Rewatching Monty Python's Flying Circus

[Jockice]

Or:  I'll lend you a Goon Show CD and my video recording of An Evening with Billy Connolly, you take them both and neither give them back nor lend me anything in return.

In fact a bit later on you tell me you gave the Goon Show CD to your dad as a birthday present.


Cunt.

Ah yes. Those were the days.  Another anecdote I've undoubtedly told on here about my mate at school who was a notorious borrower but not giver back yet would never lend out his own stuff. However on a visit to his house once I managed to convince him to lend me an album (The Gang Of Four's Solid Gold) on the proviso I'd record it straight away. I got home, put it on a table and went off and did something else. An hour or so later the door went. I answered it and who should be there but ****, asking if I'd recorded the album yet and could he have it back. Blimey, some people are just so possessive about their possessions.

He isn't the bloke I got the Monty Python LP from though, although I much later lent him a load of CDs it took years to get back. But that's another story. I can't remember the full details of this particular swap deal but I do remember one of the other LPs I got out of it was an autographed debut Psychedelic Furs album that he'd won in a contest, not because I was a huge fan (they were okay though) but because a girl I fancied at school was and I thought it might impress her. It didn't.

New page, it's.

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

Have you ever considered writing your memoirs, Jockey ?

[Jockice]

Have you ever considered writing your memoirs, Jockey ?

Apart from the title (mentioned in the Handsome thread today) not really. I think someone should write a book called that though.

[Revelator]

Anyone own the Contractual Obligation album?

I do! A pretty memorable album--it's got "Sit on My Face," "Henry Kissinger," "Medical Love Song" ("Inflammation of the foreskin reminds me of your smile"), "I Bet You They Won't Play This Song on the Radio," the all-time-best version of "Bookshop" (Cleese's demented cackling is a wonder to behold), "Rock Notes," "Decomposing Composers," and some of Terry Jones's most sadistic audio experiments ("Here comes ANOTHER ONE!!!!").

As for "I Like Chinese," Idle evidently felt the same way you did, since at the O2 shows he replaced "They only come up to your knees" with "They copy everything they sees."

[Jockice]

I do! A pretty memorable album--it's got "Sit on My Face," "Henry Kissinger," "Medical Love Song" ("Inflammation of the foreskin reminds me of your smile"), "I Bet You They Won't Play This Song on the Radio," the all-time-best version of "Bookshop" (Cleese's demented cackling is a wonder to behold), "Rock Notes," "Decomposing Composers," and some of Terry Jones's most sadistic audio experiments ("Here comes ANOTHER ONE!!!!").

As for "I Like Chinese," Idle evidently felt the same way you did, since at the O2 shows he replaced "They only come up to your knees" with "They copy everything they sees."

Sit On My Face indeed. I remember hearing that and thinking: "Yuk. Why on earth would you want to sit on anybody's face?" I was pretty young in those days...

[kalowski]

I've just reminded myself of "How to be a Great Actor"

Now is your big chance, just follow the script as we present (jaring music) 'A Taste of Evil' starring...

2nd Announcer: (whispers) insert your name here

1st Announcer: as Montague... (jaring music)

2nd Announcer: A Police Station in Rectan

Spencer: Morning, super.

Donaldson: Morning, wonderful.

Spencer: Nasty business up at the Towers, sir.

Donaldson: Oh yes, what's happened?

Spencer: Montague's shot himself.

Donaldson: Dead?

Spencer: 'Fraid so sir, blood everywhere.

1st Announcer : We apologize for an error in this 'Be a Great Actor' in your own living room section of the record. Owing to an error in the selection of the play the character of Montague does not appear to speak throughout the production. So let's go straight on to number 2 in your scripts

[Phoenix Lazarus]

Re: Cheese Shop, I personally far prefer the TV use of, "I don't care how excrementally runny it is," as opposed to the album's, "I don't care how fucking runny it is," as I find the former far more lyrical, grim and evocative of just how unpleasantly runny Cleese is willing to accept his Camembert by this point.

