Whoops Apocalypse is a reasonably obscure ITV sitcom from 1982, which only ran for a single season of six episodes. However, the reason for it not being recommissioned for a second season is nothing to do with its quality, but more due to the fact that it concluded with the end of civilisation as we know it* in a nuclear "apocalypse," hence the title, as the series depicts the sequence of calamitous events that leads to a world war between the USA and Russia.
In some ways it is surprising that it is not better remembered. Partly due to the unusual subject matter (doubly so for a sitcom, although, that said, 1981's The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also saw the Earth get destroyed), but mainly due to the range of talented comedic actors who appeared in it.
The main characters were played by actors who were comfortable in both comedic and serious roles, which suited the fact that this series needed them to switch suddenly from the former to the latter at the climax. These included Barry Morse as the US President "Johnny Cyclops" (an exaggerated version of Ronald Reagan, although with hindsight probably not as exaggerated as the writers imagined), and John "CJ" Barron as his advisor "the Deacon." Barron didn't get where he was in this series without playing both comedies such as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and dramas such as Crown Court. Ed "Ed Straker" Bishop plays the American news anchor Jay Garrick, who feeds vital exposition to viewers by way of his news reports, which are also used to recap events of previous episodes.
The British cabinet are played by Peter "voice of the book" Jones, Geoffrey "Masters" Palmer and Richard "Mr Burton" Davies as a parody of the SDP at the time - Jones is very clearly playing a thinly-veiled Roy Jenkinsalike, and (slightly less obviously) Palmer is meant to be David Owen. They are collectively portrayed as hopelessly naive and incompetent (despite having just become the government by unexpectely winning a general election), with Jones's character being insane and under the delusion that he is "Superman." Many of the best jokes that arise from this situation are based upon needlessly precise references to Superman comics continuity, which I expect would have flown over the heads of most viewers, yet which would have been unlikely to fly at all if this had been made in the more litigious times we live in now.
"I'm sorry I can't make Question Time in the House today, Brainiac has escaped from the Phantom Zone."
Replace that with a generic, non-copyrighted supervillain name and it just wouldn't be the same.
This series, being made in the early '80s, saw the established, traditional sitcom actors joined by a couple of new names from the world of Alternative Comedy that were just beginning to break through at the time. Several months before either The Young Ones or The Comic Strip Presents began their TV runs, Whoops Apocalypse featured both Alexei Sayle and Rik Mayall.
But the outstanding comic actor who gave by far the most memorable performance in the series, easily stealing every scene - every episode, really - that he was in, was John Cleese.
Only appearing in three of the shows (episodes 3, 4 and 5), and never appearing on screen with any of the other regular cast (his one encounter with another main character occurs mostly off-screen or with Cleese replaced by a double), Cleese played the master of disguise "Lacrobat" who was tasked with stealing one of the USA's most powerful atomic bombs
"The Quark Bomb (Formerly Known As The Johnny Cyclops Bomb After The President of the Same Name)"
and smuggling it to the Middle-East. Every appearance saw Cleese adopt a new set of outrageous costumes, accents and mannerisms that showed off his comic talents to best effect. While the character of Lacrobat was written to veer between supernaturally competent and hilariously incompetent at his job, depending on the needs of the plot, Cleese held it together by playing both sides of the character completely over the top.
He did have one advantage over the rest of the cast - beyond just being John Cleese at the height of his comedic powers - which is that his scenes were all filmed on location, while the other regulars were mostly limited to videotaped recordings in front of a live studio audience. These had all the pitfalls common to studio recordings of the era (as can also be seen in the likes of The Young Ones) such as audience reactions drowning out dialogue, and editing or directorial choices (close ups vs wide angles, that sort of thing) causing punchlines or visual gags to not land quite as well as they might have with a better take. The filmed material, by comparison, was of a higher professional standard all around.
Cleese's presence helps lift the entire series to another level, and it remains very funny. And with conflict in the Middle-East and senile old mannys in charge of the USA and Russia once more, it is as topical now as it has been for 40 years, so worth watching for that reason too. It does, alas, contain a lot of of-its-time material that has dated poorly, displaying 1980s attitudes to race, gender and sexuality. The second disguise that we see Lacrobat in (not any of those I have chosen to illustrate this article with) sees Cleese in brownface, though at least there it is the character who has done it - so it could have been worse.
* While not all that common as a reason for comedies to not have sequels, it does seem to be a bit of a theme for comedies featuring John Cleese.
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.
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.
