AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT...

I was in the fifth form at a Leicester grammar school when the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus - the sparkling and effusive comedy series which began before anyone now under thirty was born - gatecrashed Sunday evening television on October 5th, 1969.

My recollection of the programmes themselves is far from hazy or incomplete (as it is of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s exquisite but dimly remembered Not Only But Also, most of the recordings of which were wiped during the unforgivable archive purge of the 1970s when the BBC found itself running out of space). On the contrary, I’ve watched most of the forty-four TV episodes repeatedly and well into my forties, thanks to BBC videos and UK Gold.

No, it is the ever dimming memories of the passionately negative reactions to the programme that are redolent of an age that has not so much gone as fled. Detractors fell into two groups.

The first comprised those people, mostly over thirty, who found it offensive. It is hard to believe today, after The Young Ones and Bottom, Harry Enfield’s Wayne and Waynetta Slob, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s flatulent Frenchmen, The League Of Gentlemen and two decades of “alternative” comedians, that anyone was actually shocked by Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

But shocked they were - by swear words that were then still taboo in broadcasting, by sexual or scatological references in the scripts, by sketches about cannibalism, by alleged “blasphemy”, by the often risqué (for the time) animations of Terry Gilliam, and by a stark naked Terry Jones at the piano. The “Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days” pastiche, where the members of a 1920s tennis party gush fake blood from the stumps of severed heads and limbs, was particularly condemned by our elders.

A sixth form friend told me in 1971 that his father had furiously switched off the television the previous evening, and banned the programme from his home forever, because the word “bastard” had been uttered. Was his dad a pious cleric or pin-striped pillar of some suburban community? No, he was a market trader. Outraged opposition to Monty Python cut across class barriers.

The then ubiquitous Mrs Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association dealt it an occasional glancing blow, although most of her crusading venom in the area of comedy was directed at Till Death Us Do Part. And only because of Alf Garnett’s bad language and “blasphemy” - she seemed strangely unconcerned by his racialism.

The second group of Monty Python detractors consisted of people of all ages who simply did not find it funny. In this respect, the programme divided the nation, as seen microcosmically among the regulars of local pubs. Fierce arguments would break out over this issue, with the anti-Monty Python lobby always seeming the more polemic, as if they feared that a virus of cult comedy was infecting everyone else but they would never get the joke. (I remember the battle lines being similarly drawn over Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em and, amazingly, Fawlty Towers, both dismissed by the enemy as “just slapstick”.)

Here, class was a factor in the division of opinion, and education more so. The Monty Python writers were highly educated and cultured men, who drew on a wide range of historical, philosophical and literary references for their material. The viewing masses (including my own dear parents) simply did not understand it.

They may have allowed themselves a grudging chuckle at the Upper-Class Twit of the Year Show or the Ministry of Silly Walks, but sketches about summarising Proust competitions, about Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Mao vying to win a lounge suite on a banal TV quiz show, or about football teams comprised of the world’s greatest philosophers, simply left them cold. They did not, and could not, get it.

In the early Seventies we would recite, red-faced, the Parrot Sketch in the sixth form common room, screaming maniacally at each other as we competed for accuracy of rendition and quality of John Cleese impersonation. Not possessing photographic memories, we were probably fairly wide of the mark in an age before home video recorders, but we enjoyed ourselves.

When this immortal sketch was affectionately parodied a couple of years ago by the excellent young Asian comedy show Goodness Gracious Me, to the whooping delight of its live audience, I realised that John Cleese et al., those shocking and misunderstood impostors of thirty-two years ago, had been a British popular-cultural institution for the last twenty.

A Monty Python aficionado should strive, though, to keep a sense of perspective. The classic sketches already mentioned (along with the Lumberjack Song, the Cheese Shop, Spot the Brain Cell, the Silly Party’s election success, the Spam sketch, and Eric Idle’s “Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink, Say No More!”) were, it has to be admitted, the cream of a sometimes overabundant crop. Many of the episodes were self-indulgent or repetitive; others were simply not funny.

My own favourite sketch was that utterly perfect reversal of a Northern and Midlands literary and dramatic genre, where the brutish working-class father (Graham Chapman) is the writer and the aspirational middle-class son (Eric Idle) is the miner! An argument develops during the son’s dutiful visit to the parental home, despite the desperate pleas of the jaded wife and mother (Terry Jones).

“Hampstead weren’t good enough for yuh!” taunts the late, great Graham Chapman, veins swelling on neck and temple, in one of the most stunning displays of impassioned acting I’ve ever seen in a comedy sketch. “You ’ad to go swanning off to Barnsley!”

Like the best of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, that was something completely different.

© Pete J Garbett 2001