acting and writing. He did all three on Eric [sic] the Viking and Wind in the Willows and also directed Personal Services. Among his books is a serious academic work, Chaucer's Knight.

Eric Idle has appeared in a mixed bag of films, with Nuns on the Run and Casper, the Friendly Ghost the most successful. Appeared on Top of the Pops when Always Look on the Bright Side reached No 1.

Terry Gilliam, the cartoonist, co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Terry Jones and built a career as a serious film director, with Time Bandits, 12 Monkeys and Brazil.

Graham Chapman's subsequent work was often overshadowed by stories about his private life. He was homosexual and adopted a son who became his manager. After a long and eventually successful battle against alcoholism, he died of cancer, aged 48.


Daily Telegraph, Arts & Books supplement, 14th March 1998, page A7


UNDEAD PARROT

The Monty Python team once vowed never to work together again. Catherine Jordan reports on a change of heart

The night before Monty Python's reunion gig last weekend at the annual US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, John Cleese appeared on the TV talk show Dennis Miller Live. Now 58, he appeared frustrated that, 15 years after the Pythons' last film, The meaning of Life, their worldwide following of fans refuses to accept that they are an ex-team of comedians, that they have met their maker, that they have joined the Choir Invisible.

Miller asked: "How much of your fortune would you give to have strangers stop walking up to you on the street and asking you to do the silly walk?"

Cleese replied: "I'd give about three billion dollars."

Wherever he goes, strangers approach him to quote their favourite piece of Python dialogue. "The problem is, they always know it better than I do."

Despite this, Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones are back together. In 1989, the sixth Python, Graham Chapman, died, and the others vowed separately they would never work as a team again.

Last year, however, the remaining Pythons met for the first time since 1983 to rediscover their old friendship: tentative plans were drawn up for a reunion tour, which would be announced at the dummy run in Aspen.

Dennis Miller Live was taped the night before the gig in the same venue - Aspen's Wheeler Opera House. Eight inches of snow fell overnight and the mood in the Python camp the following morning seemed frosty.

A photographer from the Colorado Springs Gazette took a snap of Cleese walking through the lobby of the St Regis Hotel from his $689-a night suite. "Why did you take my photo?" Cleese bridled. The photographer mumbled the obvious. Cleese replied tartly: "You should have asked first. It's rude."

At 8.30pm, the comedians were driven four blocks in Aspen's version of limousines (27ft four-wheel-drive trucks) to the packed Opera House. Actor Ted Danson was sitting in the fifth row, along with other cast members from his old show, Cheers. The lights went down at 9pm to the rousing Flying Circus theme music, Sousa's Liberty Bell March.

The Pythons sat on stage in a cosy semi-circle, with host and American comedian Robert Klein, who remarked that it was a shame Graham Chapman couldn't be there.

"But he's dead," said Idle.

"He is no more. Ceased to be," said Palin.

"Stone f***ing dead," added Gilliam, who was wearing a sweater emblazoned with a giant image of Tin Tin.

"It's a tragedy," said Cleese. "But I brought him from London. Shall we have him on?"

A butler strolled on stage with a silver funeral urn and placed it on a table. Chapman's ashes made six.

The urn joke wasn't entirely new. In 1994, at a 25th anniversary salute to the Pythons in Los Angeles, Chapman's longtime companion, David Sherlock, produced a packet of ashes and sprinkled them onto the front row of the audience. The ashes, Gilliam said at the time, were real, "a bit of Graham".

Last Saturday, minutes after the urn appeared, Cleese, in mid-sentence, crossed his tentpole legs and accidentally upended the table on which it was sitting. It flew to the floor and Chapman went up in a sooty cloud. The audience realised it was actually a breathtakingly tasteless gag only when English butlers marched on with brooms and a DustBuster, and the Pythons leapt up and briskly swept Chapman's ashes off their clothing and under the rug.

They sat back down. "So, after about four sketches..." Cleese continued, poker-faced, and the audience exploded with laughter and applause.

The next 45 minutes were an entertaining jumble of reminiscences. Periodically, they revisited on screen some of the best and brightest moments in the prodigious Python repertoire, from Flying Circus sketches such as "The Undertaker" to clips from their biblical lampoon The Life of Brian.

The Pythons used to be a cult, but they're now more than famous, more than influential - they're historical. Throughout the session they made it clear that they are well aware of the irony of having moved from the avant-garde to the cultural mainstream.

'We were trying to do something that was so unpredictable," Gilliam said. "And I think the fact that 'Pythonesque' is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the extent to which we failed."

Cleese added: "The oddest thing is we used to fight like cats and dogs about material, because we really cared about it. We all get on very well now because we don't care any more, you see."

When the team was presented with an honorary American Film Institute Star award for its significant and enduring influence in film and television, Cleese stepped to centre-stage with the award and faced the audience with a thin smile.

"On behalf of the group, I'd like to say a word of thanks. We Monty Pythons started together 29 years ago. And, here we are, receiving this award at last. And I often think how much it would have helped us, when the show was struggling, if we'd received an award like this then. You know, but we didn't. In fact, we never did." He paused. "Nothing." Pause. "Not a f***ing sod. But, now that we're all rich and famous, it's a different story, isn't it?"

This comic rant disguised the surprise of the evening. "We had a meeting here today in Aspen, in an oxygen tent," Cleese went on to say. "And we decided that, as next year is the 30th anniversary of Monty Python, we are going to do something.

"We are going to have tea."

After the show, Cleese formally announced the reunion tour. A Python stage show will visit London, New York and Los Angeles (at the least) in the autumn of 1999.

"We were all enjoying one another so much, and we thought, why not?" he said. "The funny thing is, we want to do new material more that the fans do. They want the "Upper Class Twit" sketch. But we will be doing new material, perhaps bringing in something more current. For me, the delight is to make them laugh. I don't even remember most of the old skits."

The style of humour will, they say, remain true to the early days. Michael Palin told me: "Any new material we write would have to be in the style that we've always had. That's what we do."