Two years passed. In that time Monty Python's Flying Circus became a legend, expanding to become far more than just the TV series. There were live shows, tie-in books and records (the age of the home video having not yet arrived), and even their first feature film, with which they (or at least their financial backers) hoped to crack America. They also made Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus, two special episodes for German television which, although they have been shown on British TV channels as well, contains some of the rarest Flying Circus material since they are not usually included on commercial releases of the TV series.
Recording of the third season commenced in 1971, and was completed by May of '72, but broadcast on the BBC did not begin until the October of 1972. The season started with the fifth show recorded, and it's a strong one that hasn't dated nearly so badly as a lot of the third season - the topical references have either been lucky and dated well, or else aged into timeless "zany madcap" humour, and there's a lack of racially/sexually questionable material - which the third season as a whole, alas, contains a lot of.
The titles are now introduced by three characters - first up is the new one for this season, Terry Jones as the nude organist plays a chord while half-turning to grin at the camera, then John Cleese's familiar announcer says the truncated
"And now..."
and then finally the It's Manny says his word. The voice speaking the title is now that of a Gumby, and Michael Palin has taken over this duty from Cleese. The title sequence itself is wholly new Gilliam animation, save for the foot at the end, but it is impossible to overstate how much less iconic it is than either of the first two seasons' sequences.
The first sketch is, to begin with, a traditional courtroom sketch, where a mass murderer (Idle) is let off with a suspended sentence because he was polite and apologised. The studio audience is evidently pumped up for the recording, because they continually laugh all the way through Terry Jones reading out the long list of names of the victims, despite that not being a joke but just the setup for the joke that follows.
Gilliam's animations have become, if anything, more grotesque since the last season, and we see our first evidence of this in the one where two policemannys pursue an escaping criminal inside his own body. The landscapes of the body are a disturbing mix of architecture and body parts, all in strange colours.
The terrible "Njorl's Saga"
"It's not that terrible."
"No, I meant terribly violent."
is packed with a number of different gags, moving seamlessly to each in turn. And just when the sketch seems to have moved on from the North Malden sponsorship bit, it returns in the form of the six warriors who have the letters MALDEN on their chests, a brilliant reveal.
Erik Njorl next appears in the courtroom from earlier, in the dock for a satirical sketch that lays into police corruption - as relevant today as it was in the '70s. This contains lines like the police superintendent (Chapman) asking the judge
"Is a charge strictly necessary, m'lud?"
"The press is here."
and the offensive weapon the accused was supposed to have in his possession being "the big brown table down at the police station."
"It's the best we could find, m'lud..."
Palin then appears as "Police Constable Pan-Am," an incredibly stupid thug who attacks all and sundry with his truncheon and blatantly takes direction in answering counsel's questions from the superintendent.
"You are Police Constable Pan-Am?"
"No, I deny that to the last breath in my body. Oh. Sorry, yes."
Palin's enthusiastic delivery of the line "Oh yes!" deservedly gets a big laugh from the audience, though they remain prone to laugh at anything and even drown out some of the dialogue with their hilarity. What do they think this is, a Radio 4 panel show?
The extended sketch where Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion (Cleese and Chapman, who were clearly also the writers) go from the launderette to visit Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris to ask him if his Roads to Freedom was "an allegory of man's search for commitment," I find much funnier now that I know there was a 13-part adaptation of the trilogy made by and shown on the BBC less than two years before this sketch. This series, starring Michael "Stone Tape" Bryant, was repeated on BBC Four in 2022 as art of the BBC's 100th anniversary, which is where I first found out about its existence and got a chance to watch it.
"When will he be free? Oh pardon. Quand sera-t-il libre? Oooooh. Ha ha ha ha She says he's spent the last 60 years trying to work that one out. Tres amusant, Madam S."
A gag about all the other celebrities who live in the same block of flats as the Sartres is a close repeat of the Beethovens from show 21. The Roads to Freedom TV series theme song plays on the radio for a couple of seconds in the Sartre's flat, before Mrs Sartre (Palin) turns it off calling it
How would you rank the impressions? You have to paw it to Eric Idle, his is clearly the best. After that I'd say there's not much in it, but I'd go Michael Palin second best, then Graham Chapman, then John Cleese, and then a bit of a gap before Terry Jones brings up the rear. Let me know in the comments if you'd disagree with my order.
