And now for something completely different ...

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Sep 5, 1999 | by Words: Mark Rickards

They invented the Ministry of Funny Walks, made mirth out of flogging a dead parrot and caused uproar by lampooning religion. Now Monty Python prepare to celebrate 30 years since their anarchic brand of humour hit the TV screens N OCTOBER 5, 1969, a new television comedy series was tucked into the late-night schedules of the BBC. Thirty years later, the corporation is preparing to commemorate a comedy programme which introduced an unsuspecting audience to men who dressed as mice, flying sheep and a number of seemingly unconnected scenes involving pigs. It was a programme which, if John Cleese had had his way, might have been called A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin or even Owl Stretching Time.

Cleese remembers vividly the experience of trying something which was, quite literally, completely different. "Michael Palin and I were in the dressing room just before we ever recorded the first Monty Python in front of a live audience, and he was looking at me and asked me what I was thinking. I said that we might be the first people in history to record a half hour to complete silence, and he said that he was thinking the same thing. It felt that experimental."

Monty Python was a break from the satirical tradition which had dominated comedy in the Sixties, with programmes such as That Was the Week That Was and The Frost Report. Some, like Cleese, had worked on these shows and found the strict format of the sketches and the need for a punchline, frustrating and constraining. Nearly all the team who went on to make the Python series had listened to The Goon Show and were excited by the mix of the surreal and the anarchic that it offered.

"For me it was a breakthrough," says Palin. ''I discovered my own comedy heroes in the Goons. My parents just didn't know what it was, and my father used to come into the room when I was listening and think that the radio had broken down. In a sense I owed a lot to the Goons because it brought something out of me, a humour which wasn't derived from something someone else had done."

Terry Jones remembers the "flights of the imagination" that he found in Spike Milligan's work, which sparked off the idea that perhaps it would be possible to create a television version without the normally accepted boundaries.

It was Barry Took who first suggested the team to the BBC, although Cleese points out that the writing partnerships had already been established. He recalls: "I'd started writing with Graham Chapman when we were still at Cambridge. We were a writing item in 1961, so by the time we came to Python we had already done a lot of writing together, including on The Frost Report. Michael and Terry had been writing together in Oxford, so when we came together we tended to stay in those pairings."

Barry Took was to grease the wheels within the BBC and persuade the men in suits that they were taking on a talented group. "I think the BBC were unbelievably brave," says Cleese. "I don't think they knew what they were commissioning, and that was what was so great about it. And whereas in many other eras of television there would have had to have been a pilot that would be analysed, they just said go ahead and make 13 programmes. Looking back it seems like a heroic decision."

At first there was surprisingly little reaction to the show, which the BBC did not even broadcast to all the regions. Jones remembers that there was very little money available for the series. "I think the budget for first series was about #3500 per show and that was all in, so it was a pretty cheap show and we were hard put to get all the filming and everything done. There wasn't much fat on that budget."

The first programme introduced the audience to the Funniest Joke in the World, a joke used in the Second World War to help defeat the Germans as it was whispered by specially-trained troops. In the second programme those most dangerous of animals were let loose, "the clever sheep".

Later in the series, the now infamous Gumbies appeared, along with the immortal Nudge Nudge sketch in which Eric Idle enquires as to whether Palin's wife is a "goer".

One comedian who followed in what he describes as "the long shadow of Python" is Stephen Fry, who still remembers the very first episode he saw. "I was 12 and I knew nothing about it. I saw a little bit by accident on a black and white TV set and I just remember a strange image to music and those distant, echoing footsteps and I thought it was a bit scary. But it's made by your own generation. You suddenly find that your school friends are saying how brilliant it is and so you immediately have to agree with them. The next time it's on you would kill your parents if they didn't let you watch it, but I have to say that my parents didn't particularly like it."

Fry's parents were not the only ones to feel affronted by the Pythons' irreverent and surreal humour. But looking back on the early programmes, the men involved find the idea that they were presenting anything immoral or subversive as absurd.

"I wasn't the Johnny Rotten of comedy," says Palin. "I can never look at Python and think we did something dangerous, or broke the barriers of comedy, or were shocking. When people say that to me I'm really quite surprised because I was doing Python when I was still going to visit my mother on Sundays, and my life hadn't changed very much. Yet people were saying that we were undermining the whole moral climate of this country. I never really saw that at the time."