"I'm sure we'll make a whole lot of bad taste jokes about Graham Chapman being dead," said Cleese, with a naughty smile. "Our brand of comedy is a mixture of anxiety and liberation."

[Reunion tour, eh? That never happened...]


Classic Television, No. 4, April/May 1998, page 12-16

[Classic Television magazine was a short-lived fanzine
devoted to television programmes. It was a bit amateur:
poorly-written articles, grainy nicked-from-the-internet
photos, unpaid contributors, but they had a nice style,
devoting the back page of each issue to a "Special Guest
Villain" such as Genial Harry Grout or Servalan, later
replaced by a page of humorous quotes from Blackadder
or The Day Today. They didn't stick to the usual TV
magazine selling tactics, either: for example, when doing
an article about Dr Who they would put a large picture of
John Thaw on the cover instead. Actually, in retrospect,
this may have been why they sold so few copies. But they
gave away videos of either Ripping Yarns or Boys From
The Blackstuff with every subscription for a while, which
was a nice gimmick. And I wrote an uneventful piece about
The Young Ones for them once, printed in their kinda-
widely-acclaimed British Comedy issue. They added an
irrelevant intro about how I argued that The Young Ones
were the South Park of their day, which I didn't, and they
only said it to add drawings of Neil, Vyvvian, et al, dressed
as the two-dimensional sweary puppets. And they added a
badly-done three-quarters of a page description of 'Nasty' to
fill up space. Aah, I'm rambling now. The article, then:]


THE FULL MONTY

As the remaining members of Monty Python staged a one-off reunion and prepare for a tour next year, Paul Bamford assesses the impact of their comedy on British and world culture over the last 30 years.

The word phenomenon seems inadequate to describe what five Brits and one American set in motion almost three decades ago. Monty Python's Flying Circus was indeed 'something completely different' and anyone around in the late 1960s or early 1970s will tell you just what an impact it had on this country, and later the world.

Monty Python inspired a whole new generation of comics and is still doing so today (where would Alexei Sayle, Steve Martin or Vic and Bob be without Python?). But how did it all happen and under what circumstances?

It is important to understand that Python wasn't created in a social or cultural vacuum. It has predecessors and influences, and definitely wouldn't have come about without important events in British history that changed the way we live and how we regarded our country.

One important factor was a gradual change in the authoritarian BBC and a willingness to experiment with more unusual forms of entertainment.

In their formative years, the Pythons were almost certainly exposed to post-war radio shows like Hancock and the Goons (this influence cannot be emphasised strongly enough, nor can Spike Milligan's later Q5 television series). And as the threat from commercial rival ITC (launched on 1955) began to hit home so the Beeb took more and more chances.

There was also the Suez crisis in 1956 in which Britain displayed a total ignorance of its place in world politics and embarrassed itself on a global scale. This ultimately led to an upsurge of what the press called 'the satire movement' when it became fashionable to knock leading British figures.

Inevitably, this came to a head in the swinging 60s when, after years of repression, there was suddenly a lot more freedom of expression. It was against this background that the Pythons emerged.

There can be no denying the importance of Oxford and Cambridge Universities in this story either. The British-born members all wound up in one or the other (with Terry Gilliam going to Occidental College, California - but later becoming an honorary member of Oxford).

Michael Palin, the son of an engineer from Sheffield, went to Oxford to read history. There he met Welshman Terry Jones, who was already a notable figure on campus, and they formed a friendship. Palin was a keen actor and, like Jones, he loved to write what he performed.

A play condemning capital punishment, Hang Down Your Head and Die, which Palin contributed to, was good enough to reach the West End and he also went with Jones to Edinburgh for the Oxford Revue in 1964.

Similarly, Somerset-born John Cleese, who went to Cambridge to read law, encountered his writing partner from the Midlands, Graham Chapman, while at college. Both got involved in the Footlights theatre club there, and after experiencing some success in the areas of performing and writing, Cleese decided he didn't want to be a lawyer and Chapman gave up a promising medical career.

Eric Idle, who hailed from County Durham, arrived at Cambridge in Cleese's last year, just after Chapman had left. Idle also got involved in Footlights and even became its president for a while.

All five went into television after leaving university. Jones and Palin wrote for the Frost Report (1966) and a series featuring John Bird and John Fortune. The pair then joined Eric Idle and David Jason for ITV's Do Not Adjust Your Set (1968), which in some respects can be seen as a dry run for Python.

Cleese delivered copy for That Was The Week That Was (1963), then he and Chapman joined the Frost Report where they met Palin and Jones. Cleese also worked with Marty Feldman on At Last, The 1948 Show (1967) and adapted Richard Gordon's novels for the small screen.

There are two theories about how the gang all came together. In the first, Barry Took, then a BBC comedy producer, gathered them together, adding a young cartoonist from the USA, Terry Gilliam, who'd worked for magazines like Help! and was relatively new to television.

In the second version of events, the Pythons approached the BC with the show and were then referred to Took. In this version, it was Eric Idle who insisted that Gilliam should provide the graphics and animation.

However it happened, it was the catalyst for one of the funniest and most outrageous programmes television has ever witnessed. Such a mixture of talent and viewpoints resulted in a unique perspective on comedy.

The next step was to come up with a name for the thing. Several suitably surreal ones were suggested, including The Year of the Stoat and Owl Stretching Time (which eventually became the sub-title for the fourth episode of the first series).

There was some mention of Baron Von Took's Flying Circus and Palin rather liked the name Gwen Dibley, which he'd noticed in a newspaper. However, Monty Python had a more seedy appeal and so it was coupled with the 'Flying Circus' and a legend was born.

Terry Gilliam devised the delightfully daft opening title sequence featuring the words springing out of red roses, various naked ladies, a cardinal on wheels, a man's head being pumped up until it explodes and, of course, the soon to be famous giant foot, stolen from Bronzino's Cupid, which drops down at the end to the sound of a 'raspberry'. It was all set to the distinctive tune of John Philip Sousa's Liberty Bell.