Twenty-eight
A strong contender for the least likely episode to ever get repeated on a mainstream television channel ever again, this opens with possibly the most obscure joke in all of Monty Python's Flying Circus, one which I have never been able to decipher. The opening shot is of a closed, richly-decorated book, with a voiceover (Palin) and superimposed captions which say
"THE KON-TIKI"
"RA 1"
"RA 2"
"AND NOW.."
and
"MR. & MRS. BRIAN NORRIS' FORD POPULAR"
Now, I know what the Kon-Tiki is, and so it is easy to deduce what Mr & Mrs Brian Norris' Ford Popular is then a reference to, but Ceiling Cat alone knows what the "RA 1" "RA 2" bit means...
The sketch itself drags on for considerably longer than it can justify, though the contrast between the narration (by Idle) taking the concept seriously and the visuals we see, which contains all the actual gags, means there is some merit to it. Mr Norris seems an obvious forerunner of Mr Pither, whom we shall meet later on this season.
How to do it is an obvious send-up of Blue Peter (two of the schoolboys - Idle and Gilliam - in the sketch that precedes and leads into it are either wearing Blue Peter badges or else close copies of them), though done in a cramped studio set. This being the BBC, you would expect that any sketch show attempting such a thing these days would make use of the real Blue Peter studio, but this sketch ends with the revelation that the tiny studio was sat in the corner of the living room belonging to one of a pair of pepperpots - Jones and Palin.
Palin's character is Mrs N*****-Baiter, and is named as such, out loud and in full, three times over the course of the sketch. The conceit is a funny one - that she talks to Cleese's character as though he were still only a toddler, even though he is "Minister for Overseas Development" - but the joke name has dated so poorly that this is now one of the hardest Monty Python sketches to watch.
After a few lesser sketches (including the Farming Club special on Tchaikovsky, and Trim-Jeans Theatre), which have some good moments but are hardly classics, we get what is possibly the shortest Monty Python sketch to have obtained 'classic' status: the fish-slapping dance. The big laugh comes from Palin getting blatted into the water by Cleese, and the following animation, though it does follow on from the first bit, isn't really worth counting as part of the same sketch. It gets decidedly 'lacist' once the Chinese fish-ship arrives on the scene, with traditional '70s sketch show l-and-r-swapping accents. There'll be plenty more of this sort of thing later on in the season, unfortunately.
Some stock footage of a model of the Titanic sinking (perhaps taken from the 1958 film A Night to Remember?) leads in to the next sketch, where the crew are making the "women and children first" announcement while in the process of disguising themselves as women and children... until they run out of those costumes and have to start adding to the list of those who are allowed to escape first.
"The BBC is short of money" is the next sketch, and never mind the racist bits from earlier, this is probably the sketch the BBC would most like us to forget, since it feels all too topical when compared to the BBC we have nowadays. It would have been even more satirical if they had turned the Flying Circus into a panel show - much cheaper than a sketch show.
Julia Breck, more frequently to be seen in Spike Milligan's Q series where she would be a regular later on in the '70s, makes a single appearance here as Puss in Boots. I do like the bit where the screen wobbles as though going to a flashback, then doesn't. Cleese and Jones time their "Go on!" and "Oh..." (of disappointment) perfectly.
The BBC finally get thrown out of the flat and they commit to the joke all the way through the credits, having them on pieces of paper scattered across the floor.
The show isn't quite over, since after the fade out another programme starts up. It's It's.
This features the actual Lulu and Ringo Starr, only the second time the show has had celebrities appear as themselves (after Reginald Bosanquet at the end of the second season), and they have gone straight to the early-1970s A-list for these two. The trouble is, when the It's Manny tries to introduce the programme, as soon as he says "It's" the theme music starts up, drowning out anything else that is said and causing the two guests to walk out. A lovely little sketch and a fabulous use of the big-name guests.
Twenty-nine
This is a high point (possibly even the high point) of season three, containing as it does one of the series' most famous sketches, and deservedly so. But that comes near the end, first we get the title sequence to The Money Programme (including its real theme tune, one of the all time greats). This plays in full, and the first indication we get that this isn't the real The Money Programme (other than it being on a Monty Python's Flying Circus DVD) is when Eric Idle appears as the presenter. His rant about how much he loves money leads into the song "There is nothing quite as wonderful as money" and is a great start to the show. This is followed by the real programme titles.