I find the bit where Cleese shouts 'Shut that bloody bazuki up!" funnier on the album, because, up till then, you assume it's played by a radio, not an actual musician in the shop.

[the science eel]

stolen by Mark E Smith a few years later, of course

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

The Man Who Cheddar Demanded.

[Chriddof]

"Decomposing Composers,"

That has to be one of the eeriest things Python ever did. Right from the get go it's funny but not quite right - it's more unsettling than laugh provoking, despite some nice lines. And at the very end the humour suddenly drains out of it and you're left with this genuine chill.

[Autopsy Turvey]

1) I thought the police station was in Wrexham, though it sounds very like Rectum.

2) I got the chance to say "Excuse me, I've got a bit of a dirty fork, would you mind replacing it for me?" recently in an airport steakhouse. The waiter took it well.

3) I never quite got the "I'm twenty minutes late myself" joke, I figured it was just funny that they were both so late for a date, but someone online once suggested it had something to do with menstruation, which threw me even further. Can't be, can it?

[DrGreggles]

" Mr. Neutron " and " Michael Ellis ". Now, there's some proper top-notch episode- long Python for yer.

Best episode ever?

[Jockice]

Best episode ever?

I'd say Mr Pither's Cycling Tour is the best. Although Michael Ellis does mention my mum.

[Replies From View]

Favourite moment of Michael Ellis for me is the smashed televisions.

[Revelator]

Idle has been doing interviews to promote his autobiography--here's one from the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/books/eric-idle-always-look-bright-side-life-monty-python-spamalot.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbooks

And one from another paper:
https://www.dailyrepublic.com/all-dr-news/solano-news/solano-county-entertainment/eric-idle-ready-to-chat-about-his-sortabiography/

[Delete Delete Delete]

A quick little heads up that the episode Michael Ellis is tonights Python episode on (spam). The complete stream starts at 6pm but Python will be on after 8:30.

[the science eel]

Best episode ever?

That'd be Mr. Neutron

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

Very, very depressing to read about Terry Jones' degenerative state in those Idle interviews : (

[Revelator]

The latest edition of The Times Literary Supplement includes a review by David Quantick of Idle's sortabiography and Cleese's Professor at Large:

The life of Python: Remembering comedy that was savage, bludgeoning and unsettling

by David Quantick

In Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Eric Idle mentions that, in 2017, the Victoria & Albert Museum asked the members of Monty Python for permission to stage a retrospective of their work. The Pythons turned them down, for three reasons. First was money (there was none); second was that it would lead to their deaths, as with the other recipients of this honour (David Bowie, Alexander McQueen, "Pink Floyd: almost dead"); and the third was the title of the exhibition: "From Dalí to Dead Parrots". "Pretentious nonsense", writes Idle. "We're nothing to do with Dali or Duchamp. For me Python has always been about comedy." (He is not the only Python to decry pretentiousness: once, in a writer's meeting with John Cleese, I made the mistake of ordering a fruit infusion and was rewarded by Cleese screeching, "Ohwwwah! Elderflaaahwaaah tea!" in full-on Anne Elk mode. It was both humiliating and wonderful.)

In keeping with this, Idle's "Sortabiography", as he calls it, is far from pretentious. It is perky, witty and charming, even if he is fond, of not so much dropping names as carpet-bombing them – at times it seems that there is no page which does not mention his friendship with George Harrison or the fact that he wrote "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life". (At one point, perhaps to save time, he simply lists the attenders of a dinner party: Robin Williams, Barbara Hershey, Gary and Michelle Lineker, Charles and Kay Saatchi, and Lin and Peter Cook.) He is also fond of quoting his own jokes (but then, they are very funny). Idle's story – losing his father at three years of age, a horrendous boarding-school childhood – may partly explain why he, in contrast to Python's writing partnerships of Cleese and Graham Chapman, and Michael Palin and Terry Jones, preferred to write and perform his own monologues. For this reason, much of his best work – the oleaginous despair of the Nudge Nudge man, the enraged ranter of the Watney's Red Barrel routine, the crucified optimist of The Life of Brian – is much more akin to character-based stand-up than to traditional sketch comedy.

