One: Whither Canada?
Whither Canada? was a rejected title for the series as a whole. It, and other rejected titles, were used for the episode titles (not given on screen but used in a number of semi-official places such as the script book and DVD episode menu) of the first five programmes.
The first proper sketch is the 'famous deaths' sketch, presented by John Cleese as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This is followed by teaching Italians to speak Italian, which is one of my early favourites, due to the implicit world-building such as the way the teacher immediately identifies the German as being in the wrong class.
The 'Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson' sketch I don't like so much, perhaps because it goes on a bit too long considering it is the second sketch in a row where an interviewer annoys his guest, although the payoff sort of makes it worthwhile when the interviewer from the earlier sketch joins in. Next up is the cycling artists sketch, in which I've always had trouble with understanding a lot of Cleese's dialogue during the bit when he's the reporter seeing all the artists who aren't Picasso cycling past him - a lot of it is just a list of artists' names, but he gabbles them so quickly that the meaning of Michael Palin's line "He's German!" was a mystery to me for years. It turns out this is in response to Cleese saying "right at the back of this group, our very own Kurt Schwitters."
The animation that follows is interminable and not very funny, although the studio audience seems to react and laugh at it more than any of the sketches up to this point - of course it's now impossible for me to appreciate this with the novelty it had in those days, where it would have been most (probably all, unless they had seen Do Not Adjust Your Set) of the audience's first encounter with Terry Gilliam's animation style.
It goes down so well that it seems to set the audience up to laugh more at the subsequent sketch, one which I would suggest is the main event for this episode - the 'funniest joke in the world' sketch. It's still a delightful concept even after all this time, and I love the way it escalates from the suburban house of the writer to the World War 2 setting and its use as a British superweapon.
The simplicity of the archive footage of Hitler with the "My dog's got no nose" subtitle is also fantastic, lol. It is here too that we get the first example I'm aware of of Cleese doing nazi goosestepping, most famous, of course, from Fawlty Towers. John Cleese is clearly the MVP (Most Valuable Python) in this first show. Perhaps that is because he was the most experienced TV performer, and the others hadn't quite caught up to his level yet?
It's... an odd choice for the first one broadcast. But then any of them would have been, wouldn't they? They had five fully filmed and finished episodes before the series began transmission - the first five, as it happens, although they weren't shown in the strict order they were made, and this one was actually the second episode recorded. It doesn't have the strongest of opening sketches ('famous deaths' would hardly be deemed worthy of inclusion in a best-of compilation, for instance), but it does finish well. Does that make it the strongest of these early episodes? Well, we'll just have to watch more and find out, won't we...
Two: Sex and Violence
The flying sheep sketch gives us the two comedy Frenchmannys (Cleese and Palin) with one moustache between them and their "mouton anglo-francais," which these days I am able to recognise as a reference to Concorde, which first flew in 1969, only a few months before the making of this episode.
This is the first episode in which the phrase "And now for something completely different" appears, though while it would go on to become associated with John Cleese (he says it - or a variation on it - in every episode of season two, just before the It's Manny and the titles), in this instance it is said by Eric Idle... several times, although it is also subverted within the same show when he says "And now for something completely the same". Michael Palin also says the line (once) later on.
The Marriage Guidance Counsellor sketch sees the first appearance of Carol Cleveland, even though she has no lines. The basic idea behind the sketch - that the counsellor carries on with the wife right under the nose of the unsuspecting husband - may seem trite and obvious, but the execution is so ridiculous, Palin's Arthur Pewtey character so oblivious, that it becomes hilarious. Although the punchline was done better when they remade it for the And Now For Something Completely Different film. It also gives the lie to the old story about the studio audiences not laughing at the earliest episodes, as there's plenty of laughter in both this and the flying sheep sketch - though obviously not by the standards of a hyped-up modern-day TV panel show audience.
In the sketch where the RP-accented, suit-wearing miner visits his award-winning playwright father with a strong Yorkshire accent the reversal of expectations is brilliantly realised so that you can tell immediately what it is reversing even if you've never seen whatever the original is that it is a parody of.
"There's NOWT wrong wi' GALA LUNCHEONS, lad!"
There's a very brief cutaway of "a Scotsman on a horse" which I have to believe is a setup for something that won't pay off until show six, when we'll see the full "Scotsman on a horse" sketch. Either that or this is a spare bit of footage (filmed at the same time as the sketch) being used for a surreal moment.
The animation of the manny pushing a pram that noms the old ladies who look into it is one of the most sinister Terry Gilliam ever did - I think it's the way his feet go up and down in excitement while the pram is noming the old ladies that gives it just that little bit more of an edge.
The big sketch to finish on is the faux documentary on 'The Mouse Problem' which is one of the most outright and obviously satirical sketches done by Monty Python's Flying Circus, which tended, as a rule, to be more general in its satire. This is clearly and specifically a satire on the way homosexuality (only recently decriminalised in England and Wales when this was made, and shamefully still illegal in Scotland and Northern Ireland until the 1980s) and gay culture was portrayed by the media of the time, with an emphasis on underground parties and drug-taking:
"Then you steal some cheese, brie or camembert, or cheddar or gouda if you're on the harder stuff."