Elizabeth R had finished its original BBC broadcast only eight or nine months before this episode was recorded. Now here we have Erizabeth L, a "sullearist" send up where the Tudor nobility are all on motorized bicycles and they all swap their ls and rs in every word like the racist caricature of Engrish - even the superimposed captions "Episode Thlee" and "The Almada" do it. With Terry Jones in yellowface as the director insisting upon this (even correcting one of the actors' "Groucester" to "Groucestel") it would be tough to defend this sketch at the best of times, and is arguably even more racist than "Mrs N*****-Baiter" was in the last episode since they clearly knew that this was transgressive even at the time.
It is still pretty funny though. I love the touch that when Cleese turns up as "Inspector Leopard" to arrest Jones as "Yakamoto" the court announces him with a fanfare. The theme of police violence continues from two episodes ago, although as this was the first show of the season to be recorded we could instead claim that it started here.
"The Church Police" sketch isn't very funny, though it does contain the memorable image of the giant paw of God descending into the studio set to point at Eric Idle.
The jungle restaurant sketch features an actual black manny. Obviously he doesn't have any lines, and it is Palin blacked up who plays "Mr Akwekwe" the restauranteur. I know I shouldn't judge a 50-year old show by today's standards, but it really does feel as though season three has already been much more densely packed with questionable racial material than the first two seasons - in these respects the series is dating more poorly as it approaches the present day, not less.
As the sketch goes on it starts to lean more heavily on 'actors forgetting their lines' gags, which I would consider a rare instance of this show sticking with a subject a touch longer than they should. It gets better when the characters start spotting the various film crews, which is a variation on the characters-semi-aware-they're-actors thing we haven't seen before. Unfortunately this ends with Terry Jones blacked up as his second director character of the episode (could this be a comment on how Jones was supposedly always trying to take over as the director on all the Pythons' projects around this time?), and then the sketch ends with a police inspector turning up, just as Erizabeth L did. The credits roll, and the picture fades out, to be followed with the BBC globe of the time.
"And now on BBC One, another six minutes of Monty Python's Flying Circus."
announces Eric Idle. This is both a joke, and the setup for another joke later on. The first joke can't possibly land as well as it might have in 1972, since nobody watching this on DVD is going to think the episode just ended, but I also think that they might have sold the joke even better to the 1970s TV audience if they'd had a genuine BBC announcer do the voiceover instead of Idle.
The show continues with the Argument Sketch which, no matter what any contrarians might claim, is one of the all-time classics. The "abuse" Palin gets from Chapman (carefully avoiding using any truly bad words that you couldn't get away with on the '70s BBC) is eminently quotable, and really the whole sketch is just full of great lines and exchanges - for all that it consists of "Yes it is" and "No it isn't" type exchanges for quite a bit of it, there is a lot of variation on the theme.
So many internets arguments of our modern era could do with being compared to the futile contradictions of Palin and Cleese, both at the top of their game here.
Obviously that's the famous part of the sketch, but for me it remains almost as good, just as quotable, and - if anything - gets even sillier once Palin goes into the other rooms. Take the
"No, no, no, hold your head like this, and then go 'waaagh'!"
bit from the "being hit on the head lessons."
For the third time in the episode a sketch is ended by having a police inspector turn up, and then it gets very meta as the inspector is also then arrested by a second inspector for "offences against the 'Getting out of sketches without using a proper punchline' Act." This inspector is in turn arrested for the same offence, and the sketch hard cuts away just as that arresting inspector is about to get arrested in turn, the infinite recursion by now so fully established in the viewer's minds that we need see no more.
The cut is back to the BBC globe, as before, where we are told (by Idle again)
"And now on BBC One, one more minute of Monty Python's Flying Circus."
For those of us watching on DVD it is clear that the show ends here, but one has to wonder how many TV viewers at the time kept watching, unaware that the programme had, in fact, already ended...
Thirty
"Ring Kichard? But surely that's not an anagram, that's a spoonerism."
"If you're going to split hairs I'm going to piss off."
I think more arguments, especially on the internets, should end in this way.
The rampant capitalism of the 1970s is satirised by the Merchant Banker sketch, in which Cleese's merchant banker is unable to understand the concept of charity.
"Er... I forget my name for the moment but I am a merchant banker."
This is a decent sketch up until the point where Terry Jones is dropped through the trapdoor (and we get a glimpse of a member of the crew down there), but then it turns into a sketch about sacking one of the two pantomime horses that the merchant banker's company employs. The mere presence of pantomime horses inevitably makes this sketch feel a bit Rentaghost.
