Monty Python's Flying Circus

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 (Palin 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.

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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.

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3:4

Another three weeks have passed somehow. Must get into the habit of doing these at least once a week.

Anyway another absolutely brilliant one, just inspired from start to finish. Hilarious. One of the best 30 minutes of telly ever. The sketches thematically segue into each other cleverly. There's a nice running joke. There's an extended animation which is gobsmackingly inventive and utterly hilarious. I laughed out loud several times. There just isn't a weak moment.

I remembered the scene with Cleese as a merchant banker and Jones as a charity worker, but didn't remember that it morphs into a genius sketch involving pantomime horses in the same office.

Richard Baker, the newsreader whom older readers may remember has a cameo in one sketch (as himself) and keeps a completely straight face. Legend.

 

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3:5

I'd got about halfway through this one thinking it was below par, but it picks up nicely after that. There's an overlong sketch about the Fire Brigade in the first half that's pleasingly, very imaginatively surreal without being overly funny. Graham Chapman appears blacked up in full tribal dress in this one, doing a comedy West Indian accent.

I don't remember ever having seen this episode though I think I must have. But lots of the material from the latter half is familiar from the albums - especially a dialogue between Idle and Palin, in which Idle plays someone who can't say the letter C, and substitutes B instead. The line "What a silly bunt", present on the Live at Drury Lane version is not present here. Idle goes into a long, ranting monologue about package holidays and Watney's Red Barrel, again fondly remembered from the live album. Must have taken him weeks to memorise. Classic Eric Idle material.

I think the closing piece, regarding Anne Elk's theory on brontosauruses, is also present on one of the albums. Certainly I remembered that one very well.

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3:6

I remembered none of this. For a long time I've believed that I watched every Monty Python episode in the '90s or early '00s, but I must now suspect that I didn't.

None of the sketches are familiar to me from the LPs either and none are classics, so this was all new to me. It's a pretty good one though. Solid. It starts off with an anti-Conservative political parody featuring "Tory Housewives" in a sketch that also refers, to my own great amusement, to the Common Market. The BBC's underhand bias is not a new phenomenon.

There's a hilarious piece about a travelling documentary salesman with a genius performance from Cleese, presenting a programme about molluscs behind a cutout TV set frame. There's an archetypal Python sketch with the gumbys featuring the classic phrase "my brain hurts", so at least this episode is notable for that.

And there's even an impressive sketch filmed in a water tank furnished and decorated like a living room, with the Pythons' voices dubbed over (what I assume are) stuntmen in scuba diving gear.

The animations are brilliant, as well. Good one.

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3:7

A very good one; it positively whizzed past.

It gets off to a weak start though with a rather random, and surprisingly homophobic sketch about Biggles dictating a letter. Even in 1972, surely jokes leaning on extravagant effeminacy were a bit hackneyed? I think the Pythons were better than this. There's a dolly bird typist who isn't played by Carol Cleveland. Was she busy?

After that though it's laughs aplenty and we get several timeless classics - the climbers attempting the North Face of the Uxbridge Road, The Peckinpah film parody which had me shaking with laughter, and - what is for me the greatest Python performance of all, the Cheeseshop Sketch. Oh yes and probably the best-known Gilliam animation, a joke about telly being bad for your eyes.

There's a piece set on a boat out at sea, very definitely filmed on the deck of a boat at sea, in which Palin, dressed as a naval officer, jumps feet first, upright, straight into the sea. I note that he was also the victim of a sketch in which he jumps into the Thames earlier in the third series. Perhaps he was the best swimmer.

Here's an interesting thing. There's a sketch about two old ladies using sophisticated surveillance equipment on their neighbours in which one of them uses the term "digital scanner", which strikes me as remarkable for 1972.

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3:8

I'd been wondering when this one would turn up. I well remember watching it in my flat in London about 25 years ago. Really a very odd one in that the whole show is a single story. About Mr Pither, a character played by Palin, and his cycling tour.