The team was given quite a free reign in what they wrote, unthinkable before the 1960s. John Howard Davies stepped into produce and direct the show, although he was replaced after the fourth programme by Ian MacNaughton.

Monty Python's Flying Circus premiered on Sunday, October 5, 1969 on BBC1 in what had previously been a religious slot. The only warning the audience got was a mysterious listing in the Radio Times. Goodness knows what people thought when they initially encountered it.

The first episode, actually recorded second, contained a telling blend of items, giving a good indication of what to expect in future. Called Whither Canada, for reasons not explained, it started with Michael Palin's ragged man struggling to reach the seashore and then proclaiming: 'It's...' followed by Cleese's exaggerated vowels announcing 'Monty Python's Flying Circussss.'

The Pythons were an educated lot and their show reflected this. But references to 'high culture' (the arts, literature, classical music) rubbed shoulders with 'popular culture' (TV, film and advertising) and politics as well. There was also a fair amount of generally bizarre visual humour too.

In Whither Canada, for example, Mozart (Cleese) hosted his own TV show about famous deaths; Arthur 'two sheds' Jackson (Jones) attempted to talk about his symphony; and Picasso painted while on a bicycle.

We also had the Pepperpots (the Pythons in drag and talking in high pitched voices) who were taking the mickey out of Stork margarine adverts; a tutor trying to teach Italian to men from Napoli and Milan; the funniest joke in the world being used as a weapon in the Second World War; not to mention pigs being sat on and Terry Gilliam as a Viking.

As the series progressed, more and more Python staples were introduced to go with the Pepperpots and Chapman's interfering Colonel ('Stop that. It's silly.').

There was the well-dressed announcer; the knight with a chicken fetish; the Gumbies, complete with wellies and knotted hankies on their heads; comedy judges and lawyers; government officials; and Mr Praline (played by Cleese in a certain parrot sketch).

In addition, Python developed some regular formulae which it used many times over: Gilliam's fantastic cartoons breaking up the show; the interviewer situation; the office; parodies of TV shows; ending a sketch in an unexpected way - such as the dropping of a weight on somebody's head or having a choir suddenly burst into the room. And, although the guys often played female roles themselves, women like Carol Cleveland were introduced to add a touch of glamour to proceedings.

Unfortunately, the BBC was slow to pick up on what it had discovered. It kept moving the show around and sometimes took it off-air altogether if there was a sporting event on.

This made it hard for Python to build up a regular base of viewers - but not impossible. By the end of the first series, audiences of three million were enough to give them a second go, this time with a more stable time slot (albeit at 10pm when regional programming took over).

Thank goodness the BBC persevered because the second series was the best ever with highlights such as the Spanish Inquisition, the Bruces and the sketch which was to become synonymous with Cleese - the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Immediately afterwards, in 1970, the Pythons embarked on their first cinematic project. In an effort to promote their material abroad, especially in the United States, sketches from the first two series were remade for the big screen.

Shot over five weeks on a very low budget, the set-pieces didn't translate that well to the big screen and failed to elicit the desired response. The film only made a profit in the UK because the comedians were quite well known.

Annoyed at producer Victor Lownes' domination of the film and, no doubt, their small pay cheques, the team set up Python Productions. A number of albums and books followed with the Pythons exercising more control over what was on the market.

By the time the third series began in 1972, there was more tension than usual in the work place. Lord Hill had become chairman of the BBC and he was less liberal than his predecessor and more inclined to take note of Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listener's Association. You can imagine what she made of Python and, for the first time, cuts looked inevitable. As if that wasn't enough, Cleese's first child, Cynthia, had just been born (he was married to American actress Connie Booth) and he resented the long hours he had to put in. He also felt that the team was repeating itself rather than producing something fresh and original. Cleese made it plain that he would tour with the group in 1973, but would not do a forth series.

The BBC, however, begged for more, so the show continued, but only for six episodes rather than the usual 13 and with BBC2 as its new home.

It is generally agreed that the fourth series was the worst, yet the last ever programme, broadcast on December 5, 1974, was a belter. It featured the course, but hilarious, most awful family in Britain; a doctor whose patients are stabbed by his nurse; and an appeal on behalf of the extremely rich.

Ironically, at the point of break up, the Pythons were becoming established overseas. In Germany, they'd done a special pilot and were very popular. Likewise in the United States, where the movie, And Now For Something Completely Different, had failed, small stations showing the series had succeeded. Though much later the team would end up taking the ABC network to court for re-editing their material, and they eventually gained copyright for their own programmes abroad.

In 1974, they made plans for another movie. But they vowed to have more say in its making. Palin's interest in history fuelled the idea of tackling the Arthurian legend in true Python fashion. Originally envisaged as a mix of the contemporary and the historical, with the Holy Grail being found in Harrod's, in the end it leant more towards the latter (except for the abrupt ending).

Cleese returned to the fold for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it was a huge hit. Gilliam and Jones shared directorial duties with the whole affair being filmed in the remote Scottish highlands where coconut halves were used instead of horses, Black Knights were armless and shouts of 'Ni' struck terror into defenceless old women.

The movie was so well received that they were encouraged to make another. The cinematic life suited them, allowing them to get together every so often but still do their own thing in between.

Unfortunately, The Life of Brian, which told the story of how an ordinary bloke was mistaken for Christ, proved a major headache.

For a start, they were dealing with a touchy subject - religion is something almost everybody has an opinion on.

Although it took a year to get to first draft level, the project appeared to be going well. It was backed by EMI to the tune of almost $5 million. But then EMI withdrew support because it feared a blasphemy prosecution.

Former Beatle George Harrison's Handmade Films stepped in and the project was revived. It was filmed on location in Tunisia under the direction of Terry Jones.

Although the British Board of Film Classification passed the film without cuts in 1979, the Catholic Church blasted it and groups such as the Festival of Light caused a rumpus. It was banned in some areas, while others deemed it X-rated. On the other hand, the notoriety ensured it made money.