The vox pops of "the British public's view" are mainly "hostile" and include such well-observed gems such as
"Well I mean, they can't help it, can they? But, er, there's nothing you can do about it. So er, I'd kill 'em."
There's an undercurrent of anger about the ignorance of the public and the media's sensationalising of the issue while at the same time refusing to take sides. Thank goodness that doesn't happen these days, eh? I mean, when was the last time the ill-informed public held reactionary views on an issue whilst the media kept treating both sides as equally valid? Mew. It's impossible for me to know what the reaction to this must have been like in 1969 (they may have been lucky this went out in an early episode before they built their audience and got mainstream attention), but surely if you put today's equivalent in a sketch show it would be decried by the usual suspects in the press as 'woke' etc. Hard to believe John Cleese was in this, given what he has now become.
Though it can also be enjoyed as a silly sketch about silly mannys who dress up and act like mouses.
I'd say this is a more consistently good episode than the first. But if I am remembering right, the strongest of the early shows (by which I mean the first half of season one) is actually the third one...
Three: How to recognise different types of trees from quite a long way away
In the first sketch, where Eric Idle's court defendant makes an overly-impassioned speech against imprisonment for "only a bloody parking offence" we get the first usage (of two in the first season) of the phrase "Owl of Thebes." I assume this comes from a quotation, but looking online I have been unable to find what it is a reference to, and searching for the phrase "Owl of Thebes" mainly returns the two Monty Python's Flying Circus references.
This then develops into a superbly silly courtroom sketch with some great lines, including Chapman's gossipy old woman opening with
"I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so anyway..."
There's the delivery of Cleese's "No further questions, m'lud" when his witness dies, and then Palin as character witness Cardinal Richelieu getting caught out by Inspector Dim of the Yard (Chapman again). It ends with the knight hitting Cleese on his head with the chicken, making the knight the first recurring character other than the It's Manny, and this the first gag to run over multiple episodes. The knight appears twice more later on in this episode - in the first of these we don't see him hit anyone with the chicken, but he does follow a character off-camera, and we are left to infer what is going to happen next. This makes it much funnier than if we just saw him hitting someone again. The third appearance is also a subversion of the knight's usual modus operandi, since here another character takes the chicken from him, to hit a third character with it. This is a running gag done properly.
"Bicycle Repair Man" is another good sketch that stands up well today, though I have to assume it would be much harder for a modern sketch show to do anything like it, since I expect the owners of Supermanny would be much more protective of their trademark these days, and a large part of what makes the sketch succeed is that everyone in it wears authentic-looking Supermanny costumes. It wouldn't be nearly so good if you replaced this with a generic superhero costume or the like to avoid copyright infringement.
The Jackanoryesque 'Storytime' sketch where Eric Idle stops reading the story out loud just as it is becoming smutty is the next good one, especially in the way Idle recovers and starts a new story afresh, only the same thing happens again. It's all in the delivery of the lines, and only he could pull it off.
While the overall intention and central joke of the sketch still remains clear, there has been enough of a shift in the culture of sex and sexuality since 1969 that some of the precise wording no longer has the same resonance now as it would have when this was first broadcast.
The first story begins
"'One day Ricky the magic Pixie went to visit Daisy Bumble in her tumbledown cottage. He found her in the bedroom. Roughly he grabbed her heavy shoulders pulling her down on to the bed and ripping off her...'"
Of the three stories Idle begins, this comes closest to having its original meaning intact (which is probably for the best for the joke to succeed), though if one wanted to find something to take offence at, there is the question of consent between Daisy and Ricky, which would radically alter the tone of this story depending on which way it went. Fortunately it doesn't really matter for the joke to hold together - the point is that either interpretation would be unsuitable for a children's story.
The second story gets trickier:
"'Old Nick the Sea Captain was a rough tough jolly sort of fellow. He loved the life of the sea and he loved to hang out down by the pier where the men dressed as ladies...'"
Idle's reaction to the last few words he speaks and the fact that he stops when he did seems to indicate that "men dressed as ladies" is an intrinsically unsuitable subject for a children's story. Leaving aside the fact that we have seen five of the Pythons (all of them bar Terry Gilliam) playing women characters in the first two episodes already (so it can't be as simple as men + women's clothes = rude), this doesn't seem like something that would fly today. It's clearly hinting that there is some association between sailors, piers and transvestites* that immediately gives rise to a smutty situation, but I would suggest that we don't really have that in our culture any more.
The third and final example is, if anything, even worse for this:
"'Rumpletweezer ran the Dinky Tinky shop in the foot of the magic oak tree by the wobbly dum dum bush in the shade of the magic glade down in Dingly Dell. Here he sold contraceptives and...'"
The tone changes and Idle stops on the word "contraceptives." By as soon as the end of the 1980s society had changed its attitude on contraceptives, thanks (I suppose) to the AIDS crisis, never mind another 30+ years passing to bring us to today. This bit only lands at all now thanks to the following line, as Idle reads out three fragmentary bits from (what we are to take as) the next section of this story:
"Discipline? ... Naked? ... With a melon!?"
Even shorn of context, these well-chosen words hint at the smuttiness of the passages we aren't hearing, and still succeed, I would contend, as well today as 50 years ago.
