Abigoliah: Hello there. This is the podcast All British comedy explained. I’m Abigail Schamaun and with me is Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello there.
Abigoliah: Hello. We’ve just recorded our intro. So how have you been this week?
Tom: I know it’s been a while. Fancy meeting you here etc. etc. but I’m really looking forward to this.
Abigoliah: I am, I’m kind of nervous that I won’t like it.
Tom: This is entirely allowed, right This is old comedy from a bygone age. And what I want and what I assume our listeners want is your unvarnished, authentic reaction. You and I don’t have to like the same stuff. And as I said in our first episode, I’ll be showing you stuff that I don’t like because it has some other interesting reason for us to watch it. So just be honest. Just be straightforward.
Abigoliah: Why don’t you tell our listeners what we’re watching in case they haven’t read the episode title.
Tom: We are watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If I say landmark television comedy series to anyone in Britain, that is likely the first thing that they’ll think of, particularly if they’re older than about 30, and certainly if they’re my age.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, this is the Monty Python sketch troupe.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: Yes. They did make it over to America. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was always a VHS passed around. Here’s why I’m afraid I won’t like it. My little brother became obsessed with it when we were kids. Like, probably around age seven, and we would all sit around the dinner table and Abe. Little, young, seven year old blonde rosy cheeks, cute as a button, would sit there and recite from memory the African swallow. Is it an African swallow or however it goes? It was hilarious to watch my little brother do this. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. And then I finally put on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and I was like, I really just like watching my brother do it. Abraham was better at it than the Monty Python guy, in my opinion. So that’s why I’m kind of like, oh, I hope I like it.
Tom: But these little kind of quirky specificities in your personal history, I think, is one of the things that’s going to make this so interesting. So let’s see. Let me give you a little bit of context. This started airing in 1969.
Abigoliah: Hmf. 69.
Tom: Comedy. This is the year of the moon landing okay. America is embroiled in the Vietnam War. Elvis Presley is beginning his Las Vegas residency. And it’s the year that Star Trek was cancelled by NBC. So that gives you a little bit of that’s the that’s the world into which this is being born.
Abigoliah: I know Vietnam sounds rough, but Star Trek got cancelled.
Tom: I know, I know. What else do you know about Monty Python? Can you name any of the participants?
Abigoliah: I forget their names, but literally, as you say them, I’ll be like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Tom: So it’s a landmark show. You can see it coming if you watch other shows that were being made around the time. It doesn’t, like completely rewrite the rule book, but it casts an incredibly long shadow. So this particular group, when they assembled, just ended up doing similar things, but they did it better. They had more ambition, and they’re more fondly remembered for various reasons. Any famous sketches that you can think of?
Abigoliah: The African swallow and the English swallow.
Tom: The European swallow.
Abigoliah: The European swallow.
Abigoliah: The coconuts. The coconuts.
Tom: Yeah. That’s all from Holy Grail.
Abigoliah: I, I really don’t know anything from Flying Circus. I will say, my brother, because he was such a fan of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. My parents did then get him a VHS of Flying Circus, and the consensus was not as good.
Tom: I mean, that is arguably true. We’ll talk maybe a little bit more about this after you’ve seen it. But one of the reasons why I think they’re so well remembered is because certain sketches got endlessly recycled. So the parrot sketch, for example, is incredibly famous, but in context it doesn’t stand out quite as much.
Abigoliah: So there is one I’ve seen where one of them is dressed as a woman. I think that’s a theme for them, and they’re always about to go into a musical, but they don’t.
Tom: That’s also Holy Grail, and neither of them is dressed as a woman. Terry Jones is playing a sort of fey character, but he’s not playing a woman.
Abigoliah: I don’t know. I’m gonna stop talking. I know nothing about this. Terry Jones. I know the name.
Tom: Here’s what you need to know, okay? John Cleese had been appearing on British television since the mid 60s. He was a member of the Cambridge Footlights. Does that mean anything to you?
Abigoliah: I was going to ask if they’re from the pedigree of: I went to a fancy school and studied English, but somehow came away as a comedy genius. Because you can’t major in theatre at like, Cambridge and stuff.
Tom: You can’t major in anything.
Abigoliah: Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s how that works.
Tom: Yeah. Oxford and Cambridge, very academic. But the Cambridge Footlights was and indeed is this club where undergraduates can put on regular sketch shows.
Abigoliah: Right.
Tom: And it was a feeding ground to television for a long time. So for example, the annual revue – and that’s revue meaning sketch show – the annual revue that the Footlights did that John Cleese was in was so successful it went straight from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So he is also writing sketches for other comedians.
Abigoliah: Is this the Footlights version that, like Stephen Fry was in and Hugh Laurie and. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
Tom: And he was one of the mainstays of a popular radio show called I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. He was one of the core cast of The Frost Report, along with Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. Just out of interest to those names?
Abigoliah: No, not at all.
Tom: Come back to them. And then he was in a show called At Last The 1948 Show, which he co-wrote and performed with Graham Chapman and Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman. And that was such a success that the BBC’s comedy impresario Barry Took took him aside and said, would you like your own series? And if so, who would you like to work with?
Abigoliah: When you say BBC’s comedy impresario, was he a producer there or was he the head of commissioning?
