Eight months had passed after the
first season ended before
Monty Python's Flying Circus returned in September 1970 for its second run of 13 shows. With only a few notable exceptions, the great majority of their most famous sketches comes from this season. Even the way the episodes are introduced is more familiar - John Cleese in the traditional evening dress of a BBC announcer (though situated in an unusual or incongruous location) announces
"And now for something completely different..."
then the It's Manny says
"It's..."
then the second set of animated titles plays - this is the one with the chicken manny, not the cartoon Cardinal Richelieu and the gratuitous nudity - while Cleese (again) says "Monty Python's Flying Circus" in a silly voice over the title.
The first actual sketch gives little indication of the greatness to follow, being a forgettable little number where Graham Chapman plays a cross-dressing minister (of the political variety, not the religious). The "NEW COOKER SKETCH" is a satire about taking the red tape involved in getting a new gas cooker delivered and installed to a ridiculous extreme. More and more delivery mannys turn up and join in discussing the different forms that need to be filled in under different scenarios, and this escalates to the point where Terry Jones as the housewife is being deliberately gassed in order to create an emergency situation that would allow them to hurry up. The sketch goes on a bit too long for my personal taste, though the long line of dozens of identically dressed mannys stretching on down the road gives it a memorable image to end upon.
But in terms of iconic imagery, you don't get any more so than the sight of Cleese's extraordinary walk as he passes the sign announcing "Ministry of Silly Walks." This is a superbly silly idea, executed brilliantly, despite the studio audience laughter drowning out some of the dialogue. As is almost always the case for the best Python sketches, the concept doesn't get overused or outstay its welcome, although it is never possible to recapture one's first experience of it with repeated viewings. This leads into a connected sketch on film about "the Anglo-French Silly Walk" which features the same two moustache-sharing Frenchmannys played by Cleese and Palin who we met all the way back in the second episode of season one.
Ethel the Frog is the bizarre on-screen title of another faux-documentary sketch - this time it's the one about Doug and Dinsdale, the Piranha Brothers. Obviously based on the Krays (convicted in 1969 so still a topical subject matter in 1970), this has so many good bits that if I quoted them all I'd basically be quoting the entire script. It starts as a satirical piece about the "loyalty and terror" Dinsdale Piranha inspired in his victims, before it takes a turn for the more absurd with the introduction of the giant hedgehog Spiny Norman.
Luigi Vercotti returns again as a victim of Doug Piranha, and we get some not-so-subtle nods at police corruption.
"Why didn't you call for the police?"
"Well, I'd noticed that the lad with the thermo-nuclear device was the Chief Constable for the area."
The focus switches to the police operation after Dinsdale sets off (stock footage of) a H-Bomb in an attempt to kill Spiny Norman.
"Even the police began to sit up and take notice."
The end credits play over scenes of London, while the animated Spiny Norman looms over them seeking out "Dinsdale!" and ensures that I can never hear that name without thinking of this show.
Between the Ministry of Silly Walks and the Piranha Brothers, two stone-cold classics, this is a strong opener.
Fifteen
The problem with Monty Python's Flying Circus is that these days everybody expects the Spanish Inquisition. This famous sketch dominates the episode, being divided into three parts spaced out so that one is at the start, one in the middle, and then again at the end. It's a superbly silly sketch that has been regurgitated ad nauseam, in fact so often that I have to wonder if a lot of people don't understand what it is that actually makes it funny in the first place, beyond the initial joke based on the incongruity of three cardinals of the Spanish Inquisition bursting in on a scene that is supposed to be set in 1912.
In fact the sketch has several different funny ideas in it, moving to each one in turn once the previous idea has been used up. Palin as "Cardinal Ximinez" enters full of manic energy, but despite insisting that their "chief weapon is surprise" (in the most-quoted section of the sketch) he then proceeds to give away the element of surprise from their sudden entrance by his need to pedantically list all their other "chief weapons." This is most clearly seen by the bored and irritated way Chapman's character gives them their cue for the third time - an understated straight-manny performance that contrasts against Palin and the two Terrys going way over the top.
The later stages of this first sketch sees Terry Jones's cardinal forgetting his lines, and then the business with the dishes rack in place of an instrument of torture. Watch out for Chapman quietly smoking his pipe with his arms crossed in the background of this bit if you want to see something new in this all-too-familiar sketch. Or else there's the bit where Palin comes slightly too far forward and we get to see off the top of the set.
The next sketch with John Cleese as the manny from the BBC gets very meta, and is an early example of the Pythons biting the hand that feeds them, with lines like
"It's all a bit zany - you know a bit madcap funster... frankly I don't fully understand it myself, the kids seem to like it. I much prefer Des O'Connor... Rolf Harris... Tom Jones, you know..."*
and
"I'm mainly in comedy. I'd like to be in Programming Planning actually, but unfortunately I've got a degree."
After a couple of shorter sketches, including a vox pop montage which features a Gumby, we're on to the second Spanish Inquisition sketch with the old woman being tortured with "soft cushions" and "the comfy chair!"
When Terry Jones's cardinal is named as "Biggles" this gets an enormous laugh from the studio audience, who are audibly enjoying themselves throughout. But then they would - they're seeing this sketch for the first time.
