All The Words, Vol. One – Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1989 ★★★★

Python... Before the Big Screen

Loving good old Monty Python comes easy, but it’s a sign of age when you hear what it is about Python people love. For many, debate centers around cinema. Arthur? Brian? Perhaps some wafer-thin love for Mr. Creosote?

Fewer mention the television series. And why should they? It was the output of tight schedules and budgets, requires over 20 hours to take in, and employs some of the harshest videotape transfer known to man. Why not stream one of their legendary movies instead? Yet TV was the medium of the British comedy troupe’s birth, for which its members developed most of their material. In 1989, the series scripts were collected in two chronologically organized volumes; this is the first.

On BBC-TV from 1969 to 1974, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” launched most of their characters; perfected their comic surrealism; and, in remarkably quick time, launched them into stardom, first at home, later in the United States. If Monty Python were for comedy what the Beatles were for pop, you can even track the passing of the baton. The same month the Fabs wrapped up Abbey Road, August, 1969, the Pythons shot their first-ever episode in the same city.

Is that the real Cardinal Richelieu (Michael Palin) giving testimony, or a clever impostor? Graham Chapman as Inspector Dim prepares to reveal the truth, in the opening sketch of the first episode ever taped of "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Image from https://yarn.co/yarn-clip/c86d433d-6e44-4b72-868a-19d0d526d346.

To read that first Python episode, taped on August 14, is to sense some of the liberation its creators felt kicking off the confines of other sketch-comedy shows of the day:

Prisoner [Eric Idle]: What fires and stirs the woodcock in his springe or wakes the drowsy apricot betides? What goddess doth the storm-toss’d mariner offer her most tempestuous prayers to. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!

Judge [Terry Jones]: It’s only a parking ticket.

You see in that single exchange both the loftiness of Monty Python’s vision as well as the punchline-delivering dictates of conventional TV they still honored for a time. That first episode, the third show aired after the program debuted the following October, features its share of clunkers. One long, meandering sketch spotlights a lone bicycle repairman revered in a world of comic-book superheroes.

Monty Python in their early heyday, as BBC sketch comedians extraordinaire. Left to right, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Terry Jones, and lone American Terry Gilliam. Image from https://www.senscritique.com/serie/Monty_Python_s_Flying_Circus/269228/S1/page-1.

Two other sketches airing that night hold up better, one about a restaurant which melts down after a patron mentions a dirty fork (“Mungo, never kill a customer”); another where a man pesters a married stranger about his sex life (“Is your wife a goer, eh, know what I mean?”) Still, both those sketches employ punchlines, too.

To read All The Works, Vol. One, bringing together all of Season 1 and most of Season 2 of the original “Flying Circus” series, is to see the evolution of comedy the same way listening to Beatles’ albums spotlights a pop-music revolution.

Commentator [Terry Jones] (reverently): This morning, shortly after eleven o’clock, comedy struck this little house on Dibley Road. Sudden…violent…comedy.

All The Works, Vol. One is not an ideal collection. The episode scripts, while complete and true to what went up on screen back in 1969 and 1970, are transcripts rather than actual working scripts. They also condense Terry Gilliam’s cartoon animation, a vital part of the show’s surreal approach, into jokey descriptors: “These words are followed by various strange images, possibly connected with the stretching of owls, and proceeding from a bizarre American immigrant’s fevered brain.”

What strike me reading Vol. One are not weaknesses but how quickly the show hit its groove, in the middle of Season 1. There were four seasons in all; the first three ran 13 episodes apiece, the last six. Each Season 1 episode has at least one lame sketch, like Eric Idle playing a theater-going Red Indian or an Agatha Christie spoof where each succeeding detective turns up the next victim.

John Cleese recalls the gangster Piranha Brothers in their heyday, a first-season highlight sketch: "Dinsdale... knew how to treat a female impersonator." Earlier this episode, Cleese debuted another series favorite, his government-sponsored Silly Walk. Image from http://pythonluv.blogspot.com/2014/05/episode-14-face-press-aka-dinsdale.html.

But Season 1 also has an outsized number of greatest hits, sketches and black-out bits that live on via YouTube and still only require shorthand identifiers today: The Lumberjack Song, Hell’s Grannies, Crunchy Frog, Upper-Class Twit of the Year, and that buzzword for Hollywood toadies, “Splunge!”