Tom: No. So Tom Sloan and Michael Mills were the bosses, and Barry Took was a comedy writer, and he was just, like, their in-house comedy consultant for a while.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: He didn’t have any power, but he had a lot of influence.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So John Cleese had formed a very productive writing partnership with Graham Chapman.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So it was obvious for Cleese to want to work with Chapman. And he greatly enjoyed watching a show on the other side, an ITV show called Do Not Adjust Your Set, which starred Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, David Jason and Denise Coffey. It was aimed at children, but Cleese thought it was the funniest thing on TV, and then he remembered how much he’d enjoyed working with Michael Palin on a one off comedy special called How to Irritate People. Okay, so he said to Barry, took, Can Michael Palin come and join us? And Michael Palin was in a writing partnership with Terry Jones. So they came as a team, and one of them asked if Eric Idle could join them as well. Eric Idle was another from Cambridge, but he was a few years younger than John Cleese, so he hadn’t appeared in any Footlights shows with them. So Michael Palin and Terry Jones are from Oxford. Cleese, Chapman and Idle are all from Cambridge. Okay, another feature of Do Not Adjust Your Set was the cutout animations provided by an American cartoonist called Terry Gilliam.
Abigoliah: That name’s familiar, but I think that might just be because that’s a name that I’ve heard you talk about around the poker table. And I’ve just gone. Yep.
Tom: He later became a very famous film director, but he started off doing these cutout animations.
Abigoliah: What has he directed?
Tom: Brazil. 12 Monkeys.
Abigoliah: Okay, yes, I know exactly who he is.
Tom: So as this team starts coming together, they start discussing like what is going to make their show different. And one of the things that Terry Jones in particular is keen to avoid is the West End Revue style of set up the premise of your sketch, deliver your sketch, punchline, blackout, and then on to the next thing he was looking for something a bit more free flowing, a bit more surreal, and he thought, oh, if we if we have these animations, we can go even further. He was a bit disappointed in the spring of 69 to see that Spike Milligan – is that a name that means anything to you?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: We’ll come back to Spike Milligan very soon as well. Spike Milligan did a show called Q5 and had kind of beaten them to the punch, had abandoned punchlines and had one sketch flow into another. But with Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones thought, oh, we can take the surrealism even further because there’ll be nothing stopping us. So that was the six people.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Barry Took escorted them to the office of the BBC’s head of Comedy, Michael Mills, and Mills asked them, so what’s the premise of your new programme? And they sort of looked at each other and went we don’t know yet. And then he asked, Will you have special guests? Oh, we don’t know yet. Will there be songs? We don’t know yet. John Cleese said it was the worst job interview you could possibly have had. Then Michael Mills sighed and went well, you can have 13 shows. But that’s all.
Abigoliah: Back when anyone could make anything. How many scripts have you written, Tom? Yeah, also, I love that they are the first. They are the original Seinfeld. It’s a show about nothing. It’s a show about nothing.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: Well, you can. Oh, my God. Remember when there was nothing on TV and they just needed to fill the air. There was a moment where it did feel like anyone could make something and get it out to the world.
Tom: TV used to stop at 11:00. Yeah, and they’d play the national anthem. Yes. And then there would just be nothing.
Abigoliah: Yeah. They used to do that in America as well, but it was before my time. But my mom talks about it. Yeah.
Tom: All right, so they’ve got their 13 shows. Now they have to decide on a name. At first a lot of the team wanted to give the show a different title every week. Proposed names included The Toad Elevating Moment. Owl Stretching Time.
Abigoliah: I’m sensing a theme.
Tom: Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble and Boot.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: And Whither Canada?
Abigoliah: Whither Canada?
Tom: Yeah. And some of those supposed titles have attached themselves to episodes in the first series. But the BBC took a very dim view of this and told them there has to be one name that’ll go in the listings magazines, and that we can actually use to publicize this.
Abigoliah: Branding, branding, branding.
Tom: So because it had been Barry Took’s Influence which had created this new comedy team in the BBC, some people started calling this new show Barry Took’s Flying Circus or Baron von Took’s Flying Circus. Flying Circus is a term which can refer either to an attack squad or to an air show. Yeah, but it has this idea of lots of planes flying around. So Flying Circus.
Abigoliah: By the way, I just want to stop – Flying Circus. All I could think of was trapeze. Like. That’s what I thought.
Tom: I did.
Abigoliah: Not. Yeah, I did not think about airplanes.
Tom: Go on. So then for a while, they were calling the show Gwen Dibley’s Flying Circus.
Abigoliah: Who’s Gwen Dibley?
Tom: Well, Gwen Dibley, that was a name that Michael Palin had read in a newspaper, and he just thought it’d be funny if this unassuming woman opened the Radio Times one week to discover that she had her own show. The BBC said they couldn’t do that either. So then somebody suggested Python was a good surname. And then we think Eric Idle is the likely candidate for adding Monty, which he thought was a name redolent of a kind of disreputable theatrical agent or something like that. So they have this name, Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Abigoliah: So the name Monty Python isn’t the name of their sketch troupe when they were the Footlights? The Footlights are always the Footlights. Right. They’re not like the Footlights. But this year, we’re calling ourselves Monty Python?
Tom: Individual shows would have different names. So the Footlights presents. And when John Cleese did his famous one, it was initially called A Clump of Plinths.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: And then it was renamed Cambridge Circus when it came into the West End. Okay, so there’s individual shows, but it was always branded as from the Cambridge Footlights.
Abigoliah: One of my first ever Fringes, because I had I knew what I had heard tale of these footlights of Cambridge and they were there, as they are there every year. And so I went to go see the sketch show from the Cambridge Footlights. This would have been about ten years ago. They didn’t go straight to the West End. That’s all I’m saying.
Tom: It doesn’t always happen. There are productive years, and there are fallow years.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: This was a productive year. So it ran for three seasons of 13 episodes each. Autumn 69, autumn 1970 and autumn 1972. And there was then a final series of six episodes, which was just called Monty Python, in which John Cleese declined to take part.
Abigoliah: Why did he get too big for his britches?