Some animation and "the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights" is all that separates this from the final sketch of the show. That's not quite fair, since this is really three courtroom-based sketches in one. First we have the court making things unnecessarily difficult for themselves by having the jury foremanny deliver the verdict through charades, which takes the rest of the court ages to guess even though it is patently obvious from as soon as he indicates it is two words not one. There are a couple of twists on this concept that make what could otherwise have been an overly lengthy sketch worthwhile.
The second part of the sketch is where the defendant is another judge, who tries to have himself acquitted immediately and otherwise tries to take over from the other judge. This ends with the first judge sentencing the second judge to be "burnt at the stake," prompting the line
"Blimey! I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition."
Having carefully set this up from the two previous times we have already seen them burst in this episode, the joke this time is that they don't, but everyone in the court reacts as though they do. It then cuts to them catching a bus to the Old Bailey while the end credits roll. The theme music is replaced with The Devil's Galop (previously heard back in show 13), adding a sense of urgency to the scene. The final punchline is them** finally bursting in with just enough time for Ximinez to exclaim
"Nobody expects the Sp... oh bugger!"
It's a lovely payoff, tying the whole thing together, and shows this is one of the most carefully crafted episodes yet. It's just a shame, and an ultimate irony, that the Spanish Inquisition no longer has the ability to surprise.
* This may be one of the best known Monty Python's Flying Circus episodes because of the Spanish Inquisition sketch, but the inclusion of the second example on this list drastically reduces the chances of this ever being shown on the BBC again.
** Although, since Terry Jones was playing one of the judges in the courtroom sketch, they have to get somebody else to play Cardinal Biggles for these last few seconds, goggles down to try to conceal this.
Sixteen
Here we see the first appearance of the bishop (but not The Bishop) who is rehearsing the line "Oh Mr Belpit your legs are so swollen."
For a long time I was convinced there must have been an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus that I had never seen that contained the sketch this line is from, but of course this is like the first five volumes of Graham Chapman's autobiography. Palin as the bishop claims at one point that "this is show five" and this was, in fact, the fifth show recorded for the second season, although in the end it was broadcast third.
The 'flying lessons' sketch is in my view underrated, elevated by Chapman's heightened performance, what with the way his belligerent character mocks Terry Jones's character's accent as though he is incredibly posh when he is nothing of the sort. And of course it's worth it for his outrageous flat denial of reality:
"I am not on a wire, I am flyin'."
Some sketches that haven't aged so well follow this. The 'plane hijacking where the hijacker doesn't want to be too much of an inconvenience to the crew' seems fine to me, but I somehow doubt it would have flown on the BBC ever since 2001. 'The Poet McTeagle' is a sketch I mainly remember for featuring Cleese in a plastic inflatable chair like in
Terror of the Autons, but it also contains a 'joke' where members of the production crew keep trying to molest a female character played by Idle. Both Spike Milligan and the Goodies also occasionally use this kind of 'humour' in their shows back in the 1970s, and I cannot bring to mind a single instance where it hasn't aged incredibly poorly. If it was ever funny in the first place, which I find it hard to credit, it's just so... lazy. And this is a cat saying that, mew!
'Psychiatrist Dairies Ltd' has some good bits, but isn't a great sketch on the whole, being based entirely around the idea of combining psychiatrists with milkmannys. We do get the first appearance of
"Walk this way, please."
"Oh, if I could walk that way..."
This leads in to the It's the Mind faux documentary about déjà vu. While a good sketch, it relies on repetition so heavily that it isn't one that stands up to repeat viewings without becoming quite irritating. Though do watch out for Michael Palin being given an empty glass of water to drink from... three times.
On the whole this is a much weaker episode than either of the two that preceded it, and I'd put it as one of the weakest of the second season.
Seventeen
The main sketches in this episode are announced by the five main Pythons all appearing as Gumbys. While there have been multiple Gumbys before now, this is the first time they all appear as a group on screen at the same time. The final form of the Gumby is definitely fixed by this stage and there is no longer even a need for them to be introduced or captioned as Gumbys.
"The Architects Sketch" about an architect (Cleese) who, through comic misunderstanding, has designed a slaughterhouse for mannys instead of a block of flats, transitions into a satire about first Freemasonry and then how unsafe cheaply built blocks of postwar flats were.
How do I know it's meant to be satirical? Well, it's made clear to us via a superimposed flashing caption.
"The Insurance Sketch" about a dodgy insurance salesmanny (Palin) manages to encapsulate the British public's stereotypical view of insurance (that of it being at best a necessary evil, when it isn't an outright scam) in a single sketch concept, as summed up by the lines
"Oh well, Reverend Morrison... in your policy... in your policy... here we are. It states quite clearly that no claim you make will be paid."
and
"You see, you unfortunately plumped for our 'Neverpay' policy, which, you know, if you never claim is very worthwhile... but you had to claim, and, well, there it is."
This transitions into the parody of the telefantasy genre The Bishop, which starts with a phenomenal pisstake of the more outlandish title sequences, courtesy of Terry Gilliam, before it turns into a fantastically quotable sketch as the titular Bishop and his posse of henchclergy fail to save a variety of vicars from the deathtraps of mobsters.
"The ring, Vic, don't touch the ring!"
