Monty Python's Flying Circus

[Slim]

2:11

Unexpectedly, a very good one. Consistently funny from start to finish with sharp, punchy sketches and laughs aplenty. And yet I don't actually know any of these pieces, don't remember seeing any of them before.

Perhaps the "crackpot religions" sketch is a bit overlong. Interesingly there's an animation in this sketch that shows telegraph poles shaped like crosses (ie cruxifixion style). Wikipedia says it was removed, but in this BluRay version, it's present.

I was amused that one of the characters in a sketch named How Not To Be Seen is called BJ Smegma. There are some extremely impressive explosions in that sketch, the props department must have bought a job lot of TNT. Or something.

I especially loved the sketch about an ad campaign for a coffee company with and Idle (especially) Cleese on manic top form, and a sketch set at the offices of Exchange and Mart. Genius.

[Slim]

2:12

Not a bad one. It does have a few classic Python moments.The "communist quiz" sketch in which Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Mao Tse Tung and Lenin take part in a panel game. It was on one of the records (the live one I think). The rude Hungarian phrasebook sketch ("my hovercraft is full of eels"). And most notably, the Spam sketch.

It's all good. Maybe the piece about works of art going on strike is overlong. Nothing stands out as, er, outstanding.

[Slim]

2:13

This one had me in stitches for the first fifteen minutes or so, then it sags a bit in the middle with an overlong piece about patients being mistreated in a hospital (it's funnier than it sounds). Then it builds to a crescendo, climaxing on one of the classic and most controversial Python sketches.

The running joke in this one is that the Queen was believed to be watching. Therefore it contains a number of sketches which might be considered to be in bad taste (deliberately, of course). None more so than the famous Undertaker's Sketch, which the BBC allowed to be broadcast only on condition that the studio audience were heard to boo, and ultimately invade the set in protest. Despite the BBC's interference, it remains very funny.

Apparently (or so I've just read), it was ordered to be wiped from the master tape so it could never be shown again. However some time in the '80s the sketch was restored from an inferior video copy (possibly even a home tape copy one of the Pythons had had made at the BBC). It doesn't look bad and the audio is fine.

The Pythons did defiantly record a version of the sketch without the audience interruptions for one of their LPs. Somewhere (probably in a cardboard box in the garage) I have a book about Monty Python that has an interview with Cleese - he says that he and Chapman were killing themselves laughing when they wrote it, and were angry and disappointed that it had to be compromised.

Reggie Bosanquet appears as himself in one of the other sketches.

And that's the end of the second series! Took me more than five months to get through it, I'll see if I can get through the third series a bit quicker.

[Slim]

3:1

And so we come to the third series of Monty Python's Flying Circus. This first episode was shown in October 1972, nearly two years after the last episode of the second series was first broadcast.

It's not at all bad. There's an entertaining piece about the North Malden Icelandic Saga Society contributing to a BBC drama. There's a thoroughly serviceable courtroom sketch, with Eric Idle putting in an excellent shift as an improbably sympathetic murderer. Probably the cleverest piece is one written by Cleese and Chapman about two old women arguing philosophy and existentialism at the launderette. They visit Sartre in Paris.

But ironically the funniest sketch is arguably the least unconventional - the famous Whicker's World sketch, based on simple parody and impressions of Alan Whicker.

[Slim]

3:2

A very good one. Consistently very funny, except for an overlong sketch about "slenderising garments".

I remembered a fair bit of this one - a very funny spoof of Blue Peter, the short piece featuring Mrs Niggerbaiter speaking to a government minister as if he were six months old, and the famous, short but funny fish-slapping sketch. I recall from Michael Palin's diaries that he was provided with brandy immediately after being dunked in the Thames. I remember him mentioning it in an interview in Melody Maker about 50 years ago as well.

Lulu and Ringo have cameos in a brief sketch at the very end. More than fifty years later, they're still both household names.

One thing that struck me (again) about this episode is the amount of material that might be considered politically incorrect in the present day. Apart from Mrs Niggerbaiter, there's a sketch with ridiculous homosexual stereotypes. Someone (Pailin I think) does a ridiculous cartoon-Chinese accent for one of the animations. And Cleese appears dressed as a "red indian" very briefly.

Palin plays an outlandishly camp TV presenter in one sketch. He played a very similar character in a guest appearance on OTT about ten years later, but for some reason he doesn't write about that in his diaries, or at least the published version. I wonder if he came to regret it.

[Slim]

3:3

Fantastic one. Consistently very funny, delightfully clever and surreal comedy. A few classics in this one. The skit on The Money Programme, which I remember as a '70s TV show about finance (obviously), but which (I've just checked) actually ran until 2010. The delightfully sordid Church Police sketch, which I found that I knew by heart - it was on one of the Python LPs. On the TV version, God's hand appears appears from above to point out the culprit of a serious crime; on the LP version a booming (and oddly effeminate) heavenly voice announces "the one in the braces .. he done it".

One sketch I didn't remember at all, but which was genuinely brilliant, concerned a restaurant in the middle of a jungle. Palin and Jones both appear heavily blacked up, with cod-African accents. Actual black people appear as extras (with spears). I have to wonder what they thought of it. In the following image, Michael's character has had an altercation with a tiger.



And another one that was on one of the albums - the legendary argument clinic sketch. Please indulge a small anecdote, intended to demonstrate this particular piece's enduring place in popular culture. A few years ago I took issue with a change of policy one of our directors intended to introduce, and when I emailed him about it, he replied with "is this a five minute argument, or the full half hour?". "I've told you once", I replied.