Monty Python's Flying Circus

The Pythons

inversion of linguistic categories, and distortions in visual perception of places and events. The Pythons The first season of the Flying Circus, containing thirteen hhalf-hour programs, began airing on BBC television on October 5, 1969. The second and third seasons also contained thirteen programs of the same length as the first, whereas the fourth contained only six programs, bringing the total of half-hour episodes to forty-five. The final program was aired on December 5, 1974. Five Britons—John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, and Eric Idle—and one American, Terry Gilliam, comprised the Python group. Though not usually designated as such, Carol Cleveland is deserving of recognition as the seventh Python. The show’s producers were John Howard Davies and Ian MacNaughton. They also directed the series: Davies directed four of the first programs in 1969, and MacNaughton directed the remainder. Although the six Pythons worked collectively or in pairs on the scripts, other writers were occasionally hired for additional material (e.g., Douglas Adams and Neil Innes). Gilliam created the animation , and James Balfour, Alan Featherstone, Terry Hunt, Max Samett, and Stanley Spee were the cinematographers. Neil Innes was credited with musical direction (with uncredited assistance by Idle). The Flying Circus underwent alterations during the four seasons as the Pythons experimented with the uses of comedy . The technique of abandoning punch lines and conclusions to various sketches and of moving more freely from sketch to sketch began during the middle of the first season. The Pythons’ stream-of-consciousness style became more pronounced throughout the subsequent seasons. The motifs that characterized the sketches were as wide ranging as the 4 Monty Python’s Flying Circus style adopted to present them. The Pythons’ forms of comedy tackled sexuality, law, medicine, politics, psychiatry, literary classics, comic books, language, cinema, and, above all, television . The steadily increasing popularity of the shows can be accounted for by the group’s eclectic, daring, and innovative uses of the medium. However, after the second season, signs of restlessness were evident. Cleese appeared in fewer episodes and was absent from the fourth series. He later explained: “We were repeating ourselves. . . . If anyone did a sketch I could say, ‘It’s that sketch from the first series combined with that sketch from the second series.’ Once you begin to identify sketches like that, I thought, why are we doing it?”7 Despite his departure and the ending of the television series in 1974, the group (including Cleese) reunited for stage and television appearances and feature films. The identity and success of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was due in large measure to the similar cultural and social backgrounds of the individual Pythons. Also, they had prior and wide-ranging experience with writing and performing for stage, film, and television comedy (add to the mix Gilliam’s work as an animator) before combining their talents in novel ways for television. An initial challenge they confronted in creating the show was the selection of a title. According to Roger Wilmut, “The team were anxious not to have a title which might give away the content of the show in any way.”8 Numerous titles were suggested—“Arthur Megapode’s Flying Circus,” “Owl Stretching Time,” “Sex and Violence,” “Gwen Dibley’s Flying Circus,” and so on—until the team finally decided on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In the Pythons’ experimentation with comedic form on the Flying Circus, no one individual was singled out—the men were collectively identified as “Monty Python.” No one person was the “spokesperson,” the “anchorman,” or the “inspiration” for the series. An examination of the scripts, the 5 The Pythons acting roles assigned, and the synchronized performances of the group members reveals talents that are more generally distributed among the group according to their various talents . From initial discussions to script writing and from improvisation to rehearsals to shooting and to subsequent alterations prior to broadcasting, the Pythons (despite whatever personal animosities or annoyances they might have experienced) worked closely with one another. The cooperative character of their work was vastly enhanced by their shared histories due to their generation, social class, education , and intellectual predilections. They had had professional or academic careers in mind while at university, but they were also interested in writing and in selling their scripts to television, and they shared an eagerness to experiment with comedy through that medium. All the men in...