the peculiar ambience of the Python TV series

[ajsmith]

This is hard to exactly explain, but does anyone else enjoy the experience of watching the world as it is in the 1969-74 Python TV show? I don't so much mean the satirical/absurd writing, but I mean, most specifically, the ambience of the outside filmed shots. It's an ambience also shared by the location film in Season 7 Dr Who, those film bits left over from Braoden Your Mind, Linda Thorson episodes of The Avengers: all turn of the 60s/70s decade early colour productions. Something to do with the quality of the the film of the time, of the frequent shots of deserted suburban, rural and London locations.
The experience of watching Python's take on the world is uniquely heightened and distinguished by the peculiar shared reality of these types of location shots, combined with bright early 70s studio and the domain of Gilliams animations. And Now For Something Completely Different also contains this element. Holy Grail retains a rural variation on same, but all Python product after that point is lacking in this atmosphere. I realise that this atmosphere is almost entirely an unitentional byproduct of the context in which the TV series was made, but I'm just trying to acknowledge the importance of this atmosphere to some viewers of Python.

[Talulah, really!]

This is hard to exactly explain, but does anyone else enjoy the experience of watching the world as it is in the 1969-74 Python TV show?

Yes and you are right about Doctor Who having it as well, "The Sweeney" also springs to mind.  It's there in some 70s UK films as well, perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me could confirm if it was a property peculiar to Eastman film stock of the time, a sort of more muted tone than the "brighter" normal of cinema movies (though it might just be 16mm v 70mm) I don't know enough about the subject.

Another thought I once had was that Monty Python  from one perspective  would be thought of as being part of the Sixties counter cultural movement, alternative, anti-establishment, revolutionary, etc yet there is very little in there that actually reflects the iconography or attitudes of those times. They aren't mired in "the Sixties/seventies" though obviously originating from that era. It's like James Bond films from the sixties haven't dated as much as something like "Our man Flint" which is just laughable now in a way probably not intended (it looks like a proto Austen Powers) or The man from UNCLE. I wonder what elements mark something from being "of a time" as opposed to "Of its time" and thus still relevant against being almost unintelligible.

[gatchamandave]

I think I know what you mean. They have become historical documents now, recording ways of dress, of behaviour that we just don't see - for better or for worse - nowadays. Even things we don't think we notice conciously - the way High Streets in those days had a multipilcity of different shops with different frontages selling things you wouldn't expect to see on a High Street - nails, confectionary, prams and the like, or the entirely different shape of cars. The streets are deserted because no-one went about the place at 8 am on a Sunday morning, and even shooting in a public thoroughfare people would avoid the cameras rather than try to get their face on the box.

I think it is one of the marvels that I find watching this stuff now, that it records for me a past that is as far away now as the flapper era was then.

Talulah mentions that he/she doesn't get that from The Man Fron Uncle - and neither do I. But I suspect that's because American series in the 60s were shot on the backlots that they'd taken over from failed or failing big studios.

[Talulah, really!]

Good post, Gatchamandave.

It clarifies what I think is poignant about this ambience for me, it is the twilight of the post war austerity generation and their behaviours and values, it is a world that is soon to disappear completely, turned over by the Thatcher era and the end of the post war political consensus. The arrival of the microchip revolution and the arrival of 24/7 mass media.
It's a world of council housing, workers streaming out of factories when the whistle blows, fish and chips is still the national dish, holidays in Butlins, most people don't own a car, men wear flat caps, women hair nets and house coats. It is a world where shops shut on Sunday, there's half-day closing and the TV goes off at 11pm to the sounds of God Save the Queen. Cliches of course but it looks like that.

Talulah mentions that he/she doesn't get that from The Man Fron Uncle - and neither do I. But I suspect that's because American series in the 60s were shot on the backlots that they'd taken over from failed or failing big studios.

That's true but the point I was hoping to make is that, and this is true of Python I feel, The Man From Uncle is full of pop cultural references and language of the time that dates it in an almost comical way to a contemporary viewer where as the Sixties Bond films aren't. For instance, in The Man from Uncle there is frequently a scene in a nightclub where mini-skirted dollybirds gyrate to a band who usually look like but aren't quite the Yardbirds and people say things like "Groovy".

In contrast the Bond films do a thorough job of excising their contemporary reality to the extent that the line in Goldfinger where Bond mentions the Beatles is oddly in-congruent, it is a rare acknowledgment that the outside world actually exists (as well as highlighting just how enormous the whole Beatles phenomena was, if even James Bond has heard of them).

Mentioning The Beatles* allows another compare and contrast example to illustrate what is meant here. Two British films both released in 1965, Help! and The Ipcress File. The first is almost a compendium of popular cultural cliches about the swinging sixties whilst the second despite starring sixties icon Michael Caine and being set in SWINGING LONDON manages to make it look bleaker than Antarctica.

