Forty: The Golden Age of Ballooning
Well, I had to reach it eventually - the worst episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and it isn't close. Theming an entire programme around a single concept turned out well for them with The Cycling Tour, but here it just seems to be one unfunny vignette after another, or the few funny bits there are are stretched out way longer than they can sustain the concept, and end up just as unfunny as the ones that weren't funny to begin with. The first of these potentially good bits, for example, is Chapman as the Montgolfier butler "O'Toole" being unable to say the name "Bartlett" (he'll have a bad time if he ever wants to watch The West Wing). This goes on for several lines past the point where it stops being funny, and the eventual punchline isn't even worth waiting for.
One bit I do genuinely like is Palin as the Glaswegian King Louis xiv impersonator - the way he combines the accent with the authentic-looking BBC period costume immediately clues in the audience as to what is going on, so it is never needed to be explicitly stated what the 'plot' is.
"You 'ave come from Paris?""Where?"
Then we get more business with O'Toole unable to find the decanter of claret, which is another bit that isn't funny to begin with and then gets less funny as it drags on. Jones as Joseph Montgolfier challenges the fake king on the grounds that Louis xiv is dead, and gets the line of the episode from Palin in response:
"Listen to me, smartarse, when you're king of France you've got better things to do than go around all day remembering your bloody number!"
He follows this up with a Glaswegian kiff.
As the plot moves to the court of George iii where the "suspect sovereign" tries to sell the purloined plans to the British king, the sketch descends into lolrandom anarchy when "the Ronettes" are announced and they come in and sing a song to which the only lyrics are "George the third" over and over again.
It doesn't get any better when the scene shifts back to France. O'Toole, having delivered his final line, gets an enormous round of applause and makes several curtain calls, before reprising his last few lines to enormous ovations, laughter and cheers, including from other characters who come in to join in with the adulation, but baffling the other cast members in the scene. I have never quite 'got' this bit, because I can't grasp what this is trying to do or say or why it is even supposed to be funny. (A subtle touch that is easily missed on a single viewing, which I will give it some credit for, is that bouquets of flowers are delivered to Chapman by men.) The credits roll over this scene, with still quite a bit of the episode still to go (mew), because this is the fourth season when they were pushing the envelope on this aspect of the format even more than in the earlier seasons.
The "Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Norwegian Party" is the first and only sketch of the show unconnected with The Golden Age of Ballooning, but after it we go straight back to it for the Zeppelin sketches. As Ferdinand von Zeppelin (Chapman) throws anyone from his "airship" who dares to call it a balloon, they all land on one house, creating the biggest mirth-free zone in all of Monty Python. Brace yourselves.
Palin and Jones play a German couple who are reading from a recipe book and arguing about which of their rooms is the "drawing room" and which is the "sitting room" as Zeppelin's victims crash through their roof off-screen. If that sounds at all funny to you, take it from me that it is not. The accents Palin and Jones have chosen to deploy in the scene combine with the slow pacing to throw off their usual comic timing. I have to wonder if they were directed to pad this out by playing it so tediously slowly or if it just turned out that way? There's a sort of punchline with the lines
"We must ring the government.""This is the government, Helmut."
but the sketch keeps on going after that, and eventually, mercifully, it just ends with a hard cut to some stock footage of a zeppelin.
The Golden Age of Ballooning gives way to The Golden Age of Colonic Irrigation, complete with mid-70s punked up theme tune and font in place of the classical style used for the Ballooning caption.
Well, that was shit. Thank Hoff it's over.
Forty-one: Michael Ellis
Titles; "THE END" caption; end credits: the purest expression of the joke.
Large portions of this episode were originally written for the first draft of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which intended that the second half of the film be set in the present day with the knights still looking for the Holy Grail - including at a department store, resulting in several scenes later adapted into sketches we see here. I can't tell if the same Pythons would have taken the same roles if these bits had made it into the film, but it seems unlikely that they would have been exactly the same since John Cleese would have been in that, whereas he is absent here - as indeed he is from virtually all of season four.
This is another show with a single plotline running through it. Though it is called "Michael Ellis," we never meet the eponymous character, but instead follow the ant-buying adventures of Eric Idle's character who is repeatedly mistaken for Ellis or just misses out on meeting with him.
Idle apparently owns several other pets aside from his ant, and while we don't see most of them, there is a real tiger (a little one) in a cage in the studio set for his kitchen, where his mum (Terry Jones, playing something akin to a forerunner of Brian's mum) is preparing to give the tiger an injection of "mandies" i.e. methaqualone, a common sedative in the 1970s.
There's a surreal bit of world-building where Idle and his mum have a load of TV sets in their home, which they watch one at a time and then throw away after each viewing session. This leads to the mum asking Idle to
"While you're out get us another couple of tellies would you, here's £180."