The subsequent "life-and-death struggle" nature documentary sketch is also quite poor, labouring the point of its joke and using quite low quality archive material. In fact, this episode is generally sub-par for a lot of it, and only really picks up when we get to the sketch where Jones plays the manny who causes everybody he talks to to fall about laughing. This is sort of a cross between the 'funniest joke in the world' and the 'dull life of a city stockbroker' sketches from back in season one, but what sets it apart from them is the scene where the manny's boss (Palin) sacks him, and then laughs his head off at the misfortune he has just inflicted.
The next sketch is Palin delivering a mad monologue where he talks himself into making a strange gesture, sort of like an exaggerated imaginary page turning, whenever he pauses, so that we don't think he's finished speaking. This is immediately followed by a sketch about continuity announcers that is done entirely in voiceover over the BBC globe, and continues into the news programme that they were announcing. The real Richard Baker (another newsreader of the time, like Reginald Bosanquet who we saw in show 26) appears in vision only, drowned out by the sounds of the announcers, supposedly reading the news and also making the same gesture we saw Palin do in the earlier sketch.
This whole section is well constructed, with the gags nicely building on one another, and so a great improvement on the first part of the episode, but after this we get "The Pantomime Horse is a Secret Agent Film" whose title sequence leave us in no doubt that this is a Bond parody. But as it is back to the pantomime horse-based humour of earlier on, the quality also drops to a similar level. The music used for the chase between the two pantomime horses is another appearance from our old friend Devil's Galop, as used when the Spanish Inquisition were hurrying to the Old Bailey.
Yes and mew, it is safe to say this episode is not a favourite of mine, especially coming right after the superb show 29.
Thirty-one: The All-England Summarize Proust Competition
If you've ever tried to marathon the whole of Monty Python's Flying Circus then it's about here that it starts to get very brown and extremely '70s. Given that this is also the point in the series when they started including lolrandom things like having a loony (dressed as a sort-of clown) lean into shot, wave at the camera, then lean back out of shot, you may think you're starting to hallucinate.
A sketch about camp hairdressers trying to climb Mount Everest couldn't scream 'written by Graham Chapman' louder if it tried.
Another very random sketch is the one that the Just the words script book simply calls "Our Eamonn," a name that doesn't do the sketch justice. There doesn't seem to be any central conceit holding the sketch together, only a lot of strange things happening one after the other, from the telephone operator who needs to know everyone's shoe size before they'll assist, to Graham Chapman coming in fully blacked up as "Eamonn" the primitive African warrior. It's quite unsettling, in a way, how much it defies rational comprehension. Plus they try to wring as many laughs as possible from repeating the word "yes" into the telephone, which the studio audience tolerates ('laps it up' would be a better phrase) far more than I do. This all takes place in a set made to look like a very, very '70s suburban home.
There's an improvement in the form of the language laboratory sketch, where mannys are learning to speak English but with certain accents or modes of speech. It contains some proto-Yes Minister satire, with the would-be politician (Jones) learning to say
"I'm afraid I cannot comment on that until it's been officially hushed up."
and
"While there is no undue cause for concern, there is certainly no room for complacency."
as well as an insincere laugh.
The travel agent sketch contains a few good lines (such as Mr Smoke-Too-Much having never had his name pointed out to him until now), but goes on and on and on, and of all the sketches that rely on tedious repetition for their humour this might be the worst of the entire series. I know that is sort of the point, in that it is attacking - savagely - the mundanity of package holidays, but having never experienced such a holiday myself (and never likely to, seeing as I don't live in the 1970s) it doesn't land with me. And it is yet another quite extraordinarily brown set.
Thrust is the latest in a long line of silly names for faux current affairs programmes. Cleese delivers a delightfully eccentric performance as Anne Elk (Miss), it reminds me somewhat of Uri Geller, although this sketch too is stretched out far longer than the jokes really warrant. At the end it crosses over back into the travel agent sketch, where it becomes difficult to make out what the characters are each saying, because they're all talking at once (Idle as Mr Smoke-Too-Much still continuously droning away in the background) plus there's the audience laughter on top. This is a pity, since it is the conclusion of the episode.
Never mind 31 episodes in to a Flying Circus marathon, this is a deranged experience at any time.
Thirty-two
This opens with a superb satire of Mary Whitehouse and her ilk in the Clean Up National Television brigade, as Conservative housewives wage a "war against pornography" which includes, of course, the BBC. It is packed with jokes, both visual gags and in the voiceover narration by Eric Idle.
This is followed after the titles with a very different, yet equally hilarious sketch of the Gumby brain specialist (Cleese) who is just as confused and stupid as his Gumby patient (Palin). Lines like "My brain hurts" have stuck with me for years, although really what makes it special is all in the performance. Palin recovers from almost corpsing when he has to deliver the line
"No, no, no, my brain in my head."