The next celluloid outing was Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982), which featured selected highlights from four live performances where the guys went through the motions once more. It had a limited theatrical screening but did well on video.

Then the team gathered for one final film. Supported by Universal, the rather ambitiously titled Meaning of Life again saw Jones in the director's chair, although Gilliam contributed the prologue.

The film was basically a series of sketches which illustrated life as we know it, starting with birth, and ending with death, and covering most things in-between. Fans were not disappointed. Treats such as the Lionel Bart inspired Every Sperm Is Sacred and Mr Creosote (Jones) exploding in a restaurant after over eating helped it win the special jury prize at Cannes.

It is safe to say that Monty Python's Flying Circus went from a little known cult show to a fully fledged British institution in the space of 15 years. Yet it's strange to think that the team who did their level best to buck the system, to challenge the boundaries of comedy in absurd, and sometimes shocking, ways, have now become part of it themselves. It's almost as weird as the Python ethos itself.

With the death of Graham Chapman almost a decade ago, there can never be a complete Python reunion again - let alone another film. But this should only serve to make us appreciate all the more what they did achieve in their time together.

LIVES OF PYTHON

Michael Palin has rarely been out of the limelight since Python. He wrote, with Terry Jones, and starred in Ripping Yarns for BBC Television in the late 1970s and enjoyed a string of roles in films like Jabberwocky (1977, which he co-wrote), Brazil (1985), The Missionary (1981), A Private Function (1984), A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and American Friends (1991).

He also won critical acclaim as a headmaster in Alan Bleasdale's TV drama for Channel 4 GBH (1991). More recently, he has become the BBC's travelling man, with three series under his belt starting with Around the World in 80 Days. The man who made fun of Whicker Island so long ago has become a similar figure himself.

Terry Jones has had his fingers in many pies, but his main passion is still writing. He penned a book about the Knight from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the 1970s, produced a number of children's books including Fairy Tales (1981), and wrote the screenplay for the David Bowie film Labyrinth (1986). He also contributed a regular column for the Guardian.

He continued to direct, most notably with Erik the Viking (1989), an episode of the Indiana Jones saga (1991) and more recently The Wind in the Willows in which he also played Mr Toad.

Everyone knows that John Cleese scored a big hit with his 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers (he based Basil on a real hotelier the Pythons had once encountered). But he also went on to become a bona fide film star in the 1980s.

He was Robin Hood in Time Bandits (180), a loony army officer in Privates on Parade (1982), the sheriff in Hollywood's Silverado (1985), a panic-stricken headmaster in Clockwise (1985) and a stripping barrister in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) in which he starred alongside Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline. The Wanda team reunited last year for Fierce Creatures 'an equal not a sequel'.

Cleese has also had considerable success with his books Families and How to Survive Them and Life and How To Survive It.

Eric Idle went straight from Python to his weekly BBC2 parody Rutland Weekend Television with Neil Innes. He then hosted Saturday Night Live in the United States which led to a spoof Beatles documentary, the Rutles, with Dan Akroyd and John Belushi. Film appearances include Nuns on the Run (1990) and Splitting Heirs (1993).

His musical talent has also served him well. More than a decade after the Life of Brian, his song Always Look On the Bright Side of Life reached number one in the network charts. He also played Ko-Ko in Jonathan Miller's production of the Mikado and sang the theme tune to One Foot In The Grave.

Co-directing Monty Python and the Holy Grail was frustrating for Terry Gilliam, so it wasn't really surprising that he struck out on his own to direct Jabberwocky. This brought him only limited success but he did better with Time Bandits. In 1985 he directed the excellent science fiction fantasy Brazil, having to fight to keep the downbeat ending in the final cut. Making the Adventures of Baron Munchausen was even tougher and the movie flopped. Working from a script by Richard Lagravenese gave him his most financially rewarding film - the Robin Williams urban fairy tale The Fisher King (1991). A native of Britain for the last 30 odd years, he still visits America often, especially when making a movie such as his last hit 12 Monkeys with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt.

After Graham Chapman announced at a party that he was gay, he subsequently co-founded Gay News in 1972 and became a champion of the gay liberation scene.

Alcohol problems in the mid-1970s nearly killed him although he shook off the addiction by the end of the decade. After Python, he starred in the Odd Job with Carolyn Seymour, worked on the pirate movie Yellowbeard, which failed because of the death of its star Marty Feldman, and wrote the semi-autobiographical A Liar's Autobiography which spliced together fantasy and reality. He died of throat cancer in 1989 on the eve of the 20th anniversary of Python.

TOP TEN PYTHON SKETCHES

1. The Dead Parrot... (series 1, episode 8) altogether now 'that parrot wouldn't go vroom if you put 4,000 vots [sic] through it'.
2. The Ministry of Silly Walks (series 2, episode 1)... 'le marche futile?'
3. The Spanish Inquisition (series 2, episode 2)... 'Our chief weapon is surprise, surprise and...'
4. The Lumberjack Song (series 1, episode 9)... 'Some of my best friends are lumberjacks and only a few of them are transvestites...'
5. Spam (series 2, episode 2)... 'You mean spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam and spam?'
6. Nudge, Nudge (series 1, episode 3) 'A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat...'
7. Victor and Iris are visited by Arthur Name (Name by name but not by nature) and Mr and Mrs Equator (series 2, episode 2)... 'Meet my wife Deirdre, she smells a bit but she's got a heart of gold...'
8. Self defence against fresh fruit (series 1, episode 4) 'then you eat the banana, thus disarming him...'
9. The Bruces from the Philosophy Department of Woolamaloo (series 2, episode 9)... 'That's going to cause a little confusion...'
10. Banter - RAF slang (series 4, episode 3)... 'Did you understand that?'


Broadcast, 12th June 1998, page 1


UNSEEN PYTHON TO AIR ON BBC

The BBC is understood to be negotiating with the five surviving members of Monty Python for permission to show unseen sketches from the classic comedy series as part of a Python theme night, writes Jason Deans and Steve Clarke.