There's also great visual touches, such as one of the sidekicks going stiff so that he can be used as a battering ram to break down a door. Although the sketch cutting away just as this causes the set to collapse is probably not an intentional part of the genre send up. I love this sketch.
A Monty Python's Flying Circus staple that we haven't seen much of before this point is the mock continuity announcement. Here we get one of my favourite early examples, due to the simplicity of the joke:
"Now on BBC television a choice of viewing. On BBC2 - a discussion on censorship between Derek Hart, the Bishop of Woolwich and a nude man. And on BBC1 - me telling you this."
As we start to get the titles sequence to The Bishop for the third time, it cuts to an apology from the BBC for the amount of repetition in this show - where was this when we needed it last time, mew!?
There's a callback to the wand-using police at the end of season one, when animated police use a wand to turn five frogs into the five Gumbys from earlier in the show. The use of early CSO to superimpose the real Pythons on animated backgrounds means this episode was probably a favourite of Barry Letts, maybe even an inspiration to him as he prepared to take over as producer on Doctor Who?
"The Chemist Sketch" is an excuse for some cheap laughs from toilet humour, but the show then has its noms as well as eating them when it apologises "for the poor quality of the writing in that sketch." Several rude words are then banned from being used again. One of them, "Semprini," I have only just recently learned (by doing some research on the internets) was the surname of Alberto Semprini, a BBC radio conductor famous in the 1960s - and therefore a joke that would have been much less obscure and seemingly lolrandom/"zany madcap" to audiences at the time this was made.
The chemist (Cleese) then immediately uses the word "Semprini" and is bundled off-screen by a policemanny (Chapman) to be replaced by "a less naughty chemist" (Jones). We then get what is to the best of my knowledge the only time the full punchline is delivered (rather than being abbreviated to "if I could walk that way...") from the joke:
Customer (Idle): "Good morning. I'd like some aftershave, please."
Chemist (Jones): "Ah, certainly. Walk this way, please."
Customer: "If I could walk that way I wouldn't need aftershave."
He is then also bundled off by the policemanny.
Cardinal Ximinez of the Spanish Inquisition appears on film in a vox pop, and this is obviously a callback to that episode. While this show was recorded more than two months after his original appearance in show 15, it hadn't been broadcast yet so this wasn't a case of the Pythons trying to capitalise on a successful character, since they couldn't yet have known how it would be received. In the next studio sketch Palin's character, threatened with being arrested for "heresy," gets the chance to say
"Heresy? Blimey, I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition."
But he is just told to shut up.
There's an unusual framing device in this episode, which is that Monty Python's Flying Circus is being broadcast "live from the Grillomat Snack Bar, Paignton." What this means is that every so often we return to Cleese's announcer character, who is seated in a 1970s cafe, for him to provide an awkward link to the next sketch. A lovely idea for a one-off gimmick, and the team rather wisely didn't overuse this kind of device.
Blackmail is another great idea for a sketch, but I can't help think this original version compares poorly with the much more polished remake they did for the And Now For Something Completely Different film - in particular the "stop the film" film is very flickery here, which makes it a physically uncomfortable viewing experience for me.
This segues into the "Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things" sketch, which starts off silly but only gets sillier when Chapman's character wanders into the sketch where the members of the society are trapped by "film." Forget '70s
Doctor Who,
Blakes 7 or any given drama series or sitcom, whenever I think of the difference between studio videotape and location filming (as was standard practice in British TV throughout the 1970s and well into the '80s, especially on the BBC), I think of this sketch which so beautifully calls attention to it and makes it part of the joke.
"Good Lord. I'm on film. How did that happen?"
There's an almost certainly deliberate disregard for continuity between the studio and filmed bits, such as when the group of Pythons head towards a door and then emerge in a conspicuously different order.
More lampshading of televisual techniques is seen later on, when Idle and Cleese appear on the top half of the screen, with animation on the bottom half.
"That's clever. How do they do that?"
"Colour separation, you cotton head."
The "Oh Mr Belpit your legs are so swollen" Bishop appears again, claiming he'll be in next week's show. Well, we'll see...
"Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" isn't a great sketch, being a rather too straightforwardly exaggerated example of a ramshackle school play, but it does contain one excellent exchange:
"Sorry I'm late, Headmaster - I've been wrestling with Plato."
"What you do in your own time, Padre, is written on the wall in the vestry."
The boxing sketch is full of comic violence, but seems to me to also be a satire on brain-damaged boxers so is pretty scathing about that sport. There'll be another sketch about the violence of boxing in the fourth season.
This isn't the funniest episode by any means, but it is interesting for all the playing with the medium of television itself. More characters cross into other sketches and overlap than we have seen so far, and it all combine to make this the most experimental Python show to date.
Nineteen
It's A Living rips the piss out of television panel shows and the minor celebrities who seem to make their living doing the rounds on all the various permutations of them. Strange to think that this was already enough of a thing in 1970 to draw the Pythons' ire, when they could hardly imagine the TV landscape of today where panel shows, and comedy panel shows in particular, are more ubiquitous than ever.
According to Michael Palin's "Oh Mr Belpit your legs are so swollen" bishop, this is the episode he ought to appear in. Palin does play a bishop in the school prizegiving sketch, but he neither dresses like or says the line of the other bishop. In the same sketch Chapman appears in yellowface doing an exaggerated Chinese accent. This is a forerunner of The Cycling Tour in one other way, with his line "Eyes down for first plize..." introducing the idea of Chinese Communists being obsessed with Bingo much earlier than I remembered it being.