Professor at Large is an entertaining collection of transcripts and interviews from John Cleese's lectures at Cornell University, where he was a visiting professor from 1998 to 2006. Cleese ranges across a wide range of topics, from screen-writing to the human face with a selection of his favourite experts, from the great screenwriter the late William Goldman to Beta Mannix, Cornell's Professor of Management (two people whose careers reflect Cleese's interest in both comedy and business). At its best – as in a conversation with Goldman – it is informative and engrossing with expert insights; at its worst, when Cleese simply recounts the results of scientific experiments he has read about – like the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov's work with still photographs or the Milgram experiments (in which participants electrocuted subjects to dangerously high levels following the instructions of an authority figure) – it is merely anecdotal. But it does give you a clear idea of Cleese's intelligence, curiosity and interests (psychology, comedy and his mother's partly stifling influence on his upbringing – "My mother's maiden name, incidentally, was Muriel Cross", he tells his audience. "Well, we all have one to bear").

The Pythons have been described as the Beatles of comedy but, with their bludgeoning approach and 1970s retooling of 60s styles, it would be more accurate to say that they were the Led Zeppelin of comedy; and, as with Zeppelin, Monty Python's Flying Circus was far more a product of its time than its lasting success would suggest. They came together as a kind of amalgamation of various writing teams – most notably London Weekend's At Last the 1948 Show and the BBC children's show Do Not Adjust Your Set. Even in Python's early days, Cleese and Idle were still selling sketches to The Two Ronnies (Idle's "Nudge Nudge" sketch was itself written for, and rejected by, Ronnie Barker).

Moreover, the show was clearly influenced by contemporary "surrealist" comedians, from Spike Milligan to the playwright N. F. Simpson. Simpson's work at the Royal Court brought an intelligent insanity to bear on their thinking, while Milligan pre-empted Python's disdain for conventional formats (when Milligan's television series Q dispensed with punchlines – the bane of sketch comedy – Jones telephoned Palin in some distress to tell him, "He's done it") and so, when joined by Terry Gilliam, they readily adapted his anarchic animation style to their sketches, creating a show that flowed in seemingly random streams of consciousness. Python made comedy ambitious and led the way by example (so much so that its immediate British television successor, the sketch show Not the Nine O'Clock News, felt like a massive step backwards into convention and the hell that is "pull back to reveal").

But what set them apart from their contemporaries was that they were also very, very angry. The violence in everything from a parody of Salad Days – as if remade by the ultra-violent director Sam Peckinpah as a deliberately deranged and blood-soaked orgy of death – to The Holy Grail's Black Knight, whose incessant loss of limbs in battle fails to deter him from combat, or the darkness in a funeral director sketch (in which Cleese suggests to a client that they could eat his deceased mother), to the rage that's kept in check during The Life of Brian but spurts everywhere in the immensely bleak Meaning of Life: these were all new, in style and content more redolent of The Young Ones than The Frost Report, and still have the power to make us uncomfortable because they speak to deeper, darker places in us than only our funny bones. Nor were the Pythons afraid of giving offence. As Idle tells it, having agreed to write sketches for German television, they were invited to visit Bavaria for a ten-day writing trip. On landing, for reasons that remain obscure, they were taken to visit the Dachau concentration camp. To make matters worse, when they finally arrived, they were told they could not come in as the camp was closing, causing Chapman to suggest loudly, "Tell them we're Jewish".