John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Eric Idle have in principle given their backing to the project, due to air on BBC 2 in autumn 1999, the 30th anniversary of the first series of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

The previously unaired Python sketches were thought too risqué to be shown at the time, according to a BBC source.

But a Python insider said it is not clear exactly what new material was available. He said: 'There were one or two things that didn't make it onto the screen, but who knows where they are. The BBC has never been very good at looking after its archive. If these sketches exist it's quite likely they were wiped long ago.' [*]

John Howard Davies, producer of the first Python Shows, said he is unaware on any 'risqué' material held back. He said: 'Over the years there would have been a lot of material not shown. I can't remember any sketches being too risqué although several might have been too bad for transmission.'

It is not yet clear which BBC department will oversee the night, which is expected to include new documentaries. BBC Production controller of entertainment Paul Jackson, head of documentaries and history Paul Hamann and programme-makers at BBC Bristol are all believed to be competing for the commission.

[* So hang on: if they exist then it's likely they don't exist?
What an infuriating article. And as if to add insult to injury
there is a large cartoon by it of two business-suited blokes
standing by several shelves of tapes labelled "MONTY
PYTHON ARCHIVE" ('ha!' for a bloody start) with one
of them holding up a tape and saying "Here's the
one where they kill the parrot".]


Broadcast, 27 August 1999, page 1


ROOT BRINGS PYTHON BACK

The surviving members of Monty Python will be reunited for the first time since 1983 for a BBC 2 night of programme to mark their 30th anniversary, writes Tim Dams.

With specially written new material, the Python night will form a centre piece on BBC 2's autumn season, to be unveiled on Thursday (26 August) by controller Jane Root.

The season places a strong accent on comedy, alongside factual and drama commissions. As well as a special Fast Show night, three new comedy series are set to debut: Perfect World, with Paul Kaye; Hippies, penned by the writers of Father Ted; and People Like Us, which transfers from BBC Radio 4.

Root commented: 'This is my first full season as controller. Naturally it is the work of many people, but for me it's the first fruits of having been left alone in the lab.'

[Note: despite Jane Root being so proud of her fruits,
none of them made it into a third series. Hippies
barely made it to the end of one.]


The Observer Magazine, 3rd October 1999, pages 45, 47, 49-50:

[The title is missing and the opening blurb starts with:]


Norwegian Blue parrots, the Ministry of Silly Walks, the fish-slapping dance... For 30 years now, Monty Python has helped us look on the bright side of life

Thirty years ago this weekend the Radio Times announced a new series from the BBC's Light Entertainment department. 'Monty Python's Flying Circus is the new late programme on Sunday night,' read the listing for 5th October 1969. 'It's "designed to subdue the violence in us all".' The show originated in the comedy revues that came out of Oxbridge in the late Fifties, early Sixties. John Cleese and Graham Chapman met at Cambridge, where they played in Footlights. Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin were at Oxford, and featured in the university's revues. Afterwards, all of them began working in television and radio, writing and performing in shows such as The Frost Report, Do Not Adjust You Set, The Complete And Utter History Of Britain and At Last The 1948 Show alongside the likes of David Frost, David Jason, Ronnies Corbett and Barker, and future Goodies Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor. Cleese met Terry Gilliam in New York when he performed there in Cambridge Circus, a revue based on Footlights, and when the illustrator moved to London, helped him to get television work.

At first the BBC was unsure about the show: not all of the regions broadcast it initially. But slowly, organically, it took on a life of its own. There were books, records, films and tours as well as the 45 TV programmes. There were court cases in which the Python team fought to stop its work from being edited and diluted. There was even a blasphemy row over its epic Life of Brian.

Now Python is part of the mainstream it kicked against. Sketches such as the dead parrot and the four Yorkshiremen are part of the playground vernacular, recited like nursery rhymes, while their creators present travel shows, appear in ads and direct big-budget Hollywood movies. Here, they reminisce about the series that made their names.

Barry Took (adviser to the BBC Comedy department, who initially presented the idea for a series to the BBC) I said: 'You must do it, you've got to!' My boss at the time, an eccentric man by the name of Michael Mills, said: 'You're just like bloody Barry Von Richthoven and his Flying Circus. You're so bloody arrogant.' So it was known internally as Baron Von Took's Flying Circus and subsequently The Circus. When they wrote their first script, it was called Owl Stretching Time or Whither Canada?, and Mills said, 'It's called The Circus in all the memos, make them call it "Something Flying Circus".'

John Cleese We had a whole lot of fanciful titles: A Horse, A Spoon And A Basin, which I really liked; Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble And Boot; Owl Stretching Time; The Toad Elevating Moment. In fact, the BBC had started calling it The Flying Circus. Then we couldn't decide who. We thought it might be Gwen Dibley's Flying Circus, because she was a name Michael had pulled out of a newspaper, and then somehow we went off it. But somebody came up with Monty Python and we all fell about. I can't explain why; we just thought it was funny that night.

Michael Palin I think something like Dad's Army was more up the BBC's street than Python, because we couldn't tell them what we wanted to do - we didn't know ourselves. They did have a certain amount to go on: John was a big name for them, one of their great new discoveries of the 1960s. I don't think they particularly cared for rest of us: we were journeymen scriptwriters. We'd done most of our shows for independent companies: Do Not Adjust Your Set, The Complete And Utter History, and At Last The 1948 Show were all made for ITV companies, so we hadn't really worked for the BBC excerpt for The Frost Report.

They gave us 13 shows, which was quite a commitment, but then they immediately started to try and strangle us financially by offering pitiful money. And they regarded Gilliam as something quite unnecessary: 'An animator? What's an animator going to do? That's Walt Disney, we can't afford that!' So they showed their confidence in Terry by giving him about £100 a week extra to make these animations, and Terry couldn't afford an assistant - he had to do them all himself.