As Idle returns to the department store, the whole episode gets even more surreal and dream-like, especially the scene with the poetry recital where Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson and Shelley are all obsessed with ants until Queen Victoria arrives to command them to write poems on other topics.
Chapman is great as the drunken hostess, though hardly taxing to his acting skills. Gilliam as Shelley ("Just a little one, medium dry"), on the other hand, mugs for all he is worth, and here is where the lack of Cleese is most keenly felt, since clearly all the Pythons were required for this scene. Several of the incredibly famous poems featured in this sketch I would have fiirst encountered here, and I can rarely hear them without thinking of their ant-based alternatives.
The toupee hall sketch is a short but funny one where Jones, Palin and Chapman are all wearing terrible, obvious toupees that are different colours from their (characters') real hair, yet are oblivious as to how bad each other's toupees are. It's all part of the strange world of the department store, where the satirical intent of a lot of the skits can only be deduced from context, since shopping at large stores of this sort is no longer an everyday experience - either for cats or mannys - we just don't live in that kind of world any more.
The multiple endings for sale at the "End of Show Department" shatter the fourth wall as Idle is offered his pick of how the show should end, culminating in
"Well, how about a sudden ending?"
Forty-two: Light Entertainment War
This opens on the caption "Up Your Pavement" and a Steptoe and Son type sitcom seems to be commencing, but then the pair of tramps the camera was following get run over by Chapman as the Jason Kingesque "Alex Diamond," and the narration and accompanying theme music starts rapidly switching genres as we follow a succession of different characters, each tenuously linked to the previous one. We get a rare appearance in this season by John Cleese, appearing for a few seconds as a surgeon - almost certainly some film footage they already had to paw. All this rapid chopping and changing isn't that funny to begin with, but it continues long enough to become funny, around the time that Eric Idle appears as "the chairman of Fiat" to say
"Che cosa e lo stucciacatori di polli?" ("What is a hen-teaser?")
When it finally settles down, the first proper sketch of the episode is possibly the most famous sketch from the whole of the fourth season - RAF Banter. Much imitated, the central premise of a bunch of WW2 RAF pilots unable to understand each other's slang terminology is a strong one, so this is rightly a well-regarded sketch.
"Cabbage crates coming over the briny?"
When it turns out that the Germans are literally dropping "cabbage crates" in the place of bombs, this segues into the idea that the Germans are not taking the war seriously, irritiating the British high command. They decide to come down hard on any British soldiers "found trivializing this war," leading to the court martial of Sapper Walters (Idle) for "carrying on the war by other than warlike means." Suffice to say, the court martial soon descends into silliness itself.
"Anything goes in!Anything goes out!Fish, bananas, old pyjamas,Mutton, beef and trout!"
That song, which Palin belts out in such a ridiculous way, isn't even the apex of the silliness, which comes when Jones as the presiding general decides to show them all who's in charge:
"Shut up! I'm in charge of this court. Stand up! Sit down! Go moo! See? Right, now on with the pixie hats! And order in the skating vicar!"
Then they all sing the "Anything Goes" song.
A brief bit about the love triangle between the pilot, navigator and rear gunner of an RAF bomber can only have come from the pen of Chapman, his Biggles obsession (as seen in show 33) coming out - so to speak - once more.
There's a change of direction after the (quite late) titles, with a satirical piece about how television programme planners treat the public like idiots. Mrs Mock Tudor (Chapman) using her TV remote to electrocute Terry Gilliam (browned up, in a nappy and turban, and seemingly with electrodes attached to his head) into turning off the TV gets an enormous laugh and round of applause from the studio audience. I'm not quite sure what it is that they find so amusing, but we should never underestimate a 1970s audience's capacity for laughing at the bits that we in the 21st century find most offensive.
The BBC planners themselves are shown to be even bigger idiots than the public, sat around planning on showing repeats while waiting for the bar to open. Their cunning plan is to "retitle" the repeats and thus fool the public into thinking they're watching original programmes. Their suggestions for these new titles include "Dad's Navy," "Up Your Mother Next Door," "I Married Lucy" and "Doctor At Cake."
One of Gilliam's best animations follows, in which the manny who wishes for "a decent day tomorrow" is then kept up all night by the scenery being changed.
The sketch about "woody" and "tinny" words escalates from silly to extremely silly, and contains some lovely wordplay. Palin arrives towards the end as his RAF Banter character from earlier.
The sketch about showjumping with the horses jumping over musical chorus lines contains a direct reference to The Black & White Minstrel Show as one of the obstacles, reminding us of the '70s TV landscape which this series was a part of.