Needless to say Mr Pither finds himself in a series of bizarre situations analogous to separate sketches. Actually the only part of that I remembered, presumably because it's off-the-scale bonkers, is the scene in which Mr Pithers turns up at a British consulate somewhere, only to find it staffed by ridiculous caricatures of Chinese people, played principally by Chapman and Cleese.

I remembered that this was mostly just very weird and not very funny. Actually it's funnier than I remembered. It works, but it's not classic Python by any means and it's not great.

Written by Jones and Palin (who often wrote together, including sketches for The Two Ronnies) and partly rewritten by Cleese and Chapman.

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3:9

Not a bad one. Mostly pretty funny, though there's no classic material here. There's a faint foreshadowing of a scene from Holy Grail in a scene where a Scotsman, played by Idle, gets confused about something. Similar to the 'make sure the prince doesn't leave this room' piece in the feature length film.

All the sketches are chained together in some thematic fashion. It does seem to drag a bit toward the end when, surprisingly, there's a Gilliam animation - oddly, accompanied by a narration in German - that isn't particularly funny. It's followed by a sketch about inflation making things hyper-expensive on a newly-discovered planet that, again, misses the mark. But I did laugh when the camera mounted onto the probe relating images from the planet's surface finds a woman, and the presenter declares that the mission has "struck crumpet".

In one sketch Carol Cleveland plays a posh assistant to a judge visiting a mortuary and she's really very good. Palin does a Frank Bough impersonation in another sketch, about an Olympic hide & seek contest - although the best thing about that is that part of it was filmed at Trafalgar Square. I love to see images of familiar London sites as they were in the past.

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I note that I started this exercise over a year ago now. That's a bit disqueting, not only in that I expected to complete my Pythonathon in a few months, but also that a year passed so quickly.

Anyway ..

3:10

Pretty good one, no classics. A fun sketch about a porn shop disguised as a Tudor job centre develops nicely. The Gilliam animation is absolutely inspired. There's a sketch in which Cleese wears a false 'tache that foreshadows Basil Fawlty, although I think a real one was used for Fawlty Towers.

Graham Chapman can be seen to be carrying a magazine called 'SPONTAN' in the porn shop sketch. I googled it, it was an actual publication.

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3:11

Spent the first half of this one thinking it was average, but it's actually a really good one. Two classics - Dennis Moore, the highwayman who steals lupins - and the TV show called Prejudice in which viewers have been invited to take part in a competition to find the best derogatory name for Belgians - the winning entry being "miserable, fat Belgian bastards".

The Dennis Moore sketch, principally involving Cleese, comes and goes through the whole episode and develops cleverly.

Interestingly, Eric Idle appears in sketch parts where I'd usually expect to see someone else - across a shop counter from Cleese (usually Palin) and as an old woman in the company of an old woman played by Chapman (usually Cleese).

Terry Jones is brilliant as an irritable doctor in one sketch. The whole episode features some delightful surreal bizarreness, especially in Gilliam's animations.

I enjoyed a spoof debate show entitled 'TV4' in which the question "Should there be another television channel, or should there not?" was considered. This was shown in January 1973; the fourth TV channel wouldn't arrive until nearly ten years later.

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3:12

This is a good one. Starts with a sketch about choreographed party political broadcasts, which has slightly sub-par video quality. Apparently this sketch, according to Wikipedia at least, has "been cut from many versions of this episode". It was only ever shown on the first transmission, never on a repeat. So it must have been sourced from an inferior copy to be restored to the BluRay. It's by no means rough, just not up to the usual video quality standard.

The whole episode flows really nicely with all the sketches cleverly intertwined. It's consistently very good, and there's one classic which I remember from my childhood, when Palin and Cleese fight over a single microphone on location to present different documentaries. Superb.

There's a delightfully surreal sketch about proper use of the phrase "no time to lose". And a Gilliam animation that spoofs the (brilliant) introduction to 2001 which is one of my favourite cinema moments.

A final sketch, Dad's Pooves is also described in Wikipedia as having been cut from many versions, but it's included here in excellent quality. I can see why it might have been considered a bit close to the bone fifty years ago. The folks who compiled the BluRay editions did a sterling job.