The "restaurant sketch" about the dirty fork is a great piece of escalation with a deliberately rubbish punchline. As is also the case with the courtroom sketch earlier, these really show off the group coming together, with substantial roles for all five of the main 'acting' Pythons (i.e. all of them except Terry Gilliam). The sketch where a newsreader (Cleese) is stolen by armed robbers while in the middle of a broadcast is amusing rather than laugh-out-loud funny, but I do appreciate the attention to detail in making all the news stories Cleese continues to read out particularly boring, trivial and un-newsworthy, and which are made even more so when contrasted with the events we're watching happen around him. (This won't be the last 'exciting things happen all around an oblivious boring character' sketch.)
"Nudge, nudge" is probably the most famous sketch we've seen in the series up to this point, but I wouldn't even put it in the top five sketches from this episode, and its popularity is a bit of a mystery to me.
Throughout the episode we keep returning to the 'How to recognise different types of trees from quite a long way away' sketch, which serves as a linking device. Here the joke is it just showing the Larch over and over again, until finally showing the Horse Chestnut gets a cheer from the crowd. Not the studio audience, you understand, but some stock footage of a cheering crowd. It's another weaker element of this episode, but I'd say this still manages to have the highest standard of sketches so far, and it's the episode I'd say was the best of the first six shows.
That's not to say the next episode is a massive step down, however, as it contains a couple of cracking sketches, and introduces one of my favourite recurring characters...
* Wearing women's clothing and hanging around in bars also features in the Lumberjack Song, which we will encounter before too long.
Four: Owl-Stretching Time
This one starts with the sketch about eating famous paintings, which I don't think is that funny, but it does introduce the running gag of characters with one deliberately unfunny line complaining "But it's my only line!" which I do like. There are only two instances of it in this show, but it will return in a later programme to better effect.
The episode then introduces us to Graham Chapman's Colonel, one of my absolute favourite Python characters. Here he is complaining about the use of the army catchphrase "It's a man's life in the modern army" rather than his more famous later appearance when he complains about the sketches being too silly.
There's then a lengthy sketch about Terry Jones trying to change for the beach without having to get undressed in public, which is unusual for being entirely dialogue-free, a homage to silent comedy. It's not actually that funny, being multiple variations on the same joke, and the final striptease carries on long after we've got the point. Much better is the following self-defence sketch, with Cleese as the instructor who kills his students and is obsessed with fresh fruit.
"We've done the passion fruit!"
It's another sketch that gets so OTT it's hilarious, although I have to admit the final punchline is a bit weak.
The best sketch of the episode, and in my opinion an all-time classic, is the 'Secret Service Dentists' sketch. I love all of Cleese's feeble protestations to Idle that "there's nothing going on" well past the point where that could possibly be convincing
"Drop that gun, Stapleton!""Lafarge!""There is something going on!""No there isn't."
and I love the array of spy film cliches that we meet in the various double-crossing characters, getting progressively more dentist-like as they go on - Van der Berg enters accompanied by a nurse, Brian in full surgical gear (as well as carrying a bazooka, a completely OTT weapon for the environment). This culminates in Chapman as the Blofeld-like "Big Cheese" emerging from a secret door seated on a dentist's chair, with white bunny "Flopsy" in his lap.
"I'm glad you could all come to my little... party. And Flopsy's glad too, aren't you, Flopsy? Aren't you Flopsy?" (he shoots the rabbit at point-blank range) "There, poor Flopsy's dead. And never called me mother. And soon... you will all be dead, dead, dead, dead. And because I'm so evil you'll all die the slow way... under the drill."
The sketch ends with the statement "It's a man's life in the British Dental Association," which causes the Colonel to stop the programme.
Five: Manny's crisis of identity in the latter half of the twentieth century
The opening sketch here is the most confusing sketch they ever did, the Confuse-a-Cat Ltd sketch. This consists of a cat sitting watching an insane montage of random stuff happening on a stage, made possible with the power of film editing. It's one I have always been confused by (for some reason), even reading the description of the actions that is to be found in the Just the Words script book, where it runs to the better part of a page. This is, however, a good episode for cats, as another one makes an appearance later on, failing to answer Terry Jones's interviewer's questions.
John Cleese appears as a proto-Gumby (handkerchief on head, rolled up trousers, and gumboots, but not the familiar tank top and braces of later Gumbys) expressing extremely reactionary opinions that a modern John Cleese would probably find completely reasonable.
"Well I, I think that, er, nobody who has gone abroad should be allowed back in the country. I mean, er, blimey, blimey if they're not keen enough to stay here when they're 'ere, why should we allow them back, er, at the tax-payers' expense? I mean, be fair, I mean, I don't eat squirrels do I? I mean well perhaps I do eat one or two but there's no law against that, is there? It's a free country. I mean if I want to eat a squirrel now and again, that's me own business, innit? I mean, I'm no racialist. I, oh, oh..."
Another appearance by the knight with the chicken sees him off, but we get another variation on the joke as Cleese is expecting to be hit on the head so covers himself, only to be hit in the stomach instead. (Present-day John Cleese would redeem himself totally in my eyes if his appearance on GB News consisted entirely of a recreation of this sketch.)