Newsreader Peter Woods is the latest in the line of real-life newsreaders who have played themselves in Monty Python's Flying Circus, introducing the "sentimental stage" of the war, and leading us in to the final song written and performed by Neil Innes, "When does a dream begin?"
If you only heard this then you could be fooled into thinking it was a straight song, since the gag is purely in the visuals as Innes keeps forcing the woman he is with to look at him every time she turns her head away.
This is a packed episode and is pretty effortlessly the best show of the fourth season, containing most of its best material.
Forty-three: Hamlet
This is the second show to use material originally written for the Monty Python and the Holy Grail script, with the opening sketch where Hamlet visits a sequence of sex-obsessed bogus psychiatrists originally intended for one of the knights of the Round Table.
The next sketch spoofs the One Show of its day, Nationwide. Eric Idle does a passable impression of the presenter, Michael Barratt, who I'm guessing was unable to appear as himself because he was too busy being in The Goodies. I'm joking, of course... he didn't appear as himself in The Goodies until the following year, mew. The awkward pause Idle puts in before the cut to the filmed report is a bit of attention to detail worthy of Look Around You, except it shows that you didn't have to wait until after the year 2000 to see the mocking of the limitations of '70s technology.
The filmed report is a lovely bit of location filming near the Houses of Parliament, with the buildings clearly visible in the background. Palin as a policemanny commits an escalating series of thefts, culminating in stealing beer from - it is implied by the sound of breaking glass - a shop. Or possibly there were Autons coincidentally coming to life at the same time, since the sound effect used is very similar and possibly even the exact same one.
After the titles there's a satirical sketch about the violence of boxing and the exploitation of boxers, with the central conceit being that "the Champ" has been dead for a while already (for at least "six fights" going by the dialogue) but is still being made to fight against "the Killer" by the corrupt fight organisers. Gilliam appears in this sketch fully blacked up for no discernable reason. The follow-up scene shows hospital doctors rooting for the Killer in the return fight, while the patients support the Champ - another example of the doctors vs patients theme that Monty Python's Flying Circus keeps returning to.
For the sports programme "Act Two - A Room in Polonius's House" Palin again brings out his Frank Bough impression (previously seen at the end of season three), and after the "Queen Victoria Handicap" turns out to be a horse race except instead of horses it is run by a load of Queen Victorias, Bough and his fellow sports presenters/pundits are all dressed as Queen Victoria as well. This includes the real Jimmy Hill, the latest in the increasingly long line of '70s TV people appearing as themselves. It's getting to the point where I have to wonder what the likes of Barratt and Bough did to annoy the Pythons so that they got impersonated instead of making cameos.
This isn't a bad show - though it does perhaps miss Cleese more than some of the other season four episodes - but several of the sketches feel a lot like retreads of subjects we have seen the Pythons tackle before: psychiatrists; violent policemannys; corrupt sports; sports TV shows and punditry.
Forty-four: Mr Neutron
The second-worst episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus opens with the titles. The first sketch is the opening ceremony for a post box performed by Michael Palin, in which he always pronounces the word box in a silly voice, except for once when he forgets. He repeats the entire speech in French, and is a couple of sentences into repeating it again in German when it mercifully cuts to something else. By the Hoff, this is unfunny shit. Come back The Golden Age of Ballooning, all is forgiven.
However, the reason this is only the second-worst episode is that it does get better. Chapman arrives as Mr Neutron, and he just looks hilarious - I'm laughing even before he does anything. The contrast between the narration describing him as "the most dangerous and terrifying man in the world" and the dull, ordinary setting he appears in is also very funny, even though it is arguably a partial retread of season one's "science fiction sketch."
The humdrum suburban activities of Mr Neutron are interspersed with scenes of the American military (as represented by characters played by Idle and Palin) which go on for way too long. Idle as "Captain Carpenter" is ordered to find Teddy Salad, and inquires of some fish-obsessed Eskimos who deny being Eskimos. When asked what Teddy Salad does, Carpenter claims he is a hen-teaser, leading to a lovely call back to the chairmanny of Fiat from show 42, who again says
"Che cosa e lo stucciacatori di polli?"
Carpenter finds Salad disguised as one of the doggys on a sled team (very obviously none of the doggys are huskies, as Wolfgang was quick to point out). This joke is another one that is extended way beyond the point where it stops being funny. To make matters worse, for the second part of the sketch the doggy is replaced with a disconcertingly dead-eyed, unnaturally moving, uncanny valley puppet. Mew. Do not want.
Much funnier is the scene where Mr Neutron has fallen in love with a cleaning lady, Mrs S.C.U.M. (a pepperpot played by Terry Jones). Mr Neutron tells her he has "won a Kellogg's Corn Flake Competition" before revealing that he is "the most powerful man in the universe" in the same monotone and with the same level of seriousness.