Minister [Graham Chapman]: I’d like to answer this question if I may in two ways. Firstly in my normal voice and then in a kind of silly high-pitched whine…

What made “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” so unique for its time was not only the often-surreal sketches but the bits which linked them, short jabs of comedy that in the early days featured such devices as knights smacking people with chickens or cows falling from the sky. Misdirection ploys abound:

American Voice [John Cleese] (gently): It was a day like any other and Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Brainsample were a perfectly ordinary couple, leading perfectly ordinary lives – the sort of people to whom nothing extraordinary ever happened, and not the kind of people to be the centre of one of the most astounding incidents in the history of mankind…So let’s forget about them and follow instead the destiny of this man…(camera pans off them; they both look disappointed; camera picks up up instead a smart little business man, in bowler, briefcase and pinstripes)…Harold Potter, gardener, and tax official, first victim of Creatures from another Planet.

Pet-shop owner Michael Palin wishes he found another line of work when John Cleese shows up to complain of defective merchandise. From the original "Dead Parrot" sketch. Image from http://www.timdrussell.com/pythonstills.htm. 

As with the Beatles, while each of the Monty Python members has a devoted following, the lion’s share goes to the one named John. On the page as well as on the screen, John Cleese is less the chief contributor than the loudest loon, completely in charge whenever he appears:

RSM [John Cleese] (scornfully): Pointed sticks! Ho ho ho. We want to learn how to defend ourselves against pointed sticks, do we? Getting all high and mighty, eh? Fresh fruit not good enough for you, eh? Oh well, well, well, I’ll tell you something my lad. When you’re walking home tonight and some homicidal maniac comes after you with a bunch of loganberries, don’t come crying to me.

Eventually, Cleese tired of the Python formula and left the troupe, temporarily and well after the period covered in this book. Producing the content of Season 1 would have exhausted many a brilliant writers’ team of more than six people; yet “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was hardly ready to ring down the curtain and join the choir invisible, as All The Words Vol. One demonstrates when we move on to the first ten episodes of Season 2.

Cardinal Ximinez [Michael Palin]: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise…our two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency. Our three weapons are fear and surprise and ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope…our four…no…amongst our weaponry are such elements as fear, surprise…I’ll come in again.

One thing you do note about the second season are more contemporary references. The cast members/writers often noted how well their comedy benefited by not dwelling on issues of the day or spoofing popular entertainments; in fact they did more of this in Season 2. It’s not so much that the comedy is dated as you detect a yellowing along the margins, references to names you may recognize (Margaret Thatcher, Mao Zedong) and names you likely won’t (Tony Jacklin, Lulu).

Terry Jones as the Bishop, one of many Season 2 TV spoofs, this of crime shows. The bishop's catch phrase: "We was too late!" Image from http://www.timdrussell.com/pythonstills.htm

Much of their political humor holds up, in part from lack of specificity:

Norman [Michael Palin]: Well, this is largely as I predicted except that the Silly Party won. I think this is mainly due to the number of votes cast.

As enjoyable as the one-liners and surreal gags often are, the script reveals other pleasures of Python, like the gamesmanship they employed with British television viewers back in the day. A BBC announcer will break into a show to apologize for all the repetition, only to come back a few moments later to say the same thing. Or else a credit might flash, like: “FLAMING STAR – THE STORY OF ONE MAN’S SEARCH FOR VENGEANCE IN THE RAW AND VIOLENT WORLD OF INTERNATIONAL ARCHAEOLOGY.”

The comedy landscape is a lot different now, something you become aware of when you see all the times the male cast dressed as women. Often they played a group of middle-aged dowdies they called “pepperpots,” which are intermittently amusing but do expose these famously Oxbridge products as a tad elitist and smug.

Oh, and don’t forget the homosexuals; “poofter jokes,” Python called them, another regular slap in the face of future political correctness:

First Judge [Eric Idle] (very camp) Oh, I’ve had such a morning in the High Court. I could stamp my little feet the way those QC’s carry on.

Second Judge [Michael Palin] (just as camp) Don’t I know it, love.

Something which caught me by surprise reading this is just how clean the Pythons worked in their early BBC days. They threw in sly digs at organized religion, like a wrestling bout to determine God’s existence, and of course Carol Cleveland was on hand for an occasional naughty bit, but for people with visions of Biggus Dickus or “Every Sperm Is Sacred,” Python 1.0 may come off a bit tame.

Among the most beloved of Monty Python characters were the Gumbies, grunting working-class morons who show up for linking bits, here introducing a sketch about architects, naturally. Left to right: Terry Jones, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and Michael Palin. Image from http://i.imgur.com/Kocko2t.jpg

To me, there is such a surfeit of imagination and subject matter on display that it feels the height of ingratitude noting not every joke gets a laugh, or that a few flop outright. Just to read a single episode front-to-back is to enjoy a well-earned vacation from reality:

Inspector [Michael Palin]: Morning, madam, I’ve come to read your poet.

She [Terry Jones]: Oh yes, he’s in the cupboard under the stairs.

Inspector: What is it, a Swinburne? Shelley?

She: No, it’s a Wordsworth.

Inspector: Oh, bloody daffodils.