The next sketch is another on the more overtly satirical side of Python's humour, featuring a policemanny (Chapman) blatantly planting drugs on a suspect (Idle), or trying to at least - it is then revealed that he has in fact planted his sandwiches. The punchline is then
"Blimey! Whatever did I give the wife?"
I recall an interview with Idle in which he claimed the actual punchline, which was cut (IIRC he didn't say at what stage), was meant to be the wife entering and saying "I dunno but it was better than lunch."
That sounds to me like a much worse punchline, definitely taking the joke a step too far, so much better as televised.
The animated 'Dynamo Tension' sketch is probably the first animation I really like. While I admit that Monty Python wouldn't be the same without them, I have never really been a big fan of the animated bits, with a handful of exceptions.
This is followed by a sketch where Cleese is interviewing Chapman for a job and being purposefully irritating. This is very similar to a sketch from the one-off comedy special How to Irritate People from 1968, where Cleese played the same role but Tim Brooke-Taylor was the interviewee. I don't believe there's much recycled material in Monty Python's Flying Circus, but this is definitely an example of it. The famous Parrot Sketch also owes its origins to a piece from How to Irritate People, but in that case the sketch was altered almost beyond recognition between the two versions, whereas this interview sketch was hardly changed at all.
The last sketch of the episode, about the burglar/encyclopedia salesmanny, is one of the poorest we have seen so far, though thankfully it is not very long. I suppose the fact that we don't get door-to-door encyclopedia salesmannys these days also makes it one of the most dated.
Six
The first programme without an official title (not that any are given on-screen, but some unofficial episode titles are more official than others), so sometimes informally known as It's the Arts after the first sketch.
"Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Panties... I'm sorry."
The main joke of the sketch is the very, very long name of the composer who is the subject of this faux documentary, and the insistence on always using his full name. As usual there is just enough variation in the exact form of the joke each time it is repeated to keep the sketch from getting too repetitive, but this is decidedly not one that stands up to multiple viewings. It's followed by a memorable animation of a hand trying to remove the fig leaf covering Michelangelo's statue of David's genitals, the punchline to which is ironic given the nudity on display elsewhere in this same show.
The Whizzo Quality Assortment/Crunchy Frog sketch is a good one because of the increasing level of absurdity in the disgusting chocolates, coupled with the misplaced pride in his company's creations displayed by Terry Jones's character.
"The dull life of a city stockbroker" is another extended sketch with no dialogue (similarly to the Confuse-a-Cat Ltd sketch from the previous show), as various interesting things happen all around Michael Palin's oblivious stockbroker character. These include somebody (probably Terry Jones, but it's difficult to be sure due to the makeup and the mercifully brief screentime) fully blacked-up as a Zulu - the first time we have seen this in the show, but it certainly won't be the last - throwing a spear at Palin's neighbour, and then later a topless woman behind the counter of a newsagents. While there has been plenty of animated nudity before now (most obviously in the opening title sequence), this is the first time we've seen breasts, er, in the flesh, as it were. I understand that this woman was a stripper hired by the director, which perhaps explains why it isn't one of the regular actresses such as Carol Cleveland in this small large small part.
Having uncorked the bottle of blacking up, we then get a sketch in which Eric Idle plays a "Red Indian" at the theatre.
We finally get the full "A Scotsman on a Horse" sketch after it was set up in show two. The payoff being little more than 'they're gay, lol' makes this one of the more dated sketches in this episode, though it is competing with two instances of unnecessary blackface so doesn't come out that bad in comparison.
The episode ends on what feels like a properly 'big' sketch, seeing as it features all six Pythons (as well as Ian Davidson) for what is basically the first time. It's the satire on Hollywood movie moguls, with Chapman as the producer "Irving C. Saltzberg Jnr." and the rest as his thankless scriptwriters. This sketch gave us the word "Splunge" which, as we all know, means "it's a great-idea-but-possibly-not-and-I'm-not-being-indecisive!" Like the Whizzo sketch earlier, this succeeds mainly by being so over the top.
This is one of the weaker episodes we've seen so far (and almost certainly the least likely to get repeated on the modern BBC), but I still found plenty to enjoy in it. Six shows would be the length of a whole season for a lot of sketch comedy programmes (including, of course, Monty Python's fourth season) but we're still less than halfway through their first season.
Seven: You're no fun any more
Bit of a risky title for any sketch show, that. Fortunately, Monty Python's Flying Circus is just hitting its stride. The middle of the first season kicks off with the It's Manny forgetting his only line word, and from his mime thinks the off-screen prompters are saying "tits." A puerile joke, but it makes me lol.
The first proper sketch is the camel-spotting sketch, which isn't all that funny in itself, but does lead in to the "you're no fun any more" running gag. A later sketch show might have spread these mini-sketches (all with the same punchline "you're no fun any more") throughout an episode (Harry Enfield's Television Programme and Big Train both used this technique, doubtless among many others) or even across multiple episodes (such as The Fast Show or Harry Hill) before paying them off, but here we just get them all in quick succession, until the enraged camel-spotter returns to punish a bishop for "stealing my phrase" by tying him to some railway tracks.
A brief cutaway featuring Palin as a Jewish stereotype has aged like milk, but the audience at the time seemed to like it, even giving it a brief round of applause. Maybe they were just agreeing with the sentiment - a joke about the BBC Licence Fee paying for rubbish like this?