Tom: I mean, a little bit. He was always the most prominent. And he was getting a bit bored. He said afterwards that he would look at the third series and think, that sketch is a bit of something we did in the first series mixed with something we did in the second series. It wasn’t interesting to him anymore and he wanted to go off and do other things.
Abigoliah: Was he right – as a scholar of Monty Python, would you be like, yeah, he there’s a reason he was reasonable to be bored?
Tom: It’s definitely true that the third series contains fewer really well-remembered sketches. But I do think – and the reason is the reason I wanted to show you an episode from the third season – I think in that season they are even more adventurous in how they’re playing with the form. Okay, we’ll save the rest of that conversation till after you’ve seen it. But that first series was a big success. It was going out late at night, but quite quickly it gets good reviews. People start talking about it, and there are lots of well remembered sketches from that first series, including – I’m sure none of these will mean anything to you, but for other listeners in the first series, you can see Crunchy Frog, The Lumberjack Song, the Upper Class Twit of the year, Self Defence Against Fresh Fruit, and of course, the Parrot Sketch, which is in episode eight. Between the second and third series, they made a very cheap film of some of the best sketches called And Now for Something Completely Different. And over the next few years they repurposed a lot of their material into live shows, record albums, books, and all sorts of other stuff. And this is I think we just touched on this, but this is one of the reasons why they’re better remembered than some of their contemporaries, because they realised that they had this ability to take the best material from the 45 episodes of the TV show and recycle it.
Abigoliah: Which they couldn’t have done if they changed the name of the show every week. Branding, branding, branding.
Tom: So you can see John Cleese and Michael Palin perform the parrot sketch on the original show, in the 1972 film, on the Monty Python Live at Drury Lane record album, at the charity show Pleasure at Her Majesty’s, on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, at The Secret Policeman’s Biggest Ball in 1989, on Saturday Night Live in 1997.
Abigoliah: Oh, they did it!
Tom: Yeah, they guested on Saturday Night Live – and at the O2 in 2014, and that almost certainly isn’t a complete list.
Abigoliah: This is giving me, like Abbott and Costello vibes, like, you know, how they had all their sketches that they did on television, but then would go out and do them live again famously. Who’s On First is like, you can find many iterations of that online because they did it different places.
Tom: When they did the Hollywood Bowl in particular, John Cleese says that it was a weird experience. It was more like being part of a rock group than a comedy group because they would come out and start doing a sketch and the whole audience would applaud because it’s their favourite sketch.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And then there’d be little ripples of laughter because they’ve heard all these jokes a hundred times. And then they end the sketch. Huge applause again. And there were a couple of times when one of them would forget a line, and someone in the audience would shout it out for them. Wow. Because they know it so well. Yeah. So these are really, really beloved. So the episodes I’ve picked don’t include the Parrot Sketch, but if you haven’t seen that, I might show it to you separately because it’s so famous. Okay. You kind of need to have seen it.
Abigoliah: I’m down for it.
Tom: So we’ll do series two, episode two.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Which I think is a really good example of them at their best. It contains one very well remembered sketch, which kind of has to be seen in its original TV context to work. And then series three, episode ten, which I just think is really funny, even though it doesn’t contain any well remembered sketches at all. But it’s a really good example of the thing I was saying. Like, they’re really playing with the form in really exciting ways. They’re really being ambitious around this time. What are you expecting?
Abigoliah: Even though everything I’ve remembered is one of them dressed as a woman. And you said that never happened. I swear they dress as women. Oh, they.
Tom: Do. They do definitely dress as women. They just haven’t dressed as women in any of the things that I’m talking about.
Abigoliah: Okay. So I think there’s going to be you know, kind of in that sense of when I think of older British comedy, I do think of it coming from the pantomime. So like men dressed as women being like, silly. I think there’s going to be a song in my head, like, always look on the Bright Side of Life and Holy Grail turned into a musical. So in my head, there’s going to be a song and the footage is going to be grainy. Yeah, I think I think it’s. And there’s going to be sketches where they play where they play like kings and queens from, like the time of King Arthur’s Court and stuff. I wonder if I’m going to see bits of Holy Grail like the start of that idea in these. Does that make sense?
Tom: It does. And actually, that’s in one particular case, not a bad prediction.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: All right. Should we go watch?
Abigoliah: Yeah. Let’s go see it
* * * * *
Tom: All right, welcome back. Bizarrely, I think this conversation is going to start with a discussion of Tom waits.
Abigoliah: Okay. All right. I swear to God, one of the sketches in the series three, episode ten that we watched, I was like, I’ve seen this before. I don’t know why I’ve seen it. I have seen it. And if you didn’t show it to me, my partner Tom would have shown it to me. And I swear Tom waits is in it. Tom Waits is in the background. Just no lines not featured.
Tom: What were then called extras, what we now call supporting artists.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: And they can’t speak because then they have to pay them more.
Abigoliah: And in the ten minutes that we have spent between watching it and recording this, I googled it. And it’s the internet says absolutely not. No, he wasn’t there, but I, I.
Tom: You know, better.
Abigoliah: I’m gonna research this because like I asked, I asked Google and the AI popped up first and then I asked ChatGPT. And of course that’s AI. And it’s like there’s no listing of Tom waits being in it. And I’m like, well, just because I swear that was Tom Waits.
Tom: When was Tom waits born?
Abigoliah: I don’t know.
Tom: Because that was made in 1972.
Abigoliah: Okay. Hold on.
Tom: And that man looks like he’s about 30.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So he was born in 49.
Tom: Oh, yeah. Okay. That’s.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. Like, I swear I really and and he would do that. He would be like, I’m just gonna like, hang out and it’s not gonna be a thing.