An incredibly silly visual sketch consisting of speeded-up footage where people keep getting thrown into a river by mannys with silly high-pitched voices is retroactively somewhat spoiled by the mannys being dressed as stereotypical "Arabs" (as confirmed in the Just the Words script book), which puts this firmly in the same racist boat as a lot (a lot!) of other '70s comedy. The mannys being Arabs is entirely unnecessary but, thanks to the silliness of the concept, the amount of repetition in the sketch being exactly right, and then ending on a double punchline, it still manages to be one of the funniest visual sketches in all of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Less funny is the sketch about the couple receiving "dung" and a "dead Indian," obviously a satire on unwanted free gifts. While it does escalate the ridiculousness nicely (a free motorway with "every two cartons of single cream"), I've just never found it lolsome in the same way as mannys getting repeatedly thrown into a river undoubtedly is.
The studio audience's immediate reaction to the voice Eric Idle puts on as "Timmy Williams" makes it obvious how quickly they recognised the impression he was doing. This is a vicious attack on David Frost's egomania, as he makes an old friend's desperate cry for help into a scene all about him. All of the Pythons had some experience W-wording with for Frost by this point, and their feelings are made plain in every sentence of this sketch, which ends with credits rolling:
TIMMY WILLIAMS COFFEE TIME
THEME SCRIPT BY TIMMY WILLIAMS
ENTIRELY WRITTEN BY TIMMY WILLIAMS
and then "Additional material by" is followed by 60 names going past very quickly.
This is followed by the short but disproportionately famous Raymond Luxury Yacht/Throatwobbler Mangrove sketch. Then there's some excellent wordplay in the sketch at the Registry Office, which ends with the five main Pythons all getting married "but you mustn't ask how 'cos it's naughty."
We are now hitting a point in the series when we start getting a number of Terry Gilliam's best animations. Here we have the fairytale story about the prince with a spot (most notable for the deliberately awful way the word "cancer" has been dubbed over with "gangrene" in a completely different voice - supposedly this was the Pythons' way of protesting at the BBC demanding this change). When the prince dies the spot takes over as the main character in the tale, falls in love with another spot, and the tale ends as a satire on racial prejudice - which perhaps has the unfortunate implication that the prejudiced neighbour's remark "and they breed like rabbits" turns out to be accurate, so ending on a bit of a misfire.
The big sketch to end the episode on is the Election Night Special between the Sensible and Silly parties. There are loads of great moments in this sketch, sending up the way elections were (and, in many ways, still are) covered by television - clueless pundits, swingometers, returning officers on balconies, etc. There's even a little bit of political satire, such as they way the Very Silly candidate takes two votes away from the Silly candidate, who then loses to the Sensible candidate by one vote. First Past The Post, ladies and gedderbong - it doesn't get much siller than that.
"Arthur Negus has held Bristols. That's not a result, that's a bit of gossip. Er... Mary Whitehouse has just taken umbrage."
Twenty
The Attila the Hun Show has for a long time seemed to me the perfect parody of a kind of clichéd US sitcom of the 1950s and '60s that may never have actually existed - one where the gags are corny, the laughter canned, and the family nuclear. And always named after the lead actor, for some reason. I'd love to be able to use
"Ladies and gentlemen, it's the Attila the Hun Show."
as a shorthand for lazy, middle-of-the-road, lowest-common-denominator crowd-pleasing rubbish, but I can't because not enough other cats get the reference. Apparently the Attila the Hun Show title sequence is a close parody of a specific show, The Debbie Reynolds Show from 1969. I have no idea if Eric Idle's blacked up, cross-eyed and massively over the top racist caricature "Uncle Tom" is as well, but it's certainly the part of the sketch that lets it down and prevents it from being better remembered. Though there's no denying that
"I want you kids to get ahead!"
is a brilliant example of a cheesy line, delivered with relish by Cleese.
The sketch where Terry Jones plays a minister delivering a speech while also performing a striptease is very reminiscent of his striptease on stage all the way back in season one, show four, cementing the idea that Jones really liked doing sketches where he got to take his clothes off.
The killer sheep sketch kicks off with the lovely little Wains Cotting joke:
"We've been mentioned on telly!"
When Chapman says of the sheep "It's got a gun!" Michael Palin is visibly corpsing and struggles to get his line out in response. For his second appearance as a confused cricketer, Cleese blacks up and does a mock-Caribbean accent for no reason, another dated part of this episode.
After a series of short sketches that run together, the next main sketch is about the village idiot (Cleese) who is secretly "no fool" and takes his position seriously. This seems to be a zany madcap sketch at first, until it transitions into a satire on city idiots, i.e. the upper classes, in their suits and bowler hats, with their jobs in banking and politics thanks only to nepotism - a perennial theme for Monty Python, exemplified in their "Upperclass Twit of the Year" sketch in season one, show 12.
Cleese's cricket commentator saying how well England are doing to have scored "nought for nought" while Iceland have only managed "722 for 2" "with lots of wild slogging and boundaries and all sorts of rubbishy things" sounds to me exactly like every English TV sports commentator - completely prejudiced towards England while at the same time utterly unaware of their own bias, or at the very least unaware than anyone might have a problem with that.