One of the things that makes Python appear from its time, rather than of its time, is it's very lack of these immediate but quickly dating pop cultural references. Thus Python despite being from the early 1970s isn't awash with spacehoppers, Glam Rock, strikes, Heath/Wilson, its points of reference frequently being longer lasting ones from "highbrow" culture. Of course over the range of sketches/series it touched on people of the time "Whicker Island" for instance, it isn't quite tied down and tethered to its time as many other programmes where, Rutland Weekend Television appears far more dated, to my eyes anyway, for example.

There is, finally, also the issue of Python, the Bond films and the music of the Beatles being part of the continuous present, in that they have never gone away, never buried by fashion for digging up and rediscovery later. The form part of the common cultural life of the country and I wonder if this has an effect on them seeming less dated in the sense that some cultural artifacts do. "Their Satanic Majesties Request" seems to belong to its era in a way that "Sgt Pepper's..." transcends yet a year or two later the Rolling Stones were creating works that stand as summations of the situations of their time but also stand separate from them as Sgt Pepper does, I feel.


*_{Mentioning the Beatles: How the Fab Four permemate popular culture vol 1. 1962 -1964 by Helana Handcart, Really Press 1985}

[Entropy Balsmalch]

Going ultra geeky here, but isn't it actually more of a by-product of the telecine process?

The grimness of the film is almost entirely down to the refilming of it onto video for television. If you were to watch the film inserts on their own with a projector, they would be much brighter and clearer.

[An tSaoi]

I hate when they go outside in old sitcoms or sketch shows, because the outside film quality is always awful. So no, I don't like that ambiance and find it very distracting.

[lipsink]

I think I know what you mean. 'The Fast Show' seemed to recreate that weird ambience when it had sketches deep in the British countryside. I always found these clips quite striking becuse you hadn't seen much comedy sketch shows use rural settings since Python.

[sick as a pike]

This reminded me of a sketch I tried to sell with no success, but which would have depended on the sometimes chilly sense of "otherness" that has been described so well by previous posters.

VT: Stock shots of Spanish things in the '60s.

VO: In 1965 Eduardo Zapatero vanished from his family home in Spain, never to be seen again.  Or so his relatives and friends assumed, as many years passed with no sign of the depressed businessman whose livelihood had disappeared just as he had done.  Then, in 1998, thirty three years after his disappearance, something extraordinary happened.  Eduardo's daughter Maria was watching television and caught sight of a strangely familiar figure.  Older, but immediately recognisable.  She ran to fetch her mother, her five brothers and three sisters.  They were all agreed- the man on screen was Eduardo.  They contacted the police who made enquiries with their British counterparts who confirmed their suspicions.  The man was the missing Zapatero.  ...Sadly, they discovered he had died in 1980.  But at least they had the footage to cherish.  And here it is, showing their father in a park in Chiswick, in the background of a Goodies sketch in 1976.

VT: any genuine footage of external "Goodies" material which includes a member of the public in the background, ideally fleetingly.  The more inappropriate and slapstick the material is, the better.

[Lfbarfe]

The grimness of the film is almost entirely down to the refilming of it onto video for television. If you were to watch the film inserts on their own with a projector, they would be much brighter and clearer.

And bright red/puce. 16mm Kodachrome/Ektachrome of that era has a tendency to go that way with age.

[CaledonianGonzo]

I always found these clips quite striking becuse you hadn't seen much comedy sketch shows use rural settings since Python.

The Two Ronnies were always out and about in the field.  Look - here they are with Phil Collins:



Just a budgetary thing, isn't it?  Cheaper to do things on sets than in the great wide open, cf. the differences between The Black Adder and Blackadder II.

[Lfbarfe]

Just a budgetary thing, isn't it?  Cheaper to do things on sets than in the great wide open, cf. the differences between The Black Adder and Blackadder II.

Not really, especially if, as in the old days, you had fully-staffed studios no matter how much was being made. Over at LWT, the Stanley Baxter shows, which took a year to make, used studios and crews that would otherwise have been sitting idle on full pay, so actually weren't that much of a budget drain. Outdoor filming was done largely if the setting couldn't be replicated reasonably in the studio, or if studios were fully booked, or simply for stylistic reasons. If you think that film was a cheaper option, find a book like Inside BBC Television and look at the pictures of location shoots. The crew for a Kelly Monteith quickie was the same size as a feature film crew. Add to this a lack of control over the weather, and days lost, etc. Studio - back then at least - always came out cheaper. Now with small crews and digital video, shooting in the field is cheaper.