Tom: There were some musicians who were big fans will come to this a little bit later, but Monty Python and the Holy Grail was backed by different musicians. And in particular, Monty Python’s Life of Brian had a decent budget, like 1 million or £2, but at the last minute the chairman of – it would have been EMI – read the script and pulled the funding.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: Yeah. And the only reason it got made is that George Harrison of the Beatles remortgaged his house.
Abigoliah: Whoa.
Tom: And started Handmade Films, which went on to make lots of British comedies. But he said afterwards, I wanted to see the film. So that is the most expensive cinema ticket anyone has ever bought.
Abigoliah: That’s amazing.
Tom: Eric Idle, in particular, was always hobnobbing with rock stars.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: See, they didn’t have a plan. They didn’t have a pitch. They just got 13 episodes. And then when their film gets cancelled, a freaking Beatle is like, well, I want to see it and funds it. This doesn’t happen anymore. We need to bring this sort of life back where artists just fund other people’s artists. Going. I’m curious.
Tom: What did you think of Monty Python’s Flying Circus?
Abigoliah: Okay, here’s the thing. I feel like I was watching something that I’m not smart enough to appreciate. Like, the entire time.
Tom: It’s very silly.
Abigoliah: Because, well, I wanted to like it, but it wasn’t like hitting me in my core. And we filmed me watching it because we thought it would be good to get reaction shots. And I don’t think you’re going to have much to go from. As far as I felt like I was just kind of smiling at it being like, I’m gonna get it. It’s. It’s silly. It’s absolutely silly. Couple things. One, you know how people watch stuff with subtitles? Yes. I’ve always been against that. I had trouble understanding them at some points. And I don’t think it’s because they have British accents thing. Because I’ve been here long enough. I’m gonna go ahead and say it’s audio quality. I don’t know, but some of it I was like, I don’t know what they said.
Tom: There’s a few little stumbles, which today I think you go back and redo, but they’re doing it all in front of a live audience. And I think there’s a feeling that you don’t want to go back and do a retake unless you really have to. Plus, in those days of the BBC, you would record a show like that from 7 p.m. till 10 p.m. and if you hadn’t got everything you needed by 10 p.m., the electricians union would just come in and turn the lights off.
Abigoliah: Oh really?
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: There was a bit in the first episode we watched right when they were out as the Spanish Inquisition, that it looks like one of them was about to break. Did you see that? Yeah. I mean, I think he kind of did, but he covered it real quickly.
Tom: So it’s not going out live, but it’s being shot in an electronic studio where they’re cutting from camera to camera live. And then those pre-filmed 16mm inserts. And that’s how basically all television was being made at that time, really. No exceptions. That mixture of in-studio on electronic cameras and then film cameras outside. There’s a one sketch where you were talking about it being very meta. Another episode, John Cleese is being ridiculous with other pythons in a studio set and goes to the window, and then it cuts to a bit of 16mm film and he looks surprised, then runs back inside, looks out another window again. There’s an outside shot on 16mm film, and he comes back in and goes, gentlemen, I’ve got terrible news. This entire place is surrounded by film.
Abigoliah: See, I think I like it better when people quote Monty Python at me. I think that’s the thing. And you told me it was going to be like they thought about the way it was shot, and it wasn’t going to be like, boom, the end of the sketch button. But it took me a minute to find the rhythm of it and be like, you know, when we left the Spanish Inquisition and then we went out into the BBC truck, I was like, what? And then I was like, oh, we’re in a new sketch. I did like the traveling salesman sketch. I think I got I laughed and chuckled more. Along with season three, episode ten, which you said wasn’t or John Cleese didn’t like that one was not.
Tom: He felt they were repeating themselves.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: He thought the quality was poor. He just felt that they weren’t breaking new ground the way they had been with the first two seasons.
Abigoliah: Maybe that’s why I felt more comfortable watching it, because they were more settled into it. But I, I laughed along more with that. Or maybe it was just because it was like about sex. And sex is like, really freaking funny.
Tom: Dirty books.
Abigoliah: Dirty books? Dirty books. But yeah, I just I really want to like it. And, like, I feel like I appreciate it. I feel like for me, watching Monty Python is like watching jazz. I’m like, this is really important to someone, and that person is not me.
Tom: But it’s a funny thing going back to the original television shows, because like when you watch the live shows that they did or even listen to the record albums. You’re getting something which is much more considered. So these shows were thrown together. We have to have 30 minutes of material to give to the BBC on Friday. And so to a certain extent, whatever we can cobble together in the available time is what we’ll get. And then all the very best stuff gets taken out and reprised and repeated, and they find new details in the performance and so on. So in a sense, what you’re seeing when you watch these shows is first drafts and people whose first exposure to Monty Python is, for example, the theatrical films or seeing them in the live shows can be disappointed when they come back and watch these original television episodes, even if it’s other material that’s made them fans. They’re like, well, this isn’t as good. So that’s the reason why I showed you that version of the parrot sketch from And now for something completely different, because the version on TV is basically the same dialogue, but the performances aren’t quite as finessed.
And it’s in the first season. Yeah. So the other problem with the first season is that when your show is a hit, then when you say there are tickets available for a live recording, all your fans clamour to buy tickets. But when you’re a brand new show, you get whoever signs up to be in the audience. Yeah. So those first few shows, the audience doesn’t really know what to make of it either.
Abigoliah: You know, when I was like, did they film this in front of a live studio audience? And you’re like, yeah, in my head, I was like, were there five people there? Which I’ve been at those shows. I’ve worked on shows where it’s a new show, and even if the person fronting it is famous, like the one studio out in White City, White Chapel, whatever it’s called, I think that that studio holds like 300 people like 60 people showed up to watch it. And they were great.