For us cats who are much too young to remember the original version of the game show Take Your Pick that ended in 1968 (so two years even before this episode was made), the sketch sending it up still succeeds as a parody of cheap and nasty quiz shows in general. Terry Jones's contestant character is obviously supposed to be representative of a certain kind of racist, ignorant old manny, though her on-the-nose line "I don't like darkies!" is too little, too late in this day and age to offset the gratuitous blacking up we've seen already in this programme. And anyway, the sketch ends with a bishop and two priests rushing the set to assault the host's glamorous assistant (Chapman), a lazy, awful punchline that was just as lazy and awful when they used it back in show sixteen.
The credits play over a sign showing that a colour TV licence cost £11-0-0 (in pre-decimalised money, since this was 1970), which as a way of saying 'you're paying for this rubbish' is a bit more sophisticated than Palin as a Jewish stereotype - the form this joke took back in season one, you may recall.
This episode, the midpoint of season two, feels like a throwback to the first season in a lot of ways - with appearances by animated sheep, upper class twits, and mostly traditional, self-contained sketches. There's little sign of the development of the sketch show format that we have seen coming through in the last few episodes before this one. This was the 11th episode recorded in this season, though, so we're actually seeing it earlier in the run than we perhaps ought to have.
Anyone who remembers those dark days when the BBC would use any excuse to take programmes they actually wanted to watch off the schedules to be replaced with sport (seemingly always snooker... endless snooker...) will appreciate the first sketch, in which every genre of forthcoming BBC television programmes have been invaded or taken over by sports.
"And for those of you who prefer drama - there's sport."
Archaeology Today escalates from a presenter who is bizarrely obsessed with his his guests' heights, to a musical epic "Flaming Star" ("the story of one man's search for vengeance in the raw and violent world of international archaeology" as the caption informs us) where they battle on each other's shoulders in the struggle to be tallest.
The first reference in Monty Python to Margaret Thatcher comes in the sketch where Eric Idle plays the manny who can't remember who she is. This was about nine years before Thatcher became Prime Minister; at the time she was only the minister for education and science. What makes this even more bizarre (in the light of recent history) is that the sketch is introduced as "An appeal on behalf of the National Truss" which means it can be retroactively taken as referring to two subsequent Prime Ministers.
Spiny Norman makes a sudden appearance during an animation, just taking the time to say "Dinsdale?" before disappearing again. This gets applause and cheers from the studio audience, who must have already seen his first appearance in show fourteen, given it was broadcast about a month before this episode was recorded.
A favourite sketch of mine, another one I remember from when I first saw Monty Python's Flying Circus, is the one about the two big game hunters, played by Chapman and Idle, who hunt mosquitoes, moths and ants with bombs, missiles and machine guns. The satirical intent of the sketch is most clearly detectable in the line
"A lot of people have asked us why we don't use fly spray. Well, where's the sport in that?"
The big sketch with Colin Mozart the ratcatcher and Beethoven getting interrupted trying to write the fifth symphony is choppily edited and 'busy' enough that it is easy to miss several of the jokes - making this one that benefits from DVD and the ability to pause and rewind - including a visual gag of all the other celebrities who live in the Beethovens' block of flats that isn't on screen nearly long enough for it all to be read at normal speed.
The show ends with two camp gay judges (Palin and Idle) gossiping to each other, with the very last lines being about "those voiceover announcers on the BBC after the programmes are over," describing them as "bent as safety pins" with "beautiful speaking voices." Even if not actually all that funny - camp humour not exactly playing the same way with audiences in the 2020s to those in the 1970s - you have to admire the messing with the medium that this represents. This is something where a DVD recording can't ever recapture the original context, shorn of its presence in a Tuesday night BBC schedule in late 1970, where it would have indeed been followed by exactly such a continuity announcer as the Pythons just described. I don't believe what happened next was ever captured for posterity, so we can only imagine it.
Twenty-two: How to recognize different parts of the body
This is the first episode in a while that we can definitively say has a subtitle, since the show's name is replaced with it before the foot comes down to squash it. "How to recognize different parts of the body" is seasons two's equivalent of the first season's "How to recognize different types of trees from quite a long way away" in that they are both running gags that recur within an episode, occasionally acting as a linking device for other sketches, and neither of them are all that funny.
The "Bruces" sketch is one of those that has been mostly ruined by continuous repetition down through the years, not helped by the crowd-pleasing song from Live at the Hollywood Bowl. Most of the times I've heard this sketch quoted the quoter focuses entirely on the "is your name not Bruce?" bit, which leads me to suspect they are missing the satirical intent of lines such as
"I've told him he's welcome to teach any of the great socialist thinkers, provided he makes it clear that they were wrong."
Still, at least they're not as bad as the ones who focus on their odd-numbered rules all being "no pooftahs."
Raymond Luxury Yacht (however his name is pronounced, that is how it is spelled) returns from show nineteen. The punchline to this sketch is something I've criticised Monty Python's Flying Circus for before (and plenty of other older comedies as well, to be fair), which is that it is little better than "lol they're gay" but this time it succeeds because of Chapman's overjoyed (and direct to camera) reaction to being asked on a camping holiday.