This is followed by the "science fiction sketch," easily the longest sketch to date and very possibly their longest sketch until The Cycling Tour in season three. As Mr Samuel Brainsample, Chapman wears a toothbrush (Hitler) moustache without it being significant or ever being commented on, something unthinkable in a modern TV show, as Richard Herring proved a few years back.
As a Scottish cat, I strongly suspect I have a very different way of relating to the central premise of the sketch - that aliens are turning English mannys into Scottish stereotypes - than viewers south of the border would. It's impossible for me to be offended by this sketch, partly because it is so funny, but also because the stereotypes are so outrageously exaggerated (something that benefits from this being a longer sketch) that they just can't be offensive - it instead feels much more like an attack on the mannys who believe in such stereotypes, and as though the aliens have skimped on their preparatory research and got all their ideas of what Scotsmannys are like from The Russ Abbot Show.
There's loads of inventive ideas here, none of them outstaying their welcome, as the sketch rapidly moves from each laugh on to the next plot beat. Chapman is great as the scientist who has to break the fourth wall to explain to his ditzy Companion (she's rather like Jo Grant without the brains) what's going on.
"Is there someone at the door?""No... It's just the incidental music for this scene."
The silliness moves up a gear with the revelation that the (still unseen at this stage) aliens are blancmanges with an interest in tennis, who eat Mrs Podgorny while acting as a POV-monster. The introduction of a skeptical police sergeant detective inspector who also ends up eaten helps convince that alien blancmanges are a credible threat, a technique from a more serious sci-fi story being used in service to the sketch format.
"His name's Riley... Jack Riley... He's that most rare of criminals... a blancmange impersonator and cannibal."
Back with the scientist, he finally pieces together the clues (helping his Assistant every step of the way, until he gets so annoyed with her that he knocks her out) and concludes
The idea that Scotland is "the worst tennis-playing nation in the world" has an entirely different connotation to what it must have had in 1969 ever since the successful Scottish British tennis player Andy Murray rose to prominence a few years back, and can now only be seen as hugely ironic.
"And Angus Podgorny became the first Scotsman to win Wimbledon... fifteen years later."
Eight: Full frontal nudity
The first proper sketch gets off to a shaky start when Eric Idle fluffs one of his lines:
"Real guns, sir. Not proper ones, sir... Not toy ones, sir, proper ones, sir. They've all got 'em."
This sketch reintroduces Graham Chapman's Colonel, last seen in episode four where he stopped the programme for parodying the Army's advertising slogan, and he soon stops this first sketch for being silly. The sketch then metamorphoses into a different sketch about two mobsters trying to run a protection racket on the army. It introduces us to Luigi and Dino Vercotti (Palin and Jones). I can't remember if this is Dino's only appearance, but Luigi definitely becomes a recurring character.
"Fires happen, Colonel.""Things burn."
The Colonel's having none of it as soon as he gets their gist, and stops it for being silly too... and not at all because he couldn't think of a punchline.
The sketch ends by going all meta, with the Colonel saying
"It's time for the cartoon. Cue telecine, ten, nine, eight..."
to which Dino replies
"The general public's not going to understand this, are they?"
The episode title relates to an animation and some vox pop sketches about "full frontal nudity," which may have been referring to something topical from 1969 but which is difficult to research online... for some reason. Mew.
Another callback to the fourth episode comes from actors with only one unfunny line complaining that it's their only line. This might make it seem as though shows four and eight were intended to be broadcast closer together, but they were recorded as the fourth and eighth shows as well as that being their broadcast order. One of these complainers is Carol Cleveland, playing the bride in the sketch where her and Terry Jones are the newlyweds trying to buy a bed from a department store where the assistants have annoying quirks. The word "mattress" always makes me think of this sketch.
Another brace of "full frontal nudity" themed vox pops features Terry Jones blacked up as an "African native," all but confirming it was him back in show six since these were most certainly filmed at the same time and in the same place.
The Colonel reappears to warn the programme about its "tendency" to get silly. His monologue features what is probably his most quotable lines, reused as they were in the And Now For Something Completely Different film:
"Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do... except perhaps my wife... and some of her friends... oh yes and Captain Johnston. Come to think of it most people like a good laugh more than I do. But that's beside the point."
Unsurprisingly, the sketch about the sociable, gossiping hermits also gets stopped for being silly, with the Colonel interrupting it by walking into shot. This leads to another meta exchange, this time between Idle's hermit and the Colonel:
"What do you mean, you can't stop it - it's on film.""That doesn't make any difference to the viewer at home, does it?"
The Colonel then ushers the cast of hermits off past the camera crew so that we get a brief view of the 'behind the scenes' filming setup before it cuts to the next cartoon.
The dancing Venus animation leads in to what is easily one of the most famous Monty Python's Flying Circus sketches, arguably the single most famous one from the first season: the Parrot Sketch. Immensely quotable so understandably famous, but it is possibly too well-known for its own good as it is now basically impossible to come to it fresh. I think it deserves its reputation, but you can't deny the blue puppet parrot is appallingly fake-looking - something they unarguably improved upon when they redid the sketch for And Now For Something Completely Different. And if you think the fakeness of the parrot is part of the joke, all I can say is you are this: wrong.