Tom: The first episode of Red Dwarf, which is a sitcom filmed in front of a studio audience. Okay there were so few people in the audience. It was filmed in Manchester that the writers described going to the local pub and just, like, trying to drag people out to come and sit in the audience to try and make it a bit more full.
Abigoliah: Wow. I think the idea that this was like kind of like their rough draft, the show they got to put on television was the rough draft. I, I can appreciate that because it’s not like I hated it or didn’t think it was funny. I thought the sketch of the Spanish Inquisition like trying to torture people by making them really comfortable. Like having the old lady sit in the chair and, like, hitting her with pillows was very fun. I thought the through line with the smutty magazines, dirty books.
Tom: The dirty books.
Abigoliah: Dirty books was really fun. And Tom Waits made an appearance. I swear it is. Tom, wait, I, I, I seriously doubt by next episode I’m gonna have some information and I am going to have cited sources.
Tom: Episode eight. We will have Tom waits on the podcast.
Abigoliah: But we’ll just have him in the background and not say anything. So yeah, I don’t know, man. I just I want to love it. And I feel so disappointed in myself that I’m not like I understand now. I feel like we’re gonna put this out and everyone’s gonna unsubscribe from the podcast. And I’m going to be the least likable person in Britain because I’m like, I don’t. It’s just not for me.
Tom: Well, we’ll continue exploring. We’ve got a lot of variety in these first eight, so hopefully there’ll be something here which attracts you more. What do you think? Only having seen these two episodes would have happened in a later episode.
Abigoliah: Okay, so I was thinking if they did, if they did an episode here and now, now only seeing those two episodes in my head, the through line is always some cops or people coming in to stop the fun, right?
Tom: Well, in fact, in the first series, I think it’s the first series, Graham Chapman had a regular character of an Army colonel who would come in and interrupt a sketch on the grounds that it was getting too silly.
Abigoliah: Okay, so. So this proves it, right? It’s an army colonel. It’s a cop trying to stop a dirty books. And it’s the Spanish Inquisition. If they made a episode in 2025, it would be ice. And they would come in and do a raid and try to deport people from England because they were from the West Country. Like that would be the opening sketch. And then every once in a while, I think ice would come back in and try to deport people from being in various parts of England specifically. And because if we go to Scotland, that’s a whole that’s a whole thing.
Tom: The bit of England you’re allowed to come from get smaller and smaller.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: And eventually it’s, it’s this front room.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Exactly, exactly. That’s what I think they do in 2025.
Tom: All right. Let me tell you what actually happened. So we’ve already touched on the fact there were three theatrical films Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Like I said, they scrambled the money together for that, but it was incredibly cheap. It was made for literally £200,000.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: And that was 1975. So you only went a bit further, but it was really that’s why there are that’s why the coconut gag is there. They literally couldn’t afford horses.
Abigoliah: That’s amazing.
Tom: And then Life of Brian, with the help of George Harrison. And then Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in 1983, which is a sketch film that doesn’t have a narrative. So it feels much more like the old TV shows. And that was their last work together as a sextet.
Tom: But they all carried on working outside the group. John Cleese, of course, made Fawlty Towers with his then wife, Connie Booth. Michael Palin and Terry Jones made a series called Ripping Yarns, which was sort of parodies of Boy’s Own Adventure. Palin, in particular, became a very well respected actor. He’s in lots of good stuff and makes travel documentaries and so on. Eric Idle created Rutland Weekend Television and the spoof band The Rutles, which was a take off of The Beatles. And then he turned Holy Grail into the Broadway musical Spamalot. And as we touched on, Terry Gilliam became a very successful director. Graham Chapman, who had battled alcohol his whole life, died of cancer in 1989 when he was just 48.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s really sad.
Tom: And so subsequent reunions always felt a bit half hearted, certainly to me. And they did, of course, sing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life at his funeral.
Abigoliah: That would be the saddest thing ever, is to listen to a bunch of people mourning singing that. I have a question. In the later years, like, kind of when they started to break off and do different things, did they all leave the Monty Python universe still good friends, or was there a falling out kind of like you have with big bands?
Tom: And there was never a big falling out, but they’ve often described the fact that there was quite a lot of factionalism.
Abigoliah: So factionalism.
Tom: Factionalism. So there were kind of split into two camps.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Basically an Oxford camp and a Cambridge camp.
Abigoliah: Why am I not surprised?
Tom: So Michael Palin and Terry Jones wanted to do things.
Abigoliah: My poshness was funnier than your poshness.
Tom: Michael Palin Terry Jones wanted to do big, wacky sketches which were shot on location. And were full of nonsense.
Abigoliah: And are they there? The Cambridge guys.
Tom: There, the Oxford guys.
Abigoliah: There, the Oxford guys.
Tom: And John Cleese and Graham Chapman were Cambridge. They wanted to do much more intellectual stuff. Lots of stuff about wordplay, the so-called thesaurus sketches. So Dead Parrot as an example of that, where a lot of the comedy comes from. How many synonyms for dead can John Cleese come up with John Cleese and Graham Chapman love that kind of thing. Eric Idle was more in that camp. Okay. And then Terry Gilliam tended to side with Jones and Palin, even though he had been educated in America. He hadn’t gone to Oxford or Cambridge. Right. So the two most prominent members of each camp were John Cleese and Terry Jones, and they would lock horns a lot. They would argue a lot. So, for example, when Terry Jones was directing Monty Python and the Holy Grail, John Cleese remembers doing a bit with Eric Idle, and it had taken them half a dozen takes to get it right. And he felt on that sixth take. Yes. You know, the timing was there. It was really good. And then Terry Jones asked for another take because the smoke was blowing in the wrong direction, and that kind of thing would drive John Cleese crazy. He was like, but was the smoke funny enough? That’s what I want to know.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So in particular, I think in the in the final series, when John Cleese left, I think everybody felt that the balance had gone. Actually, that arguing that had gone on between Cleese and Jones was what gave the shows the balance they needed. He’s not there. And Graham Chapman stewing in his own alcohol. Yeah. They didn’t have the same ethos, the same kind of energy that they had before.