The Killer Cars is my favorite of all Terry Gilliam's animations, and a strong contender for the best Monty Python sketch of all time for featuring, as it does, the earliest known television appearance of a longcat! Not to mention one of my favourite lines:
"The days of the killer cars were numbered, thanks to the miracle of atomic mutation. But at what cost?"
Another returning character is Mrs Rita Fairbanks (Idle) and her Battley Townswomen's Guild. They actually reuse some footage of their first appearance from back in season one, episode 11, since otherwise the point of the joke, which is that their new reenactment is basically the same as the first only on a beach instead of a muddy field, would be lost on any viewer who missed the previous appearance. It's not any funnier, though.
The Chapman and Cleese sketch about the two housewives watching TV contains some inspired lines:
"What's on the television then?"
"Looks like a penguin."
and then
"Perhaps it comes from next door?"
"Penguins don't come from next door, they come from the Antarctic."
"Burma!"
"Why'd you say Burma?"
"I panicked."
The looks on both their faces during the pause after "Burma!" is superb. And, a bit later, Cleese is on the verge of corpsing at Chapman's
"Oh, intercourse the penguin."
A "How to recognize different parts of the body" joke about "Margaret Thatcher's brain" being in her knee gets a big laugh and a round of applause from the studio audience.
Another Agatha Christie-style sketch about a confused detective starts off not being very good, with the jokes not really landing (a fourth-wall-breaking reference to "it's the end of the series, they must be running out of ideas" a little too close to home, although this was only the tenth show recorded), until it transforms into a police-themed parody of the
Eurovision Singing Competition, which is much funnier, although Eric Idle does do a couple of decidedly racist accents as the Katie Boylesque presenter.
Surprisingly progressive by the standards of its day, yet at the same time hopelessly outdated by the standards of 2023, this episode exemplifies the contradiction that a programme which mocked Mrs Thatcher and showed a positive representation of a gay relationship (even if only for a few seconds) couldn't be shown on a mainstream channel today without a content warning. It even features a British-Chinese actor, Vincent Wong, in one of the sketches rather than just having John Cleese (for instance) in yellowface. But the character's name is "Mr Kamikaze" so...
Twenty-three
Hello, good evening and welcome to the middle of the series.
There's a lot of piss-taking of cinema in Monty Python's Flying Circus around this point - show nineteen had Mr L F Dibley complaining about famous directors of the era nicking his ideas, and going back a bit further we had "the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights" in episode fifteen. Now here we get Le Fromage Grande, an attack on the dullness of 1960s French cinema, although if you've never seen or even heard of 1960s French cinema it is (take it from me) quite likely to come across as a dull sketch in which Terry Jones and Carol Cleveland speak subtitled French for no reason.
This is followed by the mocking of the Hollywood epic, here represented by Scott of the Antarctic Sahara, although the drunken Scottish director Jimmy McRettin (played by Cleese) could well be more of an attack on the show's own drunken Scottish director, Ian MacNaughton, than any particular Hollywood director, except in the way that he is so easily pushed around by the stars and the producer, accepting all their absurd demands as "Great!"
Michael Palin is great as the egotistical star Kirk Vilb, with his delivery of the line
"The lion is in the contract."
a personal highlight, as is the lion fight that so blatantly switches between stock footage of a real lion, a stuffed lion, and a manny in a lion suit as required. I wonder what was in the lion's contract?
The title sequence arrives well into this episode. This will become much more common from now on, but is still something of an outlier at this stage.
"Conrad Poohs* and his Dancing Teeth" is one of the more famous Gilliam animations, perhaps because it was used multiple times - it makes an appearance in the And Now For Something Completely Different film - and as a result is indubitably one of the more iconic images of the series. I like it, the musical accompaniment is so perfectly chosen, and it is amusing to see it's clearly Gilliam's own face used for Poohs, but have to admit that its reputation is more than it really deserves for such a short piece with really only a single joke.
In the next sketch Cleese is once again playing Mr Praline, a character returning from several earlier appearances, including the Parrot Sketch, which we can tell from his distinctive coat and the eccentric accent Cleese uses for him. We last saw him in show eighteen, although that was actually recorded after this one. This time he's here for the 'buying a fish licence' sketch, which is one of the Python team's lesser efforts, but even then it contains a fine example of Cleese and Palin rapport in their "is" "isn't" "is" "isn't" exchange (a prototype of the famous Argument Sketch from season three, perhaps?) and I do like the line
"It's people like you what causes unrest."
Another classic line that I'm sure I have heard used elsewhere is the one Palin closes the show with (right before the 16 ton weight is dropped on him):
"If you've enjoyed watching the show just half as much as we've enjoyed doing it, then we've enjoyed it twice as much as you."
* It is definitely spelled that way, as we get to see from a letter (not a telegram, a letter) addressed to him that kicks off the following sketch.
One of my favourite programmes of the series begins with a sketch about an absurdly awful series of marketing campaigns destroying the reputation of "Conquistador Coffee" that has a punchline which makes a satirical point about nepotism. It's a strong opener.