[rudi]

Heh, using Stanley Baxter when talking about budgets and crew-sizes is a wee bit cheeky though. He's still famed as being eye-wateringly expensive, something Grade is always so keen to point out.

[Danger Man]

One of the things that makes Python appear from its time, rather than of its time, is it's very lack of these immediate but quickly dating pop cultural references.

True. One of their weakest sketches (when viewed today) has to be 'Trim-Jeans theatre'.

[Lfbarfe]

Heh, using Stanley Baxter when talking about budgets and crew-sizes is a wee bit cheeky though. He's still famed as being eye-wateringly expensive, something Grade is always so keen to point out.

It's not a wee bit cheeky at all. Read what I said properly. I was saying that even Stanley Baxter's very expensive shows in the studio were relatively cheap, compared to location filming, because the resources were just sitting there. London Weekend made programmes for 2.5 days of the week, but had a studio complex not much smaller than Television Centre. So, throughout the 1970s, it had a lot of spare capacity/down time, and the crews were getting paid whether they were working or not. Alan Boyd, who joined LWT in 1981, explained it to me:

"It's quite simple, they had empty resources, the studios were empty. David [Bell, Controller of Entertainment] said 'The people are getting paid, why not use it? Otherwise the crew will sit on their backsides and drink coffee'. It was a different system. It was the resources sitting there, we might as well use them."

By the time Boyd came in, things had changed, however. The country was in a recession, John Birt was director of programmes and beginning to do above-the-line costings for things that had previously been below-the-line expenses - studio use, crew pay, etc - and it was decided to fill the studios with game shows and 'people' shows, like Game for a Laugh, filling more entertainment hours for less money. That's why the later Baxter LWT shows have a full supporting cast, rather than Stanley playing everything. They'd gone down from 19 days in the studio to 2.

Another example: When Alan Bennett did a run of plays at LWT in the late 1970s, he was promised film. When the series happened, he got half-film, half-studio (3 plays on VT, 3 plays on location), to keep the budget down. I might have the exact details slightly out, but the thrust is right.

Another thing: Michael Grade tells good stories, but they're not always quite right.

[Alternative Carpark]

I hate when they go outside in old sitcoms or sketch shows, because the outside film quality is always awful. So no, I don't like that ambiance and find it very distracting.

Happens a lot in old dramas as well really.  Although you do sometimes see episodes from sitcoms or dramas, even from as far back as the early 70s, where the whole thing's on video, including location.

[Ocho]

I'm glad someone brought up Python's otherness because just last night I was thinking that Eric Idle briefly appearing as John Lennon in an episode ("I'm starting a war for peace") was a bit wrong in a way I can't quite define.  This also got me thinking about the Pop Historians bit on Matching Tie & Handkerchief ("Theeeeeeere's evidence!").  Monty Python acknowledging that Glam Rock exists!  It suddenly goes a bit Goodies, there.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Not really......Studio - back then at least - always came out cheaper.

By 'cheaper to do things on sets than in the great wide open' I meant studio sets.

[Graeme]

Going ultra geeky here, but isn't it actually more of a by-product of the telecine process?

The grimness of the film is almost entirely down to the refilming of it onto video for television. If you were to watch the film inserts on their own with a projector, they would be much brighter and clearer.

Series 1 of Python used 35mm and looked lovely.  Series 2 and 3 was 16mm and appeared to be shot on Ian MacNaughton's box brownie.  By series 4 16mm was looking fairly respectable, presumably down to stock / telecine improvements.

[Glebe]

Cleese had commented (in the BBC's 30th anniversary doc, I think) that he found it very amateurish looking back, which isn't surprizing, but I think the cheap, wobbly nature of the show actually added to the humour. Speaking of film quality, apparently the Fawlty Towers remasters were not issued on Blu-ray because it was felt they were too low-grade. But some of the cheaply made old movies that been released on the format apparently hold up okay in HD.

[Lfbarfe]

By 'cheaper to do things on sets than in the great wide open' I meant studio sets.

So you did. I misread that as saying the opposite. I am a cock. Sorry about that. Normal service will be resumed by lunchtime tomorrow, I hope.

[biggytitbo]

I think everything the BBC did up unto the mid/late 80s had this. Just look at Attack of the Cybermen in '85, the 16mm outside shots of suburban streets had that strange ambiance that lent the story an atmosphere it didn't really deserve. Then skip forward a year to the Trial of a Timelord and the outside shots are on video and suddenly that spell the filmed bits in Doctor Who have is broken and its shown for the cack it is.

I always think it must be incredibly peculiar for someone not brought up on British TV of the 70s and 80s to watch such a show now. The weird transitions from video to film must look like some kind of baffling avant garde artistic statement.