Abigoliah: And then you need Paul and you need John.
Tom: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Abigoliah: And George and Ringo can just hang out.
Tom: Terry Jones, unfortunately passed away as well. He died in 2020, not long after they’d done those big shows at the O2. And even then, you can see he’s beginning to suffer from some kind of mental deterioration, and he has to read some of his lines off cue cards.
Abigoliah: Did you ever get to see them live?
Tom: I saw them at the O2.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Did you? How was it at the O2?
Tom: I mean, so kind of like what I was saying about
Abigoliah: Wait. Front row. You got front row tickets at the O2? Yeah, to see them. Was that, like, Taylor Swift? Level of expensive?
Tom: No, it wasn’t that bad. But what happened was they’d had some bad financial advice. And the company they set up, which I think is called Python Brackets, Monty productions they owed a big tax bill or something.
Abigoliah: So that’s why they went back out again.
Tom: So somebody said you should do a show at the O2. And it sold out like that and were like, we could do like ten of these. So they did and then put them out on TV. And somehow I can’t remember how I managed to get front row tickets. And that was amazing. But it was like what I told you about the Hollywood Bowl. The whole audience has heard these sketches before. Yeah, there was some new stuff there. There’s a song in The Meaning of Life that Eric Idle sings about the universe, and Brian Cox had told him that some of the scientific facts quoted in the song have now been revised. And so he did a new version of that song with Brian Cox and Stephen Hawking on a video. And so there was like new stuff in there, but it’s sort of it’s five old men in their dotage recovering recreating past glories. And sometimes it’s fun. It is just it is often fun. There’s moments when they make each other laugh. Well, they break on stage.
Abigoliah: The thing about stand up comedy. And as a stand up comedian, we always talk about how we have to write new stuff and we can’t repeat and we can’t repeat. It’s really like there are comedians whom I would love to watch them do stuff that I have heard on recordings. Like, I would love to see Patton Oswalt do his album Where Wolves and Lollipops now so I could watch it live. But like, whereas with musicians, if everyone knows the song, they get to sing along as a comedian, if it’s like, oh my gosh, they’re doing the George Lucas kill George Lucas with a shovel, big Patton Oswald reference. You’re like, you don’t get to sing along. So then the comedian is just like talking to silence, which as much as the audience would enjoy as a performer, you’re like, this isn’t going well. So like, I can I can understand how that would have been really weird for them at the O2 and the Hollywood Bowl to just be like, there’s a huge cheer. And then three minutes of just…
Tom: Subtle chuckles.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Quiet appreciation.
Tom: But there’s moments when things start to go wrong. There’s a sketch that they did in their live shows, which is part of the TV series, but not one of the most celebrated ones called the Church Fuzz or the Church Police. And they could never get through it on stage without somebody corpsing because it was so silly. Yeah. And just something about that sketch would always set them off. So that’s a particular highlight, I think, of the film of them at the Hollywood Bowl, because you’re seeing something that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise unless they were doing it live in front of an audience.
Abigoliah: So when you curated our first season, obviously landmarks, and you were like, we have to start with Monty Python, Monty Python, Monty Python. What? Why do you think Flying Circus is so important to people? And or why is it important to you if it is so?
Tom: It’s important in the comedy landscape because it was incredibly influential.
Abigoliah: Were there other sketch shows as meta as this with the morphine in and out?
Tom: It was beginning. So there’s other shows I mentioned. Like at last, the 1948 show had done a little bit of that. That last one we watched ends with the the BBC one globe. Yeah. And of course, the impact of that is lost now. But if you’re watching that in 1972, you don’t know that the program hasn’t ended, because that is what that continuity announcement would look like.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Over my head.
Tom: Sometimes they would do that like ten minutes into the show. They were kind of playing with that stuff all the time.
Abigoliah: That’s fun.
Tom: And one of the things that Joel Morris talks about this, you know, Joel Morris, he’s a British comedy writer who’s written on all sorts of things, but he writes and talks very, very intelligently and amusingly about the process of comedy writing. One of the things he’s pointed out about Monty Python is that they were incredibly enthusiastic about just getting jokes in everywhere. So if you buy Monty Python book, there’ll be jokes on the cover. There’ll be jokes on the spine. If you look at the copyright notice, there’ll be jokes there. They just want jokes everywhere. The titles of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I think, are one of the funniest things that’s ever been put on film. But it’s just text. But it’s because the the titles start to have their own Swedish subtitles, which then go off into this lunatic digression about trying a holiday in Sweden and the dangers of Swedish mousse. It’s just so enthusiastically stuffing jokes into every little crevice you.
Abigoliah: Are in the world immediately. Like the last sketch show I watched was the latest season of SNL, which of course has very strong starts and finishes to everything. It doesn’t all morph.
Tom: What do we say? Strong finishes. There’s finishes.
Abigoliah: There’s a button. Some of it. I watched the whole of it. That’s a that’s a different podcast. It is. But my point is, is like in every SNL sketch there’s a setup line like, well, I’m quite excited to meet your parents for the first time. And whereas, like, what you just showed me of Monty Python, there’s none of that. And I think maybe that’s why my mind took a moment to wrap around it, because it was like, oh, we’re on a front porch now. Oh, we’re we’re torturing an old lady now. We’re just in it right away without a big, you know, heavy, like, look at us on holiday.