Shortly afterwards we have one of Gilliam's best animations - the one that jumps from the "American Defence" against the "International Chinese Communist Conspiracy" to being about "Crelm Toothpaste (with the miracle ingredient Fraudulin)" to "Shrill Petrol." A joke based on the idea that some telephone numbers are different after 6pm hasn't dated at all well, but other than that it's a winner.
We've had Agatha Christie-based sketches before (the last one only two episodes before this), but the one featured here is the one where all the characters are obsessed with trains and railway timetables, which is a fresh angle, especially combined with the payoff about the writer being really obsessed with them. It's also laid on so thickly that by the time the police inspector arrives the audience is expecting it, which gives another twist to the humour. With so many train times to recite, Chapman stumbles over a couple of his lines, but Palin is brilliant - perhaps this is a forerunner of the Ripping Yarns episode Murder at Moorstones Manor?
More film-related jokes (following last time's Le Fromage Grande and Scott of the Sahara) come in the form of the director with the oversized front teeth who fills his historical epics with main characters who have even more exaggerated teeth.
A series of vox pops contain some overt satire, including the line
"Well I've been in the city for 30 years and I've never once regretted being a nasty, greedy, cold hearted, avaricious, money-grubb... er, Conservative."
The Crackpot Religions sketch is also unmistakably satirical about organised religion's acquisition of wealth, with lines like
"Blessed is Arthur Crackpot and all his subsidiaries Ltd."
This leads in to more vox pops about other crackpot religions, including an appearance by John Lennon (Idle) to say "I'm starting a war for peace" and "Archbishop Nudge," Idle's character from the Nudge Nudge sketch, making a return to the series having not been seen since all the way back in show three. The payoff sees a representative of "The Most Popular Religion Ltd" try to "disassociate" his church from "these frivolous and offensive religions" but is interrupted when he has to take a telephone call from his stockbroker.
This is followed by a continuation of the sketch in cartoon form - one of Gilliam's more disturbing sketches where a cartoon priest has a devil inside his head trying to escape whenever he grins. The sudden cut to the next sketch hides that most of this animation has been edited from the programme ever since its first TV broadcast, and is still edited out of the episode on the DVD I have. The missing portion gets even more disturbing, with the crucifixion combined with some telephone poles and Satan rising out of the ground, before flying across the start of the next sketch, forming a link.
As we have it, it's a hard cut to the "How not to be seen" sketch, the highlight of the episode (though it is yet another classic sketch which might lose something from overfamiliarity). In it, anyone who the narrator (Cleese) can see gets killed, with the joke then progressing to him hunting them down even when they take great pains to hide themselves from him. One of the victims is a "Mrs B J Smegma," almost certainly the result of Chapman trying to slip something past the BBC censors. And succeeding.
As a linkmanny linking into the final sketch of the show, Palin gets another classic line:
"Mr Bent is in our Durham studios, which is rather unfortunate as we're all down here in London."
As he starts to interview a footballer, it is revealed that this is a continuation of the "How not to be seen" sketch since the footballer is hiding in a filing cabinet "trying not to be seen." He gets blown up because "of course they can still hear you."
A genuine pop song plays over the end credits (the annoyingly catchy Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I've got love in my tummy), though the joke is that the singer and all the musicians are hiding in crates. Despite this the camera continues to cut between them in a lively and fast-paced way, as it would on something like Top of the Pops.
After the fade out, the BBC continuity announcement globe appears. Eric Idle says "For those of you who may have just missed Monty Python's Flying Circus, here it is again." Tiny fragments of most of the sketches are then played, lasting less than a second each, and these include two shots taken from the animation that had been edited out earlier on, the only evidence remaining that it had been part of the episode originally.
Twenty-five
A lot of effort goes into making the opening sketch look and feel like the BBC have put the wrong thing on by mistake and are showing a film called The Black Eagle, with captions, authentic-seeming film stock, music, location filming, and the absence of the Monty Python cast playing any of the parts all feeding into the illusion... until John Cleese appears as the usual announcer. It also goes on for quite a bit longer than you might expect - for a season two sketch, this will become more common in season three. This was the first episode of the second season to be recorded, which suggests they maybe intended to start the whole season with this joke.
The first sketch after the titles is the 'Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook' sketch, another classic, and the sketches flow more freely from each one to the next than in most episode we have seen up until now. The 2001-parodying animation leads in to the World Forum sketch where Karl Marx (Terry Jones), Lenin, Che Guevara (Terry Gilliam) and Mao Tse-tung (two of these are not played by Python regulars, meaning this involves less yellowface than the later recreation of this sketch for their Live at the Hollywood Bowl performance) are all assembled to be asked trivia questions, mostly about English football. The inexplicable pre-eminence and singular importance that the media places on sport, and football in particular, makes this a very funny sketch that ought to land uncomfortably close to home should any TV news or current affairs presenters chance to see it.
That makes two classics so far, but an underrated sketch is the one with the characters from famous paintings going on strike, one of the most successful blendings of Gilliam's animation with live action so far.
Less successful is the Ypres sketch, which suffers - in a similar way to other sketches we saw earlier in the season - from the amount of repetition it relies on making it more annoying to sit through on rewatches. It does get good towards the end, though, as Cleese's armless padre overacts so much he gets taken away on a stetcher to the "Royal Hospital for Overacting," full of Long John Silvers, King Rats* and
Richard the Thirds.