[Marty McFly]

On a semi-related note, I happened to catch some of the repeat of 'Rock and Chips' that was on in the early hours the other morning. Being on at such a time it was in a window on the screen with a sign-languaging woman next to it, but the odd thing was the footage itself appeared pristine and rather warm, compared to the grainy 'film' look of the programme when it was previously shown. So what happened there? You'd think if they removed fields or applied filters or whatever to make video look like film it would be there on the 'master' tape, wouldn't it?

[ApexJazz]

It does seem almost like a different universe. Like some strange middle world of post-war and pre-war England, but with ever changing laws of physics.  A staid suburbia with callous Gilliam animations lurking underneath.  The elements of 'otherness' is probably why Flying Circus will continue to fascinate. US TV comedy at the time was extremely studio bound, the complete feeling of freedom of Python is striking to an American viewer. They even took television comedy outside!  Cleese may be referring to how poorly some of the exteriors are edited. In comedy, time and rhythm is essential and a single frame too much or too less can kill a gag. The power of those sketches come mostly from the performances, the best of them allowed to flow in a single shot.  Ripping Yarns suffers from its editing too. This may be all down to the 16mm editing tables of the time, which had a stop-pull mechanism that was very imprecise.  Some people have theorized that the incredible liveliness of 60's French cinema was because of these loose cutters.  Coincidentally, the Pythons did the definitive satire of la Nouvelle Vague. The tableaux can seem strangely restrained compared to the later movies (whose editing and cinematography can't be faulted). Terry Jones, in his own quiet way, may be one of the best comedy directors in movie history.
Do the original Flying Circus film elements survive? What can be done with old 16mm by a decent film lab and modern telecine is amazing. At least compared to the good ole' days.

[An tSaoi]

I always think it must be incredibly peculiar for someone not brought up on British TV of the 70s and 80s to watch such a show now. The weird transitions from video to film must look like some kind of baffling avant garde artistic statement.

Nah, it just looks shit and I have to try not to think about it or it'd ruin the shows for me.

[Lfbarfe]

You'd think if they removed fields or applied filters or whatever to make video look like film it would be there on the 'master' tape, wouldn't it?

Oddly, this one seems to have been interlaced (i.e. VT look) on HD, but deinterlaced/field removed (film look) on SD, when it went out originally. Amusing to hear it was VT SD on the signed version.

[Miss Anne Thrope]

US TV comedy at the time was extremely studio bound, the complete feeling of freedom of Python is striking to an American viewer. They even took television comedy outside!

Spot on.

Do the original Flying Circus film elements survive?

I think I read, or saw in a documentary, that Terry Jones heard that the BBC was going to wipe the original Flying Circus films and he rescued them.

[Entropy Balsmalch]

Some people have theorized that the incredible liveliness of 60's French cinema was because of these loose cutters.

Indeed. It's amazing how hard to recreate using modern cutting techniques that style is. It's almost like a sort of jazz feel. I suspect it's also slightly more complicated by the fact that while in production the director and cinematographer are aware of the editing techniques they're going to have to use and so as a result call action and cut in a very different way - so they stylisation lies somewhere between the technology and the desire of the crew/auteur/whatever you want to call them.

[Phil_A]

Great thread, this. I think it was precisely that otherworldy ambience of Python that used to appeal to me so much as troubled yoof. It's hard to describe now, but the combination of the grainy filmed locations and the stock music cues used to give me this weird feeling of false nostalgia, as if it was reminding me of something I'd experienced long ago but only had the vaguest recollection of(I'm only 27, so this was very unlikely). But watching it now, I don't get that same vibe at all. It's odd.

I think possibly the reason The Fast Show has that same "feel" is it was one of the last BBC comedy series to have outdoor sequences shot on actual film, maybe?

[Marty McFly]

Christ, The Fast Show had some great outdoorsy bits. Wasn't one of them a long, slow pan across an empty clifftop with Billy Bleach sat at the end, or is that selective memory?

[Guy]

I think I read, or saw in a documentary, that Terry Jones heard that the BBC was going to wipe the original Flying Circus films and he rescued them.

Weren't the BBC going to wipe the tapes of the whole series? I don't think you can wipe film.

I think possibly the reason The Fast Show has that same "feel" is it was one of the last BBC comedy series to have outdoor sequences shot on actual film, maybe?

The location stuff in Look Around You series 2 was all shot on film, for authenticity. As was the whole of series 1.

Christ, The Fast Show had some great outdoorsy bits. Wasn't one of them a long, slow pan across an empty clifftop with Billy Bleach sat at the end, or is that selective memory?

Was that one of the 'someone's sitting there' gags? I remember the ones where he's in an empty church, up a tree, and in that volcanic lake in Iceland.