The second part of the sketch is almost as good, starting with Chapman as the surgeon being transformed into a Gumby before commencing the operation, and ending with Jones as the Gumby anaesthetist crashing through the wall (next to the door in centre-frame, a lovely bit of audience misdirection in camera) and anaesthetising Palin by smashing him on the head with his apparatus. Just wonderful, silly stuff.
"There's a man at the door with a moustache."
"Tell him I've already got one."
So opens the sketch with Cleese as the manny presenting a TV documentary live in a couple's home (played by Chapman and Jones - playing the couple, I mean, not the home). Cleese sexing up the boring subject of molluscs in a desperate attempt to prevent the couple from switching him off accurately predicted the trajectory of mainstream TV documentaries over the next 40 to 50 years, which means it was either extremely prescient or else this sort of thing was already going on in the 1970s.
That sketch could have been written yesterday, but I really don't have any trouble imagining that it was just as valid in 1972. Less likely to get shown on the BBC if made nowadays, I suppose, in case our current government thought it was referring to them... for some reason.
This is followed by a surreal sketch with the Royal Navy's expedition to "Lake Pahoe" which sees Cleese as an interviewer who becomes increasingly Long John Silver-like as the sketch progresses, and revisits an old theme of the navy being full of cannibals (per show 26) when Chapman, as the expedition leader, starts denying it before the interviewer even has a chance to bring it up. The lake turns out to be in the basement of a suburban house, which is a bit of a lolrandom ending, but it's still a fun sketch along the way.
Speaking of lolrandom, the show's last sketch is described by Cleese's character as "the silliest sketch I've ever been in," and Idle's character is a Scotsmanny ("the silliest person we've ever had on this programme") who orders a whisky for each of his starter, main course and pudding.
Thirty-three
Graham Chapman's A Liar's Autobiography, volume vi gives hints, or in some cases clear indications, about the bits of Monty Python that most interested him. Biggles makes several appearances in the section which blurs the fantasies of the young Graham with reality, and these seem heavily influenced by the "Biggles dictates a letter" sketch, particularly the bit where Biggles worries about whether or not Algy and Ginger are gay. The outwardly butch Algy admits it at once (and gets shot for his trouble) while the flamboyant camp stereotype Ginger denies it and gets described by Biggles (played, of course, by Chapman himself) as
"Stout fellow, salt of the earth, backbone of England... Funny, he looks like a poof."
Sigmund Freud eat your heart out.
This is the episode with the cutaways to characters who just say the non-sequitur "Lemon curry?" I'd say this is another example of season three trying too hard to be zany and madcap, like with the loony leaning into shot we saw back in show 31. This running gag does at least have a payoff later on, albeit a weak one.
Another obsession of Chapman's was mountaineering. The sketch about horizontally climbing a city street in the same way as one might climb a mountain is knowingly silly, with the interviewer (Cleese) and pedestrians alike moving around on the pavement normally. The mountaineer being interviewed, Bert, is of course played by Chapman.
"Bert, some people say this is crazy."
"Ah, well, but they said Crippen was crazy."
"Crippen was crazy."
"Ah, well, there you are then."
The stop motion of three men falling horizontally is charmingly low-tech, and I reckon that makes it more amusing than if they had found a way to do the effect more convincingly.
After a couple of shorter sketches including one where a lifeboat and a suburban house get mixed up, and then an attempt to make an exciting current affairs programme about storage jars, the extreme silliness of the show up until this point is paid off in a bit called "The Show So Far..." where Terry Jones reads out a summarised description of the show so far, and he sounds somewhat embarrassed at how silly the descriptions make it out to be.
This is followed by a sketch that was parodied by Rik Mayall and Alexei Sayle in a tiny but memorable cutaway in The Young Ones. It's the famous Cheese Shop sketch, where Palin as the shopkeeper has an enormous number of different ways to tell the customer, Cleese, that he hasn't got particular types of cheese in stock. Although I don't actually think it was, this feels like they're improvising their dialogue on the spot, and in terms of Palin-Cleese two-pawers, this is almost as good as the Argument Sketch - it is a highlight of the season.
Speaking of highlights, this is followed by 'Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days' with its extreme level of blood and violence, as cartoonish as it gets outside one of Gilliam's actual cartoons.