Tom: So what it really did, was it kind of crystallized or synthesized lots of different trends that were happening in comedy at the time and then just did it better and with more broad popular appeal than anyone else. And so for about 20 years afterwards, almost anyone trying to do especially sketch comedy, but almost any kind of comedy had a choice of you either impersonate Python or you react against it. You can’t get away from it. It’s always there. And the list of people who’ve been inspired by Python is crazy. It’s Sacha Baron Cohen, it’s Matt Parker and Trey Stone, it’s Tina Fey, it’s Ricky Gervais, it’s Matt Groening. All these people talk about growing up with Monty Python, watching those shows, or watching the movies or or reading the books or listening to the album. Listening to the albums is one of the first ways I got into Python.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: My friend Ernest made me cassette tape copies of some of the albums. And again, the albums are playing around with all this kind of meta stuff. There was literally one album where they’d managed to figure out that you could cut two grooves into one record. Okay, so what you heard would depend on where the needle happened to fall, and you could put the same record on your turntable on the same side and accidentally hear something else, because there were two different grooves.
Abigoliah: They’ve literally done what everyone thinks Pink Floyd has tried to do.
Tom: And there’ll be things like, there’s.
Abigoliah: A secret song.
Tom: I think it’s the Holy Grail record album begins with an announcement. Thank you for buying the executive version of this record, which has been especially hand milled for your enjoyment. And it contains no profanities apart from two shits, three fucks and a foreskin. And since they only occur in this opening introduction, you are past them now. So they’re always playing around with that kind of stuff. And I think that is one of the things that gives it this, this fizz, this kind of punky energy, which is a an evolution of what had been happening with the kind of footlights stuff. But it’s they’re playing around with the form in particular. As I say, Spike Milligan had kind of got there first, but they did it better and they had Terry Gilliam.
Abigoliah: And it was a new show every week.
Tom: For 13 weeks at a time, and there would be consecutive.
Abigoliah: And were they writing them through the week, or were they writing them like in the break and then coming in?
Tom: I don’t know the exact timings, but my guess would be that they probably started putting them out about halfway through, so they would have done quite a bit of writing. Okay. There’s very little room writing. So there were three teams of writers. Cleese and Chapman. Team one Jones and Palin. Team two. And Eric Idle writing on his own.
Speaker13: And so Eric, just alone with his candle.
Tom: They’d write for several days, and they’d come and read out material and then vote on it. And Terry Gilliam gets more and more kind of part of the gang as the series goes on. Eventually he’s just the animator, but he’s Cardinal Fang in the Spanish Inquisition. You can see him buying dirty books in series three. So he becomes much more part of the ensemble as things go on. He’s not a terrific actor, but he’s a very odd face, which is often very helpful. Yeah. And then they’d argue about it, and then they’d just through arguing and through evolution, it would turn into a shootable script, and then they’d have to go and do the pre-filming, and then they’d rehearse it and do it in front of the audience.
Abigoliah: Okay. No cue cards?
Tom: No. No, because they were used to doing university revue.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So they’re used to like live performance.
Tom: And it’s not the same thing as Saturday Night Live where they have a dress rehearsal, which they also film, and then they rewrite after the dress rehearsal before they do it. They’ve been they’ve been refining and honing that script all week. They’ll do a camera rehearsal in the afternoon, and then they’ll bring the audience in and they’ll just try and do it straight through. I mean, not straight through, because they have to go and get costume change and so on, but they’ll try and do it in order.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And then show the audience the pre-filmed stuff at the appropriate time. And sitcoms are being made like that as well. You know, if you watch something like The Good Life, which we will definitely at some point, all the stuff in the kitchen is in the studio, and then when they go out to the back garden, it’s pre-filmed on 16 millimeter.
Abigoliah: What? Who is your favourite Monty Python? I feel like every time I say Monty Python, I’m saying it weird. I’m like Monty Python.
Tom: That’s Americans always say Monty Python.
Abigoliah: Monty Python.
Tom: The long oh at the end of Python. Whereas in in my English accent it’s more of a schwa, it’s more of that neutral, colourless vowel. Pyth’n.
Abigoliah: Monty Pyth’n.
Tom: We’ll work on it. We’ll workshop it. John Cleese was always kind of my comedy hero growing up. He has become a bit of a reactionary old duffer later in life. There is a bit of Fawlty Towers in which the crusty old major uses the N word, which was fine, apparently on BBC 2 in 1978, but is frowned upon these days. And John Cleese was fulminating that he had to change that when they did the stage version.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: But you couldn’t say fuck on BBC 2 in 1978, and that doesn’t seem to be something that he’s frothing at the mouth about. Yeah, this is just the way social mores change and the way you have to adapt your material to different situations, and that’s what writing is. So I don’t have a lot of sympathy with that. But in the 70s and 80s, he was this titan of comedy with such an incredible physical and verbal performer. And as I said, he was the, the, the linchpin around which everything else was built. He is a real.
Abigoliah: Presence in it. Like, I mean, first of all, he’s physically very tall. But there’s something about when he was on stage in the sketches that it’s like, okay. Although that being said, like when he first walked on, I was like, who’s that? Because in my head, I always picture him with a moustache. But once, once you said it, I was like, oh, shoot, that is him. If I had kept my mouth shut for a couple more minutes, I would have been like, yeah.