Eric Idle We had all worked together as writers and actors. So we weren't new to each other at all, but were actually very familiar; what was new was being free to decide what we wanted to do.

Cleese When I was working on The Frost Report, I felt quite frustrated by the format of the sketches, by the tyranny of the punchline, by the fact that the most surreal things would be suggested and all the writers would laugh, and the producer/director would smile and be amused himself, and say: 'Yes, but they won't understand that in Bradford.' So we were straining against conventions.

Terry Jones I was thinking quite hard about the shape of the show, and I saw Spike Milligan's Q5. He did a show [in which] one sketch would start and drift off into another; he made it so clear that we'd been writing in clichés, where we either did three minute sketches with a beginning, middle and end, or we did one joke with a blackout. Terry Gilliam had done an animation for Do Not Adjust Your Set called Beware of Elephants. He'd been a bit diffident about it: 'Well, it's a sort of stream-of-consciousness, one thing leads to another, it's not really about anything.' I suddenly thought: 'That's what we could do: a whole thing that's stream-of-consciousness, and Terry's animations can go in and out and link things, and the whole show would just flow like that.'

I telephoned Mike and Terry G in great excitement, and then we put this to the group and they were grumbling, 'Yeah, all right. Well anyway, let's get on with the sketch.' So the first series was very much a fight between the Oxford contingent, if you like, trying to push this stream-of-consciousness into the thing, and the Cambridge group - they weren't against it, but they weren't particularly interested.

Terry Gilliam John and Graham wrote contained pieces; they tended to be very confrontational - bam, bam, bam! Eric wrote tight things; wordplay was his speciality. Mike and Terry tended to be more conceptual in the way they approached things, and I fitted in more with that group with what I was doing.

The first meetings were in John's flat in Basil Street, Knightsbridge. I just remember sitting up there in John's room a lot and talking and arguing. I think by loosening it up as we did, it freed us up so we could have everybody write what they wanted to do, and then we started filtering it through the group's reaction to the stuff.

Idle We were young, and doing a show we were in charge o for the first time. There were no executives. This freedom allowed us to experiment without having to say what we were trying to do - indeed, we didn't have a clue what we were trying to do except please ourselves. If it made us laugh, it was in. If it didn't, we sold it to other shows.

Gilliam I think it was more like saying 'no' to certain things, and the first thing was 'no' to punchlines, which was a really critical thing. We'd seen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore doing so many great sketches where they traditionally had to end with a zinger. Time and time again, you'd see these really great sketches that would die at the end, so very early on we made a decision to get rid of punchlines.

Jones We'd meet and talk about ideas. And then we'd all go off for two weeks and write individually or in our pairs. Then we'd all meet together, often in my front room or dining room, and we'd read out the stuff. That was the best time of Python, the most exciting time, when you knew you were going to hear new stuff and it was going to make you laugh.

Gilliam You had to jockey for position about when and where a sketch was going to be read out, which time of day; if it came too early, it was going to bomb. And you knew that if Mike and Terry or John and Graham Chapman had something they wanted to do, they wouldn't laugh as much [at the other's material]. I was in a funny position, because I was kind of the apolitical laugh; I was the one guy who had nothing at stake because my stuff was outside theirs.

Idle All comedians seek control. Obviously, some are more manipulative than others. Cleese is the most canny, but everyone had their ways. Mike would charm himself into things. Terry J would simply not listen to anyone else, and Gilliam stayed home and did his own thing, since we soon got tired of listening to him trying to explain in words what he was doing.

The writing was the most glorious fun. We'd compile about six or seven shows at a go, obviously moving things too similar into different shows, and then noticing themes and enlarging on strands of ideas and then finally linking them all together in various mad ways that came out of the group thought. This, as far as I know, was an original way of working which was unique to Python.

Cleese The great joy of the group was that we made each other laugh immoderately . We had dinner together quite recently, all of us except Eric, and we all said afterwards we don't really laugh with anyone else the way we laugh together.

But if you read something out at a meeting and people became hysterical with laughter, whatever was read out next would be anti-climactic. So there was a certain amount of very careful stage-managing going on. While I was reading out material, I was often adjusting the order, because you could sometimes sense the energy of the group start to slump after a couple of hours; and if Mike and Terry just read out something screamingly funny, I would try not to read out something terribly funny after that: I would read out something that was sort of interesting and clever and witty.

Idle Casting always came last in everything, that was the brilliance of it being a writers' show. It was usually fairly easy, like the John parts were obvious - people who shouted or were cruel to defenceless people or animals. Mike and I were usually the people or animals. Mike and I were usually the people who could play each other's parts. Usually people spoke up if they thought they were a bit light in a show; but it was swings and roundabouts, really. Also, we had no girls to sulk or feel left out, and we had no girls to sulk or feel left out, and we would happily grab most of the girl's parts for ourselves. Serve 'em right, too. Get their own bloody shows! How many men are in the Spice Girls?

Palin Everybody loved performing, absolutely. Everybody wanted to go out there and put on the dress or whatever!

Jones I think our budget was £5,000 a show. Everything was planned very rigorously. We'd do the outdoor filming for most of the series before we started shooting the studio stuff. We had to write the entire series before we even started doing anything because we'd be shooting stuff for show 13, show 1 or show 2 while we were in one location, so that while you were at the seaside you could do all the seaside bits.

Palin I think there was always a conscious desire to do something which was ahead of or tested the audience's taste, or tested the limits of what we could and could not say. I think it's probably strongest in John and Graham's writing, whereas Terry and I enjoyed surprise more than shock. For us, it was more putting together odd and surreal images in a way which would not offend, but really jolt, surprise and amaze.

John and Graham took some pleasure in writing something which really shocked an audience. I think this came from within, but John never seemed to be totally happy or centred - there was always something which John was having to cope with. And that desire to shock, I think, came from the way Graham was, too. Graham was a genuine outsider, a very strait-laced man who was homosexual and an alcoholic at that time and therefore found himself constantly in conflict with people, and so he would fight back.