As the Americans look like they are destroying the world to get to Mr Neutron, the scene changes to show Idle as "a man from the Radio Times"* who describes all the "very expensive" scenes to follow. A subtle joke is that they have been "filmed by the BBC... in conjunction with Time-Life of course" showing how even in the '70s the BBC needed to do co-productions on expensive series (they co-produced The Ascent of Man with Time-Life in 1973). Before the very expensive scenes can be shown, the caption "The End" appears, and the manny from the Radio Times is heard asking for "another minute, Mr Cotton, please," which is a reference to Bill Cotton, then the BBC's Head of Light Entertainment.
The next programme is Conjuring Today, a short sketch in which a conjurer (Palin) with ping-pong eyes holding a bloody saw says:
"Good evening. Last week we learned how to saw a lady in half. This week we're going to learn how to saw a lady into three bits and dispose of the body..."
He is then chased off screen by two policemannys, and in doing so renders all 21st century serial-killer dramas redundant. The last shot of the episode is the manny from the Radio Times being struck on the head with a giant hammer (possibly the same prop that was used back in show 33 to hit the "The Show So Far" manny with?) as he leaves BBC Television Centre.
So there you have it - there's some good stuff in this show, but a lot of interminable rubbish as well.
* The copy of the Radio Times he's holding is the actual Radio Times from 26/10/74, the week season four began broadcast, which would therefore have been available by the time they recorded this episode in November.
Forty-five: Party Political Broadcast
The episode is introduced as though "a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Liberal Party," which I'm sure would have been a common sight on TV in a year which saw two general elections, but which are now essentially a relic of a bygone age seeing as watching broadcast television is almost as much a thing of the past as the time when there were only three channels to watch in the first place.
This goes straight into a disgusting sketch (most especially Terry Gilliam lying on the sofa messily noming beans) but crammed full of sight gags and wordplay. Idle as the family mother to Chapman as the daughter:
"When are you coming back tonight?""3 a.m!""I think it's disgusting... you a Member of Parliament."
It is eventually revealed that they are participating in the "Most Awful Family in Britain 1974" contest ("sponsored by Heart-Attacko Margarine"), and are judged by a panel of experts, who are disappointed that this family doesn't have the "sustained" and "really gross awfulness" of the winner. We then see the runners-up, the "Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeleys of Berkshire," who are a basic send-up of thr aristocracy, of the sort who wouldn't have been out of place participating in the Upper Class Twit of the Year. The competition winners are, of course, much too awful for us to be allowed to see anything of.
Over the course of this show, various sketches are interrupted by a Liberal Party candidate canvassing for votes. The resemblance to the loony who would occasionally interrupt sketches in the third season is, I am sure, coincidental.
A sketch with Chapman as a doctor making his patient (Jones) fill out pointless forms before he will treat his bleeding to death is perhaps the ultimate form of the recurring Python subject of uncaring, money-grubbing doctors. This one is perhaps most notable for the fact that the sketch was written by Chapman in partnership with (in the absence of J Cleese) a certain Douglas Adams.
"Surely you knew number four? It's from The Merchant of Venice, even I knew that!"
The middle of the episode contains a number of shorter sketches, making a change from the more long-form ones that are common through much of season four. The best of these is one that is remarkably recognisable today, because its subject is still making documentaries for the BBC 50 years later, albeit not in the same way he made them in the mid-1970s. In 1974 David Attenborough had only recently gone back into making documentaries, having been the Controller of BBC Two, in which capacity he commissioned Monty Python's Flying Circus. So this could be considered another sketch where the Pythons bit the hand that fed them, albeit in a more roundabout way. But seeing as this was the final episode, maybe this was a bite too far?
Attenborough (Palin) is searching for the "Walking tree of Dahomey, Quercus Nicholas Parsonus" but instead he finds the bum-shaped "Turkish Little Rude Plant" (whcih may or may not have been an inspiration for a certain mid-80s Doctor Who monster), the "legendary Puking Tree of Mozambique" and the long-lost tribe, the "Batsmen of the Kalahari."
This segues into a decidedely un-PC sketch about primitive African tribesmannys playing cricket against a side of Pratts.
The only thing that marks this out as being the last ever episode instead of any other regular episode of the show is that the music played over the end credits is done slightly differently, with the first half played on a single guitar, badly. Mind you, with Monty Python I get the impression that they might very well have done that kind of thing on a regular episode anyhow.
The actual ending gets very strange, with a series of announcers handing off to one another, and the final shot sees Jones replacing Idle in the presenter's chair, but it fades out before he can say anything. Confusing, not funny, but very Python.
The very last bit of all is the same caption as we saw at the start of the episode announcing a "Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Liberal Party" but Palin's voiceover collapses into giggles.
ETH NED
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