A cameo appearance of real-life newsreader Richard Baker, who already previously appeared in show 30, pays off the "lemon curry" gag when he says it in a confused way before the camera fades to black. They're in danger of overusing their newsreader cameos, although they're still a long way from being as bad as The Goodies, for whom Corbet Woodall was practically a regular.
This is followed by an audience-baiting ending to the show where Cleese, on a beach location dressed as a Spanish Conquistador (or possibly a Tercio) soldier but speaking as though his announcer character, announces that "the show is a couple of minutes short this week" and "there aren't any more jokes or anything." He then walks off and leaves the camera showing the beach and with only the sound of the waves. There really aren't any more jokes, so any viewers who keep watching expecting a punchline end up disappointed. I have no way of knowing if the full length of this bit is preserved on the DVD, but if it is then I feel that they didn't quite commit to this anticlimax as much as they could have, since the camera doesn't really hold on for long enough to properly keep the audience in suspense.
This sort of purposefully frustrating non-ending has been done better by later TV comedies, including a season of Smith & Jones where they promised in a song played during the end credits that there would be no extra funny bit after the credits, and were then usually true to their word. More recently than that, in the penultimate episode of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Lee noisily pretends to be noming a popadom for ages, and after doing the punchline to the audience ("Every time you look at your watch, I start again") it continues "for quite a long time before we finally fade out" (as the Just the Words script book described the ending to this very episode). I suppose in a way the Pythons even topped this themselves with the ending to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Anyway, ending (plus another couple of weaker bits) aside, this is a great episode, containing several of the third season's strongest sketches.
The Cycling Tour
I always look forward to watching The Cycling Tour as it is so unlike any other episode of the series, being as it is the only one to have a central narrative running through the entire show and linking all the sketches. This even extends to it having an on-screen caption naming it as The Cycling Tour and no Monty Python's Flying Circus title sequence. With Palin at the heart of it, plus Palin and Jones playing a single character each and evidently heavily responsible for the writing, this feels more like a proto-Ripping Yarns than it does a Flying Circus.
This is also the episode with the least amount of Gilliam animation - confined to a couple of animated monsters integrated with the live action background, who are seen only briefly in the opening scenes before making their proper appearance right at the end. In the early scenes we are also introduced to Palin's central character, Mr Reg Pither, who is on the titular cycling tour "of North Cornwall," and these are excellent at establishing Pither's personality as we see him annoying every other character he meets and insisting upon asking a doctor (Idle) for directions.
"Oh all right. Take this to a chemist."
The first person who isn't annoyed by Pither is Mr Gulliver (Jones). After an accident involving the pair, Gulliver starts to go through a succession of personality changes. First he is convinced he is Clodagh Rogers, but this soon changes to Trotsky, with much humour arising from Pither being aware of the first change but not the second, so he's still treating Gulliver like Clodagh while he's now acting like Trotsky.
The action moves to the Soviet Union, where they are happy to have Trotsky back. Pither goes to the British Embassy where we get probably the most egregious example of yellowface in the whole of Monty Python, with Chapman and Cleese as the bingo-crazed Chinese Communists who have unconvincingly taken over the position of the British ambassador. With humour arising mainly from the old l-r swap and Chapman's character ("Mr Atkinson") being unable to pronounce "Cornwall" it is aparringry lacist but, I must confess, I still find it one of the funniest scenes unlikely to get shown on the BBC ever again.
Pither is taken to Moscow to be honoured as the manny who has brought Trotsky back to them, and it is this scene which gives us this quote, which I am reminded of whenever fictional characters are depicted as speaking English when they ought by rights to be speaking a different language:
But even as Gulliver/Trotsky addresses the central committee, he undergoes another personality change, becoming Eartha Kitt. Pither gets arrested and faces a firing squad, who turn out to be incompetent and miss him several times. My favourite subversion of the much-overused "it was all a dream" trope comes when Pither wakes up to find himself at home with his mother:
"No dear, this is the dream, you're still in the cell."
Gulliver meanwhile is now fully made up as Eartha Kitt, including long dress, feather boa and, sadly, full blackface and wig. But when he opens his mouth to sing it is the voice of Edward Heath that comes out, which the Soviets are less happy with. A thrown tomato restores Gulliver's mind to normal, and he is reunited with Pither just as the firing squad decide to charge them with bayonets...
CAPTION: 'SCENE MISSING'
"Phew, what an amazing escape."
If this were a conventional sitcom or dramatic piece then that might have seemed like a terrible cop-out ending, but in the zany madcap world of Monty Python it fits in perfectly. Then after the (normal) end credits have rolled it ends with the animated monsters, who are named Maurice and Kevin, dancing to a Clodagh Rogers number.