The significance of their influence on comedy is not that they invented the techniques they used – after all, comedy had been breaking the fourth wall for millennia, and twentieth-century American comedy in particular had made it into a fine art thanks to figures including the Warner Brothers animators Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, and Olsen and Johnson, the comic geniuses behind the musical Hellzapoppin' – but that they popularized them, and with great success. This was especially the case in the US. From the moment the Pythons won their court case against ABC which allowed their shows to be transmitted uncut on American television (ABC had cut ninety minutes of television down to twenty-two, removing "homosexual references", a mention of "colonic irrigation", offensive terms such as "Good Lord", "damns" and, weirdest of all, an "exploding woman"), the restored Flying Circus was like nothing America had seen. Even Mel Brooks, the great anarchist, was moved to give Blazing Saddles a fourth wall-breaking finale as a nod to the ending of The Holy Grail. The group then toured America with shows in huge arenas such as the Hollywood Bowl, making them one of the first acts to perform stadium comedy. However, their most visible legacy is that Lorne Michaels created Saturday Night Live, that seemingly endless American institution, as an attempt to make his own version of Monty Python. It was Michaels, too, who put up the money for Idle's All You Need Is Cash (1978), one of the first – and best – examples of the "mockumentary": with music by Neil Innes and greatly influenced by Tony Palmer's easily imitable documentaries on popular music, the film told the history of the satirically Beatles-like band, The Rutles, and was studded with rock and comedy stars, even featuring a cameo appearance by George Harrison.

As happens with gods grown old, the surviving Pythons are still controversial. Once they were attacked for immorality and blasphemy by social activists and journalists such as Mary Whitehouse and Malcolm Muggeridge, and their material still has bite, but they do not chime with current ideas about diversity. The Controller of Television Comedy Commissioning for the BBC, Shane Allen, reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of Flying Circus, approaching next year, commented that "If you are going to assemble a team now it's not going to be six Oxbridge white blokes". Cleese wrote on Twitter, "We were remarkably diverse FOR OUR TIME . . . . We had three grammar-school boys, one a poof, and Gilliam, though not actually black, was a Yank", and Terry Gilliam went the extra mile to claim, "I tell the world now I'm a black lesbian . . . . My name is Loretta and I'm a black lesbian in transition". The Pythons continue to generate headlines, just as the reruns of the show generate new fans, because at the heart of their comedy there is something that is not comfortable or comforting, but savage and unsettling.

[Bennett Brauer]

Even Mel Brooks, the great anarchist, was moved to give Blazing Saddles a fourth wall-breaking finale as a nod to the ending of The Holy Grail.

*scratches head*  Am I missing a joke here?

[McChesney Duntz]

There are so many basic factual errors in that piece beyond just that one. You'd think Quantick would know a bit better than that.

[the science eel]

you would?

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

*scratches head*  Am I missing a joke here?

Yeah, that was my immediate thought. Top Small Man Big Horse lookalike David Quantick should be fully aware that Blazing Saddles was made a good few years before Holy Grail.

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

you would?

In his younger days, maybe, when he had a bit more hair. He wasn't a bad looking feller.

[Andy147]

Yeah, that was my immediate thought. Top Small Man Big Horse lookalike David Quantick should be fully aware that Blazing Saddles was made a good few years before Holy Grail.

Not that it makes any difference, but it was only one year before (1974/1975).

Isn't there a bit in Michael Palin's diaries where he meets Mel Brooks, and Brooks tells him he "forgives" Monty Python for copying all his stuff (and Palin basically decides that Brooks is an idiot)?

[choie]

Ummm oh gosh I'm sorry for not returning to this thread and leaving you all hanging with what I am sure was breathless anticipation for my judgment on my two least-favorite sketches, which (to refresh memory) included 1) well-regarded sketch that I found disgusting and 2) another well-regarded sketch I found vaguely disturbing and "off."

The first sketch is the "Worst Family in England" bit from the final episode. Terry Gilliam and his bloody BEANS and the flatulence oh ha ha yes beans make one gassy, and Anoweet because constipation is also hilarious and just on and on. I know that since the whole premise of the family being disgusting is the raison d'etre of the sketch, my complaining about it is silly. But there you go.

(Extra points for the mention of Mr. Creosote. I wasn't thinking of film sketches, but yes, that's one I can't rewatch. I guess I'm squeamish about stuff that comes out of bodies. Will talk to my shrink about it next week.)