David Sherlock (Chapman's long-time companion) Cleese, as he's got older, has become more conservative, but when they first started out, Python was really quite leftwing; it was considered by some to be Commie and subversive.

Idle Always, we tried to épater les bourgeois. Once when filming, a British middle-class lady come up and said, 'Oh, Monty Python; I absolutely hate you lot.' And we felt quite proud and happy. Nowadays, I miss people who hate us; we have, sadly, become nice, safe and acceptable now, which shows how clever an Establishment really is, opening up to make room in itself.

Carol Cleveland (actress who became the ensemble's token woman) We didn't actually do a lot of rehearsal. If anything, it was under-rehearsed to keep it fresh and fun. Lots of people say to me, 'How much of that was improvised?' Because it came over so fresh, they felt a lot of it was being improvised. And I say, 'Well, none of it. It was all scripted, everything.'

Not a lot went on in the first few days of rehearsal; because they had written it themselves, they knew exactly what they wanted, so they knew just what was going to happen. Once they knew exactly what they were doing, in order to keep it fresh, we'd stop rehearsing and the rest of the time was mucking about. We'd do something like play football. All of the furniture would be moved aside, and we'd set up a couple of goals at each end and we'd have a football match. I was always a goalie!

When we were in the BBC Centre rehearsal rooms, all the doors had little peek-through windows, and it was wonderful. You'd see people come back and do a double take, and not know what to make of it. They thought we were rehearsing a football sketch that went on day after day.

Gilliam The BBC was constantly uncomfortable with us. It didn't know quite what we were, and I think it was slightly embarrassed by it. Yet Monty Python was too successful, it was making all this noise out there. When the BBC took us off after the forth show [of the first series], we were off for a couple of weeks, I think there was a serious attempt to ditch the programme at that point. But there was too much noise being made by us. In the beginning, they would put us out at all these different times, and change it. But somehow the word got out and they kept us on.

Cleese I had a friend who was trying to watch the series, and he sat down in his hotel room in Newcastle and switched on and there was this hysterical start to Monty Python about this guy wandering around being terribly boring about all the ancient monuments around Newscastle. He watched it, falling about, and said: "It's a real nerve to do this, it's really terrific and what a great start to the show." And about 20 minutes in, he realised it was the regional off-time.

Jones Huw Weldon, who was in control of BBC1, and David Attenborough, who was in control of BBC2 in the late 1960s, were both very enlightened men. I remember them saying that the BBC was very much an anarchic organisation in a way, in that there was very little bureaucracy, very little personnel management. This tiny office was the personnel management, which I now think is a whole building! In those days, the producers decided what was going to go on the air and they took responsibility for it. If somebody objected to something that had gone out, then the producer would be asked to account for himself. But it was all after the fact; there was no censorship at all.

Things changed. We started seeing it changing in Python. With the first and second series, nobody ever looked at the shows or anything until they went out. In the last episode, we had the 'Undertaker Sketch', which was a gross breach of good taste! And then with the next series, they wanted to look at the shows before they went out.

That was when we got the list of things we had to take out. One of them was the 'Summarised Marcel Proust Competition', somebody saying his hobbies were 'strangling animals, golf, and masturbating'. And we had to cut out 'masturbating'! Very bizarre. I remember going to Duncan Wood - he was then head of comedy - and I said, 'Duncan, what's wrong with masturbating? I masturbate, you masturbate, don't you, Duncan?' Anyways, it had to come out.

Cleese I was nearly always - while they would say 'conservative', I would say 'realistic' - about what you put on the BBC. I thought the BBC was terrific. I thought the amount it messed about with censorship was absolutely minimal, but the others would probably tell you differently - particularly Terry Gilliam, who really does have a problem with authority of any kind. The number of times the BBC insisted on an edit was very small, and most of those occasions I agreed with.

Jones The BBC was changing. It was more sensitive to political pressure. But it felt like special attention was being paid to us because we were 'naughty boys'. Certainly, by the forth series, they wanted to read the scripts before we'd actually made them.

Gilliam The BBC censored something on repeats, the 'Black Spot' thing. [In an animated section in the second series, a handsome young prince discovers a spot on his face. 'Foolishly he ignored it,' says a female narrator, 'and three years later he died of cancer.' In later broadcasts, the word 'cancer' was replaced with 'gangrene', spoken by a male.] It's extraordinary that the word 'cancer' was so frightening to them that they had to cut the word out.

Cleese I think as the series began to get acknowledged as being very good and funny and original, what happened was that some of the huddling together for warmth became unnecessary when the sun came out. With pop groups, it's often when they become very successful that people begin to pull outwards, to pull against each other more. And I would say that happened with us. On the first series, we got on very, very well. And we were still getting on very well at the beginning of the second series. By the time we got to the third series, it really wasn't very much fun - I thought we were very derivative.

[Cleese didn't work on the fourth, shorter series]

Gilliam We were doing television stuff, we were doing records, books, stage shows, and we were able to teach ourselves all these jobs. And it was exciting because we didn't know where it was all leading, it was just god fun. We'd been doing Python for so long before we really took off. When I met the guys who do South Park in Aspen a year ago, it was a couple of pieces of paper, and now they've got 60 animators working with them. That's what happens in the States; when suddenly something catches on, it balloons so out of control I think you burn out, you get destroyed. You may become more famous and richer, but something dies.

With Python, it was never like that, because we were doing 13 shows at a time. There was never a sense of, 'Wow, it's happening, let's go and capitalise on this!' We just stayed together, doing the stuff and not churning it out too fast, not being too greedy, not wanting to rush off and make a fortune. I think that's one of the great strengths of the group - that we did that for so long.