The second half of the sketch (after Cleese leaves to visit the second pet shop) is much less famous than the first half, probably because it wasn't done for And Now For Something Completely Different and also tends to be left out of compilation shows, but I think it remains good, even if the sketch's highlight - Cleese's long string of different ways of saying the parrot is dead - is past, and there is even a punchline just after that bit that makes a natural point to cut the sketch off at. More fourth-wall breaking occurs when Cleese complains to a railway porter:
"Er, excuse me, this is irrelevant, isn't it?""Oh yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 30 minutes."
When Cleese is so frustrated with the pet shop owner('s brother) that he says the sketch is "too silly," the Colonel comes in and agrees with him, bringing the Parrot Sketch to an end.
"Hell's Grannies" is another classic, quotable sketch. A satire of juvenile delinquency where reality is flipped so that it is the elderly who rebel against and terrorise the young. In addition to the wordplay there are some great visual gags in it too, such as the incongruous sight of old ladies on motorbikes or graffitiing "MAKE TEA NOT LOVE" on a fence. But once we are introduced to other gangs - the "Baby Snatchers" and the "Killer Keep Left Signs" - you can tell where this is going, and the Colonel has to step in one final time.
Nine: The ant, an introduction
"Llamas are larger than frogs" is the line that has always stayed with me from the first very silly sketch. This is followed by the manny with a tape recorder up his nose. It's a short sketch and, while Michael Palin sticking his finger up his nose to play the Marseillaise is a memorable image, is probably more famous than it really deserves - this might be another one known not from its appearance here in show nine but from the And Now For Something Completely Different film.
The mountaineering sketch contains a number of good lines, such as Cleese having to look up the word "mountaineer" in the dictionary, and the visual gags of Chapman compulsively climbing all over the furniture, wrecking the place in the process, is great too. (Chapman was a mountaineer in real life, of course, and his paw is easily detectable in the writing of this sketch.) The split-screen effect for the final punchline is rubbish though.
I used to really like the murderous barber sketch, but now I can see how much Palin overplays his part, such as when he unconvincingly glugs from the bottle of "red eye." This sketch leads directly into the Lumberjack Song - like the Parrot Sketch last time, this might be another one that can no longer ever seem fresh to me due to overfamiliarity, but the backing choir of Mounties losing their confidence during the second verse then instantly snapping back into the chorus remains as good a bit of comic timing as ever it was.
"Well I object to all this sex on the television. I mean I keep falling off."
This deliberately bad joke is followed by the first appearance of a proper, full-on Gumby. "Prof. R. J. Gumby" according to the superimposed caption. The upper-class twits on a hunting expedition, letting off their guns at random and mostly managing to maim and kill only themselves, is another almost entirely visual sketch. Eric Idle appears as a "Red Indian" in it, again, for no real reason - I can only assume that Red Indians were intrinsically amusing to audiences in 1969.
A brief cutaway in which the knight with a chicken is informed that they don't need him this week is followed by the final sketch, The Visitors, which is probably my least favourite Monty Python sketch until season four. Objectively I can see what they're trying for, as a parade of increasingly grotesque characters arrive in Chapman's straight-manny character's house, but I have never found it to be actively funny. It almost feels like it belongs in a later era of the show, such as season three (or four, except this has Cleese in it) where the grotesquery might have felt less out of place than it does here.
Ten
Tenth to be shown but the ninth episode to be recorded. The first six shows had gone out by the time this was made, which might explain the audience applause over the opening titles. The first sketch is suitably meta, with Palin's character receiving a letter inviting him to be in the next sketch.
"It's A Tree" features Eric Idles's first use in the show of his David Frost impression. Watching this over 50 years after first broadcast, it's only the still-recognisable voice Idle uses that gives away that this was intended as a pisstake of a specific show rather than vacuous celebrity chat shows in general.
There's quite a few fluffed lines from Cleese and Palin in some of the studio sketches here. I'm not sure what that means, maybe they were underrehearsed on this one, or maybe they were rushed at the recording and didn't have time for retakes.
Luigi Vercotti returns from show eight as the manager of Ron Obvious, exploiting him in a variety of ill-advised sponsored record attempts. The sketch ends with the exchange
"Shh. It's satire.""No it isn't. This is zany madcap humour."
As time passes, more and more of the original satirical intent of the show is being lost to history, leaving only the superficial "zany madcap humour" remaining, and thus reversing the meaning of that bit. And this is in the UK, never mind in the USA where even in the '70s a huge part of the satire would have been lost on them, what with the targets having never been a part of their culture.
There's another, much less famous pet shop sketch, using a redressed version of the same set as the Parrot Sketch, and again featuring Palin as the shopkeeper and Cleese as the customer. A parrot is mentioned, but isn't the focus of the sketch.
The big sketch to end on is the one with Palin and Jones as a husband-and-wife couple in bed, with all of Jones's various lovers visiting in turn until Palin wakes up and has to be convinced to go back to sleep with a variety of excuses. There's a lot to enjoy here as it gets increasingly preposterous, with a Mexican mariachi band ("The Herman Rodrigues Four!") asking Palin for directions around the bed to his wife.
