Monty Python's Flying Circus

Television Time

Monty Python’s Flying Circus 40 Television Time Beyond the Pythons’ explorations of the various forms oof programming, the overall form of the series is connected to the basic attributes of television—segmentation and flow. Drawing on and utilizing every available genre— news, interviews, game shows, commercials, and films on television, the Flying Circus capitalized on and exploited the segmented character of television time. However, in its profligate “waste” of time through the disavowal, interruption, repetition, and lack of closure of many sketches, the Flying Circus calls attention to the continuous and indiscriminate character of time inherent in the televisual. While individual programs have their time slots and are self-contained, they exist simultaneously with and absorb other media forms. Given the continuous and diverse character of the medium, the viewer always enters televsion in the middle of things. Correspondingly, the Flying Circus episodes begin in medias res, making no reference to any specific moment in time or specific identity of place, as if signaling their ongoing character. The abrupt and arbitrary beginning of each of the programs is further evidence of television as a technological medium that is always on and, unlike film, has no beginning or ending. The loose structure of the shows, their broken-up character, and their movements through different temporal dimensions are characteristic of the flow and heterogeneity of the medium, though many of the episodes make repeated reference to earlier sketches and gestures (e.g., “E. Henry Thripshaw’s Disease,” “The Spanish Inquisition,” and “Njorl’s Saga”). The chronological or linear sense of the episodes is scrambled, miming the diversity of the medium. Television’s immediacy and liveness is often invoked in the Flying Circus through direct address, the play on news reportage, numerous interruptions, and the role of the “Vox Pops” (audience responses that appear spontaneous and introduce “immediate” responses to sketches). Through the 41 appearance of randomness, the Flying Circus called attention to the character of television as a “continuous flowing river of experience.”59 This “flowing river” is characterized also by the segmentation of units of time and by “interruption,” all of which find their way into the Flying Circus addresses of the television medium. The format of the Flying Circus reveals that, unlike variety show skits, the episodes have no closure, no culminating punch line, and often seem to have no point. The uses of animation contributed to the hybrid character of the Flying Circus and introduced further disturbances in relation to television time. The viewer was kept constantly off balance not only about the direction, the butt, and the quality of the sketches but also by the disruptive movement from specific places and moments in time to a timeless and phantasmic world. Although Gilliam’s animation was connected to the motifs developed in the sketches, it was not mere extension or “support.” Rather, the animation functions to highlight the atemporal and hallucinatory character of the Flying Circus world. The emphasis on sadistic acts by cartoon figures through images of dismemberment, decapitation , cannibalism, explosions, and various forms of physical mutilation are an invitation to contemplate a world that contradicts altruistic and benign conceptions of behavior. The fanciful animation, like the appealing images of each of the Pythons, allows entry into a world of unreason where time and space are disordered, as in the case of “The Wacky Queen” sketch that combines photographic cutouts and speeded-up motion as if a silent film has been shown at the wrong speed. In this way, the Flying Circus interferes with the recording dimension of television and its anchoring in the present and in real time. For example, “The Wacky Queen” sketch tampers with the historically respectable images of Queen Victoria (Jones) and Prime Minister Gladstone (Chapman). The sketch reminds one of early chase films, thus Television Time Monty Python’s Flying Circus 42 introducing a version of the past dependent on cinema history . The animation functions in multilayered fashion to juxtapose real time against the creative possibilities of television to alter representation. For example, one colorful, animated episode involves a caterpillar that enters a hut, crawls under a blanket, and emerges as a butterfly. This brief sketch captures the plasticity of television and its capacity to do more than conventional recording or reproduction of stories. In their cavalier treatment of time, the sketches revealed that television offered the commodity of the packaging and selling of time. In one sketch, “The Time...