To order a copy of 'Monty Python Speaks!' (rrp £12.99) at the special discount price of £9.99, plus 99p p&p, freephone 0500 600102, or send a cheque, payable to The Observer CultureShop, to 250 Western Avenue, London W3 6EE


BIRTHDAY TRIBUTES
Current comedy stars pay homage to Python

Stewart Lee
If Monty Python was made in the focus-group-driven climate of TV today, it would never get beyond the pilot, even on Channel 4. Ninety per cent of the sketches are rubbish, but the best ones are brilliant and will survive for ever. I've never laughed so much as I did the first time I saw 'Confuse A Cat'. There can't be anyone of my generation who wasn't inspired to comedy by Python. That said, 30 years later, there are still people writing sketches where a man goes into an office, establishes an untenable premise and then pursues it to an illogical conclusion. If we learn anything from Python, it's not to do what is expected.

"Hey, Mike - you remember this piece? We were reading it on a bus. You got as far as 'Ninety per cent of the sketches are rubbish' before physically tearing the photo of Stewart Lee's face out of the magazine, crumpling it up and throwing it out of the window. Great days."

"Yup. Thing is, he makes a fair enough point (one that Richard Herring makes too) that, if you're influenced by Python then what you should be doing is something completely different to Python - ie, you should be inspired by the thrill of originality itself. But then this doesn't take into account the number of brilliant writers (Douglas Adams, Marshall and Renwick, the Absolutely team) who not only did this but also understood why Python specifically was great, why the actual tone worked. Lee's insistence on 'only 10% of it was any good' suggests he himself never understood this, the fact that each show should be seen as a 30-minute canvas. Get the cocky dismissal of Python sketch-structure too."




Arabella Weir
I loved all the Michael Palin sketches. I thought 'I'm A Lumberjack' was particularly funny. The whole team singing a song about being macho, working all day cutting down trees, being a real man. In the second verse, a single voice sang: 'I'm a lumberjack... I wear a bra and panties... I dress in women's clothes and hang around the bar...' More joined in until by then end of the song, everyone was singing about being transvestite. Everybody I went to school with sang it. Python didn't inspire my own comedy - that came much more naturally. But it taught me a lesson about British humour - that a man in a dress is considered funny. Python felt really naughty and funny. It wasn't predictable.

"Jesus wept!"

"Textbook example of how Python isn't funny at all when you don't remember it properly and quote it really badly. And, of course, when you point this out, you get called a sad fanboy geek and all the rest of it. But the precise way it's written is crucial to why it works. The idea of a lumberjack wearing women's clothes isn't particularly funny in itself, but the detail/scanning in the lyrics, however, are very funny indeed."


David Baddiel
There are thousands of favourite moments, possibly my very favourite is 'The Art Programme', in which Eric Idle or possibly Graham Chapman tries not to talk about the nude in his bed, and then he says: 'Bum. Oh, what a giveaway!' Another one is Michael Palin saying: 'It's a bit runnier than you'll like it' about the Camembert in the 'Cheese Shop Sketch'.

"Baddiel is another one of the '90% was rubbish' brigade. As Elvis Costello sang, 'Sometimes I wish I could STOP you from talking / When I hear the silly things that you say...'"

"At least 10% of the cheese was good"


Dave Gorman
('Mrs Merton' writer and stand-up comic) My favourite moment is the scene from 'Life Of Brian' where the crowd has gathered outside Brian's house. Brian: 'We're all individuals.' Crowd: 'We're all individuals.' A lone voice in the crowd: 'I'm not.' They are two very funny jokes, and how often do you get to see a joke performed by a cast of thousands? I'd like to think that the more insane breed of Python fan will one day realise that we are all individuals and perhaps stop reciting sketches word for word.

"Yes, we all agree - especially if it means we get to be on television with you, Dave" - a load of people called Dave Gorman, yesterday

"Fuck's sake. Why don't people ever realise that it's not the obsessive fans who are the problem - it's the lightweights. They're the ones who bring everyone down - and God knows why, since they have no interest in Python either way. Also, has anyone ever actually heard anyone reciting a Python sketch in a pub, word for word? No, it never happens. Not since about 1972 anyway, and they were all doing 'Every one a Maserati'. I mean, you might get the odd line, a quick 'Ni!' under the table, but never a full rendition. And certainly nothing from the TV series. Not any more."

"Dave's okay. He just needs to update his clichés a bit that's all. And to stop identifying large chunks of society as mere 'proles' to pour scorn over in that oh-so-media way. And to lose the beard. And to stop making television shows. And to go away. I'm sure he'll manage it soon."

Eddie Izzard
When I think of Monty Python, I always think...

'AWWWWW...SHUT UP' - John Cleese, first episode
...of the 'The Holy Grail' scene when Michael Palin and Terry Jones are looking out the window. One of them says: 'One day, all of this will be yours', and the other says: 'What, the curtains?' Python is probably my biggest comic inspiration.

"Wow! I wonder what his second biggest comic inspiration is. Oh, no I don't - you know why? because I'm FAST ASLEEP."



Entertainment Weekly, no. 510, Winter 1999, page 131

[Part of "The 100 Greatest Entertainers, 1950-2000"
special issue, before Bob Newhart and after The X-Files]


77: MONTY PYTHON

Dead parrots. Silly walks. The Spanish Inquisition. Something completely different indeed.

Loaded up with a quintet of Oxbridge wits and one nomadic Yank animator, disdaining any intention of adhering to formulas or convention, and prepared to drop the jaws of their frosty Brit viewers, the comedic speed-blender known as Monty Python began its zany spin 30 years ago on the BBC. The free-form mixture that poured forth - equal parts satire, parody, random violence, naked absurdity, animal abuse, and ribald buffoonery - proved not just piquant but addictive as well, on televisions British and American. The group's films (especially Life of Brian and Holy Grail) adhered somewhat more strictly to something resembling narrative, but their joys, too, came in the complete unpredictability of their comic expression - a brand of highbrow silliness later adopted by direct descendant SNL. "Sometimes I cannot figure out why we thought something might ever have been funny," says John Cleese, 60, of the Pythons' often inscrutable charm. "And yet, as it happens, I'm laughing at it."

- WL (Will Lee)


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