Possibly the biggest laughs from the studio audience this week come for the Gumby Flower Arranging sketch. It would be tough to argue with that; it's completely stupid.
The most famous sketch from this episode is the one known simply as "Spam." It's another overexposed, overrated sketch, whose popularity is a mystery to me when compared to some other, more deserving sketches. The listing of the menu is easily quotable, I suppose. Perhaps I can never quite suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it, since a lot of the second part of the sketch hinges on every item on the menu containing spam, even though we all heard that the first two items on the menu are spamless. Mew.
Compilations often miss out the ending to the sketch, when Cleese's Hungarian tourist from the beginning of the episode comes into the cafe, bringing the episode full circle.
* The OTT panto-style character of King Rat would appear, from some more of my internets research, to be a reference to the baddy in the traditional Dick Whittington pantomime. It was surprisingly hard to find this out from Google, perhaps because panto isn't as popular in America as it is in the UK? And while you might expect a cat to know all about it, it just so happens that I have never seen a production of Dick Whittington, and I'm not really sure why that is - perhaps it has been out of fashion since the 1960s, or maybe I have just been unlucky? My experience of pantos has been that they're always either Aladdin or Cinderella.
Twenty-six
The framing device for the show is the idea that the queen will be "tuning in" at some point over the course of the programme, and the grovelling behaviour of the cast and crew at this prospect. This also pays off the announcement of "And now for something completely different" before the titles of every show in this season, as though it were a Fast Show-style running gag, when Cleese as the usual announcer deems this line unworthy of their "royal episode thirteen." The entire title sequence is then replaced with a suitably royal animation, complete with Land of Hope and Glory instead of the Liberty Bell music, although the foot does still come down at the end.
The first sketch after these royal titles is about Welsh miners striking over obscure points of academic trivia. The satirical point about how the miners are massively more educated than their management (represented by Cleese in a fancy colonial governor's pith helmet but acting like his Upper Class Twit character) is sadly mostly lost through the poor quality sound in this sketch, as well as the distractingly unrealistic studio set. Also Terry Gilliam's Welsh accent is appalling.
The Toad Elevating Moment is yet another ridiculous title for a studio-based current affairs type show sketch. Chapman delivers the line "I thought it was because you were interested in me as a human being" in a very strange, unnatural way that could really have done with another take - I wonder if this is an example of his alcoholism interfering with his performance?
After a few quick-fire sketches (by the standards of most Flying Circus sketches), Spiny Norman makes another brief appearance across the London skyline, still looking for Dinsdale Piranha - the second callback to the sketch in show fourteen, all the way at the other end of the season.
"THE INSURANCE SKETCH" is introduced in the most overblown dramatic way via a special build-up animation, as though promising much. It is then a simple, studio based sketch with Cleese and Idle, where the humour really comes from its early interruption by the sound of the national anthem starting up, causing them to stand to attention. A hushed, respectful voiceover (Palin) treats this in the way the BBC has always treated all royal occasions, with the same obsequious tone it still uses today, but he has barely begun introducing "the royal cameraman" before the queen switches over to watch "News at Ten" on ITV.
A touch of brilliance that is easy to overlook today when we are more used to TV comedies getting actual celebrities in to play themselves (thanks, it has to be said, to shows of this era like Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Goodies paving the way) is that we then see the actual ITV newsreader of the time, Reginald Bosanquet, having his broadcast interrupted by the national anthem and the need for him to continue reading the news while standing to attention. In a few seconds this fully completes the worldbuilding of the idea that the queen cannot watch any programme on any channel without it behaving like this.
The filmed sketch with the hospital where seriously ill or injured patients are treated like army recruits, made to do W-word and go on cross-country runs is suitably absurd, and like a lot of the medical-related sketches I can't help but detect the paw of Dr Graham Chapman in the writing. This moves on to "St Nathan's Hospital for young attractive girls who aren't particularly ill" where the doctor (Terry Jones) says
"We have over 40 doctors per bed - er, patient. Oh, be honest. Bed."
Another sequence of short sketches leads in to the lifeboat sketch which starts with the brilliant exchange
"Still no sign of land... How long is it?"
"That's rather a personal question, sir."
This is followed by a certain amount of fourth-wall breaking and the sketch being restarted a few times, until we finally get to the meat of it - which is them all enthusiastically volunteering to be the one who gets nomed by the others. This sketch is eventually booed off by the studio audience, and is followed by a rather cannibalism-heavy animation until that too is stopped by Terry Jones demanding "a sketch about clean, decent human beings."
Of course what we get is the undertaker sketch (funny that the tail end of season one also significantly featured undertakers), where Chapman's undertaker character - in pallid makeup that gives him a more morbid appearance than even that given by just the undertaker's costume - suggests noming Cleese's character's dead mother.
Even before the possibility of cannibalism is brought up, his brutally direct descriptions of the methods of burial and cremation turns the studio audience against the performers, starting them booing. By the time Chapman is suggesting that Cleese can throw up in a grave if he feels guilty afterwards, audience members are storming the stage. But it is then that the national anthem begins once more, and the performers and rioting audience alike stop what they are doing to stand to attention - respect for Her Majesty outweighing all other concerns in that moment. This is the BBC, after all, and the royal end credits roll over this scene.
Now there's an ending for you.