"Vera! I distinctly heard a Mexican rhythm combo.""Oh no, dear... it was just the electric blanket switching off."
The sketch then breaks the fourth wall as Palin leaves the set "for a tinkle," walking past the camera crew and leaving the others with "no one to react to." The final lover appears to be some kind of Aztec high priest who arrives to the booming sound of a gong (I've never quite gotten what that is a reference to - any ideas, readers?) and who gets told by Jones
"Here it's no good you coming in... He's gone and left the sketch."
The actual punchline which follows is then a deliberate anticlimax after all that build up.
Eleven
Dear Sir,I strongly object to the letters on your programme. They are clearly not written by the General Public and are merely included for a cheap laugh.Yours etc.William Knickers
In The World of History sketch, Chapman's presenter keeps getting interrupted by filmed pieces featuring the Pythons as undertakers, something that will be a bit of a recurring subject matter for the rest of this season.
There's a lovely boom in shot right at the start of the drawing room murder mystery sketch, just over Chapman's head. "Alduce me to introlow myself" is a phrase that I often think of whenever the normal version of that phrase is used, and it comes from this sketch. With Cleese as the policemanny who arrives before there's been a murder, then is himself murdered when the lights go out, I wonder if this is a specific piss-take of The Mousetrap (already running for 17 years by the time this was made), or just sending up Agatha Christie's tropes in general. The other Pythons (including Python irregular Ian Davidson, already on his second character with a line in this sketch, which is pretty good going for him) all arrive as policemannys investigating the previous murder, only to get murdered themselves. It's a 'clever' sketch rather than a funny one, which I therefore appreciate rather than actually lol at, and is interrupted before it can get truly repetitive by another undertaker sketch.
Dear Sir,I'm sorry this letter is late, it should have come at the beginning of the programme.Yours,Ivor Bigbottie,(Age two)
The next sketch sees Idle's pretentious, intellectual football show presenter interviewing Cleese as the footballer "Jimmy Buzzard" who is unable to operate on the same intellectual plane as his interviewer, something that is made obvious to the viewer before Cleese even says his first line, just from the combination of his name and the way Cleese sits. This sending up of an attempt to present football as 'high art' is as relevant now as it must have been in the '60s (though it obviously wouldn't be made quite that way today), and I am again left wondering if this was an attack on a specific TV show or pundit of the time, or not.
Ian Davidson gets a third character and line as we briefly return to the detectives sketch, then more undertakers.
Interesting People is a sketch with a lot of quick-fire gags and one-joke characters. John Cleese's hacking cough as the manny who can "give a cat influenza" is a claws-on-a-chalkboard sound, really unpleasant to me. And that's not just because I don't want to get influenza! Idle's "invisible" manny who is really just so boring that everyone ignores him seems like a really obvious idea, but is done well here, lasting just long enough to make the point before moving on. My highlight of the sketch has to be the brave stunt cat Tiddles, who "flies across the studio and lands in a bucket of water." Although that is helped by the brilliantly funny way Chapman pronounces the line
"No, I fling her."
The next undertakers sketch is the one I find the most memorable, as the four undertakers each in turn go
The second version of The World of History opens with an incredibly risqué collage of stills of naked women over which the caption appears, followed by the presenter being Carol Cleveland (though dubbed by Cleese) writhing around on a bed in her underwear. This is followed by "a bit of fun," namely speeded up footage of a woman stripping. Legend* has it that this was a real stripper (and the same woman who appeared topless in show six) filmed by the director Ian MacNaughton without it being in any of the scripts.
Chapman's presenter returns from the start of the show to interview Palin as "Prof. R. J. Gumby" - the second use of that name, though he was played by Chapman back in show nine. Further Gumbys appear, including Idle as "F. H. Gumby, Regius Prof. of History at His Mother's," Chapman as "Prof. L. R. Gumby" and Cleese as "Prof. Enid Gumby."
"The Batley Townswomen's Guild's re-enactment of 'The Battle of Pearl Harbor'" is a sketch I have little time for. While on the face of it it is as silly as any other, I have just never found the joke funny. A final couple of short film skits from the vicars and undertakers collection stop this from being a weak ending to the programme.
* The Pythons Autobiography by the Pythons, p.153:
'But Ian, we haven't written a stripper sketch.''Oh, I promised her a part, it's great, and she'll be great.'
Twelve
Spectrum sends up current affairs programmes by boiling them down to their most basic elements, all linked together by Palin's hyperactive presenter.
The caption "A small boarding house in Minehead, Somerset" begins one of the most timeless and ridiculous Monty Python sketches of them all, as it turns out that Hitler and other top nazis are staying at this boarding house under wafer-thin aliases (Mr Hilter, Ron Vibbentrop, Heinrich Bimmler, and Mr McGoering) until Hitler Hilter can participate in the North Minehead by-election, as candidate for the National Bocialist Party.
"I said 'you wouldn't have had much fun in Stalingrad, would you?'""Not much fun in Stalingrad, no."
John Cleese makes a brilliant Hitler, standing on a balcony doing the full Nuremberg Rally speechifying-ranting, except to an audience of three small children and a comedy yokel (insert joke about the viewership of GB News). In vox pops we see another yokel say
"I don't like the sound of these 'ere boncentration bamps."