The second "unsettling" sketch is indeed The Restaurant Sketch (not the dirty fork version, the one from the "Undertaker" episode). The audience seems similarly nonplussed about the whole thing given the paucity of laughter. John's apologetic but flat husband, Eric's awful wife monologue (though one good line is "I'm going to have a baby in a few years," I'll give it that), Terry Jones's dish-of-the-day (Douglas Adams cribbed that bit, didn't he), the sheer bleakness of it all... Even Michael Palin's maitre'd couldn't save it, despite the amusing dig at smug vegetarians. It was the cap of a largely unpleasant episode, really.

There, I'm sure you all feel SO much better now that I've revealed my opinions. So, well-guessed, those who guessed well!

For the record, unpopular sketches I do like, or other wrong opinions I hold, are:

- Blancmange/Science Fiction Sketch. If nothing came out of it than Terry Jones's deliciously weighted reading of "Angus Podgorny, what do ye mean?!" (which curiously has been reused a lot in my family), it would've sufficed. But then there's the abovementioned oh-so-sympathetic DI talking to poor weepy Podgorny ("what happened to your wife was so terribly, terribly funny--tragic!") only to end up slapping the mourning Scot for failing to address him correctly. Also Idle on the other side of the police inquiry while trying to explain the alien creature on the tennis court while (constable?) Cleese can't grasp why there were five people playing "doubles" when the blancmange was playing itself. Also I love a good call-back twist in any mystery, and the Brainsamples at the end pleased the Agatha Christie lover in me.

- Mr. Neutron. Chapman, for all the guff he got in the later series for his alcoholism and not being "with it," was just lovely here. Gave his all to this performance as the "most dangerous man on Earth, honestly!" Also love Jones as the enamored Mrs. S.C.U.M. (Why the acronym? How did they come up with that?! I don't know the answer to either but I love it.)

- Agree that "excrementally runny" is funnier than "fucking funny." Not that I have a problem with curses well done (look at the guy in my avatar) but Cleese's character seems far more likely to use the more overblown vocabulary, and rather than the admittedly shocking turn from his "curtailed my Walpoling activities, sallied forth, and infiltrated your place of purveyance to negotiate the vending of some cheesy comestibles" phrasing, I find the humor in the deliciousness of the word itself--if one may use "deliciousness" when talking about shit.

Okay I've typed enough.  Sorry again to have missed the follow-ups a couple of months ago... I don't know how I did, I usually check CAB at least once a week, usually more.

[the]

Also love Jones as the enamored Mrs. S.C.U.M. (Why the acronym? How did they come up with that?! I don't know the answer to either but I love it.)

I (probably wrongly) assumed it was a reference to the SCUM Manifesto / acronym shenanigans.

If so, the unlikely association between the character and that concept is a gag in itself.

[Queneau]

Python made comedy ambitious and led the way by example (so much so that its immediate British television successor, the sketch show Not the Nine O'Clock News, felt like a massive step backwards into convention and the hell that is "pull back to reveal").

I'm just wondering how Not the Nine O'Clock News can be considered an "immediate" successor when it came some 5 years later. I think you could go further and say that it is not a successor at all if you consider the shows are completely different in terms of content, style and probably target audience.

[EOLAN]

Another shout out for the Angus Podgorny/Blanmange/tennis sketch. Enjoyed that a lot including all the points choie pointed out. I was genuinely disappointed when Andy Murray ended up becoming quite good at that tennis as it ruined the central tenet of the sketch. And I just feel there is a great rhythym and pace to the section of everyone being converted into Scotsmen.
And finally, love the outdoor street scenes in Python; giving a historical artefact of England at the time and the empty streets and estates as England gets deserted has a very beautiful, nostalgic  and melancholic tinge to it.

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

I'm just wondering how Not the Nine O'Clock News can be considered an "immediate" successor when it came some 5 years later. I think you could go further and say that it is not a successor at all if you consider the shows are completely different in terms of content, style and probably target audience.

I agree, but they did that thing with false opening titles, quite similar to Python. Also yer man top James Woods lookalike Chris Langham did one or two sketches that could be said to be a little bit Python-like (DIY man who dismembers himself, later ripped off to far less funnier effect by Kenny Everett ).