Tom: But I think there are. They all have strengths and weaknesses as performers, but it’s the ensemble and they also know what their strengths and weaknesses are. So they cast very well. So I think Terry Jones is probably the least able performer. But you give him the right material and he’s terrific. And you can’t imagine anyone else in that part like his Cardinal Biggles as part of the Spanish Inquisition is brilliant. And when Graham Chapman died, John Cleese had always been a little bit sniffy about his writing partnership with Graham Chapman. He’d say it was great having Graham there, because you’d be working on something and he’d just throw in something completely left field that no one else could ever have thought of. But he couldn’t drive the machine. He couldn’t make it work on his own. But he did say that when Chapman died, they’d lost a really important part of the performing ensemble, because there were things that Chapman could do that no one else could do. Like, he’s the lead. He plays Arthur in Holy Grail, and he plays Brian in Life of Brian.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I’m sorry, I just take umbrage with having watched all of two episodes. And John Cleese being like, well, he’s a good writing partner because he gave some ideas, but he couldn’t like, drive the writing. I’m like, well, neither could you, John, because you used a writing partner, didn’t you? Like, that’s what it is. It’s collaborative. It’s you both talk about some ideas and someone says something absurd and then you write it down.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: John Cleese is just upset because he was the typist, clearly. And he didn’t like that part.
Tom: Yeah, it could be. Could be. Maybe. Also worth pointing out that not long after they started making Python shows, Graham Chapman came out as gay, which was quite the thing in those days.
Abigoliah: As in it was fashionable? They were all doing it?
Tom: I mean, he didn’t have to. Yeah, but he felt the need to. And some of the pythons were quite shocked.
Abigoliah: They didn’t know that about their own partners. Wow.
Tom: Barry took is supposed to have said. Let me be absolutely clear about this, boys. This does not mean you have to stop doing poof jokes. It was a different time. Yeah, but Eric Idle remembers that when this was on the news, they received a letter from this querulous old woman who said. A member of the Monty Python team who did not give his name. Not true. Has admitted to being a homosexual. I would remind him that in the Bible it clearly says, if a man lies with another man, he should be taken out and killed. And Eric Idle claims to have written back, saying to her, we found out who it is, and we’ve taken him out and killed him.
Abigoliah: I love that they’ll go after it no matter what.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: I guess my final thoughts with Monty Python is like, I love hearing about them, and I like I said, it’s like I like it when people quote it at me. And I think their history is fascinating and I deeply respect who they are and what they’ve done. But the only reason why I would continue watching Flying Circus is to force myself to like it. Where is like, I don’t think I like it.
Tom: So that brings us to our shelf of comedy glory.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: When we finished watching each of these shows, I’m going to ask you, do you want to add the show we just watched to the shelf of Comedy Glory? And one way of thinking about that is, is this a show that you would come back to having seen two episodes? Do you want to watch more? Do you want to start at the beginning all the way through? Or is there something you’d rather put in the bargain bin, never to be seen again and no judgment? Comedy is one of the most personal things in the world, and so your taste is entirely your own. But are you going to put Monty Python’s Flying Circus on the shelf of comedy glory.
Abigoliah: As this is our first episode about a TV show? Please don’t give us one star reviews. Dear listener I think I’m going to leave Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Sorry, Monty Python’s Flying Circus off the shelf of glory and in the bargain bin. However, I will go out and purchase a book called The Making of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and love reading about it, but I don’t think I want to rewatch it.
Tom: Fair enough. So what have we learned?
Abigoliah: We have learned that Tom Waits did a silent cameo.
Tom: In season…
Abigoliah: Three, episode ten. I am right about this. I will find it and I will cite sources. I will get reputable sources. It’s not just because you can’t trust AI anymore. Ai was telling me he wasn’t there. And we know AI is a lie. So Tom Waits was in it. What I learned is, I think it’s been really interesting to hear about what they did and how they shaped comedy here in Britain. And I think what I’ve learned is like, you know, all the source material they drew from to create this. And you know how, like, barn busting door opening this show was when it came on the scene. And you critically watched it. Much more younger than you and I are now.
Tom: I was about ten.
Abigoliah: I am, like I said, I’m going to be 40 this year. I’ve never seen it. I have seen a lot of comedy. So this discovery of something new is not happening in me. All this, like, how did they do that? I’m like, oh, that’s where this comes from.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: So yeah, maybe that’s why I’m not a big fan is because I didn’t start watching it at ten.
Tom: And also it is 50 years old.
Abigoliah: It is 50 years old.
Tom: All right. Well, our show for next time, we’re going to take what sounds like the most boring and obvious sitcom setup in the world for students sharing a house, but they turned it into one of the most groundbreaking comedies that’s ever been on television.
Abigoliah: Oh, cool. It’s like the British version of Friends.
Tom: It is not at all like the British version of Friends, but I see what drew you to that conclusion. We’re going to watch The Young Ones. And listeners, if you want to watch along with us, I’ll be making Abigoliah watch season one, episode two oil and season two, episode one Bambi, and both of those are available on iPlayer, I believe.
Abigoliah: I’m so excited. I have never seen this. I don’t know who’s in it. Can you tell me what year?
Tom: Yes. 82 and 84.
Abigoliah: Okay, cool.
Tom: And if I tell you the name of the most prominent participants, then I think you might know who I’m referring to. Or we could say that little episode two. What do you want to do?
Abigoliah: Oh, I want to know now, but I have no delayed ability to have delayed gratification.
Tom: All right. This was among the first television appearances of a group of actor comedians, which include Rik Mayall.
Abigoliah: Okay. The one time when we. After poker. When we got drunk and started talking about. And this is when. Fun fact kids, we came up with this podcast drunk after poker when Tom was like, you’ve never seen this? You showed me this.
Tom: No, that was Not The Nine O’Clock News.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Which is not on this first list. But we will come to it very soon. But the Young Ones is actually came just after. Not The Nine O’Clock News. They overlapped. Yeah, but not the 9:00 news. Started in 1979, and the young one started in 82.
Abigoliah: I am very excited about this. I’m very excited about this. All right. Until then, it’s goodbye from me.
Tom: And it’s goodbye from me, Tom Salinsky.