A stockbroker adds
"Well I think he'd do a lot of good for the Stock Exchange."
which is a short and biting bit of satire that has scarcely dated a day since first broadcast.
A sketch where Terry Jones tries to report a burglary to a selection of policemannys, who each have a different eccentric quirky way they must be spoken to, is basically just a retread of the department store "mattress" sketch from show eight, though this variation does at least pleasingly escalate as the policemannys all talk to each other, switching up eccentricities depending on which other character they're addressing.
The biggest sketch of the episode is the "Upperclass Twit of the Year" sketch, with all of the five main Pythons as the competing twits. A mainly visual sketch, save for Cleese's voiceover, this is incredibly scathing about the stupidity of overprivileged, inbred aristocrats, including such rounds as kicking beggars, insulting waiters, and car door slamming, with them having to shoot themselves as a finale.
"Well there'll certainly be some car door slamming in the streets of Kensington tonight."
The last full sketch of the episode is the Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Wood Party, a.k.a. the one where the minister (so... presumably the Wood Party are the party of government, then) falls "through the Earth's crust" (I love the matter-of-fact way Eric Idle exposits this straight to camera) and has to continue the broadcast from an unconvincing studio-bound chasm. This is another sketch that escalates nicely, with enough variety to the minister's situation that it never becomes stale. The discussion of how long a "BBC rope" will be required to rescue the minister is a highlight, as is Cleese's impersonation of Patrick Moore getting so excited that he starts to go on fire.
And the minister's broadcast is about opposing "the present weak drafting of the Local Government Bill" so it would seem they must be in a coalition.
Thirteen
The undertakers return from episode eleven right at the top of the show, carrying the It's Manny in a coffin. The first full sketch is one of my absolute favourites, the cannibal vegetarian restaurant.
It's full of great bits that are only loosely connected - when they aren't deliberate non sequiturs - by the restaurant setting.
"Once I married someone who was beautiful, and young, and gay, and free. Whatever happened to her?""You divorced her and married me."
There's good bits for all five of the main Pythons, and also for occasional Python David Ballantyne as the utterly bizarre Greek Prologue - with the second reference to the "Owl of Thebes."
"Pearls for Swine" is a great pisstake of the old Pearl & Dean advertisements that used to be in cinemas. Luigi Vercotti makes another appearance here. It's followed by the inexplicably popular Albatross sketch. This episode has loads of great sketches and is, on the whole, one of my favourite programmes in the entire series, but that this should be the most famous and oft-quoted sketch from it is a mystery to me. I can only assume this is because it was later performed again so often, including the Live at the Hollywood Bowl film as well as one of their albums of sketches that were a thing back in the days before the invention of VHS. The original version we see here is tame when compared to some of the later ones, presumably because of the restrictions on what they were allowed to get away with on the BBC, with "bloody" the only swearword.
The very short filmed sketch where Palin meets Cleese's police inspector and they end up going off together is one where the original context is tough to even imagine nowadays, with homosexuality only decriminalised in England and Wales less than three years earlier. Today the punchline comes across as "lolgay" (as in, the very fact that they're revealed to be gay is in itself a reason for audience laughter) but I can only deduce that things were very different in 1970 when depicting gay mannys on TV at all (except in very prescribed, stereotypical ways) was still a novelty.
Historical Impersonations almost brings the first season full circle, considering that all the way back in the first programme we saw historical characters taking part in the "famous deaths" sketch. And Michael Palin gets another use out of the Cardinal Richelieu costume we saw him in back in show three. I suspect there's a bit that was recorded but was then cut out of this sketch when broadcast, since at one point a second person is briefly visible behind Palin in the studio, but whoever it is (it could even be a member of the crew accidentally appearing in shot) they have no lines and aren't referred to at any point.
The fairy story about the police is another good sketch, starting with the speeded-up visual chase to the Dick Barton "Devil's Galop" music. This segues into the Probearound report into the police.
"Just what are the police up to?"
Cut to police constable.
"Oh, I'm up to page 39, where Peter Pan first manifests himself."
This then transitions to the 'Atilla the Hun handing himself in to the police' sketch. The best bit of this otherwise lolrandom sketch is the little moment when Terry Jones removes his fake moustache, hides it in his hat, then smoothly carries on with the sketch.
The big final sketch is the medical sketch that begins with Palin (as "Mr Notlob," a callback to the "palindrome" of Bolton as used in the leser-known second half of the Parrot Sketch) seeing Cleese, a psychiatrist
"A mad psychiatrist, that'd be new."
and then moves to Chapman as "a colleague of his, a surgeon, who specializes in these kind of things."
When he's playing the surgeon we can again see the paws of Chapman (a qualified doctor in real life, of course) in the writing, especially when asking for a bigger knife with which to make the incision.
"Oh what a great slit."
The punchline is Cleese and Jones as policemannys diving headfirst into Mr Notlob's stomach to remove the squatters in there, while Cleese shouts
"Release the vicious dogs."
This isn't quite the end, however, since there's just time for "a short piece of confusing animation" (in the words of the script book) that complains this is "a terrible way to end a series." The punchline may have been weak, but the episode overall was anything but.
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