I like this not just for the unique structure, but also because it has loads of good bits and hangs together well as a whole, making it one of the funniest episodes of the third season.
Thirty-five
Eric Idle's character Mr Badger ("the silliest person we've ever had on this programme") returns from show 32 to ruin the first sketch with his silliness. He offers not to ruin it "for a pound" but by then it is too late.
I do love the simplicity of
"And now for ten seconds of sex."
(sound of clock ticking over a blank screen for 10 seconds)
"All right, you can stop now."
The sketches after the titles flow into one another, moving quickly from one silly concept to the next until Mr Badger again interrupts, as he does several more times throughout the show. This is followed by a Gilliam animation, then the Olympic Hide-and-Seek sketch in which the competitors can hide anywhere in the world so it takes years for the games to play out. In the filmed section with Jones out on the streets of London, seeking, we can see members of the public chuckling at the sight of him or looking in the direction of the camera. The ultimate punchline, that the years-long match is a tie and so has to be replayed, is as inspired as it is ludicrous.
The knight with the chicken makes his first appearance in quite a while when Cleese is seen to borrow the chicken with which to hit Palin. This leads in to the dinner party sketch with the "Cheap-Laughs" (Chapman and Jones) who leave their hosts' house wrecked and full of practical jokes awaiting said unwary hosts.
The sci-fi sketch about the economics of the planet Algon features some CSO that Barry Letts would be proud of, and there is a certain resemblance in particular between some of the scenes and the cliffhanger ending to part four of The Mutants. This was recorded in 1972 so is contemporary with season nine of Doctor Who as well.
And Mr Badger returns again at the end to read the credits in return for being paid 40p by the BBC. This isn't a bad episode by any means, it just has a tough time following after what was easily a series highlight.
Thirty-six
Erizabeth L wasn't the only third season sketch to have a marked Erizabethan influence, doubtless due to the broadcast of two landmark BBC historical dramas (The Six Wives of Henry viii in 1970 and Elizabeth R in 1971) not long before the making of this series. A large portion of this episode is given over to the sketch that begins with the "Tudor Jobs Agency" before swiftly becoming about a police raid on a seller of "dirty books." The two then get all mixed up as Superintendent Gaskell gets mistaken for Tudor celebrity Sir Philip Sidney, and he slowly becomes the character.
After swordfighting with two Spanish smugglers trying to bring a huge collection of pornographic mazagines ashore, Gaskell seems to have fully embraced life on the 16th century vice squad, until the arrival of his missing partner Sergeant Maddox (in modern day dress) snaps him back out of it. Alas, like a Shakespearean tragedy, things come to an unhappy end when Gaskell/Sidney is undone by his wife's secret porn stash, and Maddox arrests them both. This is such a bizarre sketch, in the way it blends the two disparate aspects back and forth, that it is really memorable, with a great central performance by Palin.
After a couple of shorter sketches we get the one about Thripshaw's disease, where Palin's patient uses the wrong words for things, and which contains the quotable line
"And the thing about saying the wrong word is (a) I don't notice it, and (b) sometimes orange water given bucket of plaster."
I sometimes think I know mannys who suffer from Thripshaw's disease.
More quotable lines come in the following sketch about the vicar that's obsessed with sherry:
"Not at all, vicar, you're one of our best customers... you and the United States."
There is an irony that in this sketch it is Palin who plays the vicar, while Chapman's character is the one who keeps refusing the proferred alcohol.
The end credits all contain references to pornography, some of them more explicitly so than others.
Thirty-seven
Sir Kenneth Clark of Civilisation fame makes an appearance in the first sketch, albeit played by Chapman (who doesn't even attempt an impression of his voice), before being knocked out by a boxer.
After the titles, we get the first Dennis Moore sketch - the highwaymanny played by Cleese who is obsessed with stealing the lupins from his victims. This first part is really only establishing the character, ready for later parts of the sketch to recur throughout the programme - a bit like the Spanish Inquisition only not nearly so good.
There's a very poor sketch with Idle and Chapman as two pepperpots reading their horoscopes in newspapers, although the studio audience seem to like it a lot. References to Roger Moore, Tony Curtis and Peter Wyngarde in the horoscopes make it very clear that this was made the same era as The Persuaders! and Jason King. This transitions into a sketch about doctors fleecing their patients of all their money, which seems oddly out of place in a series made in a time when the NHS was at its height, but I suppose is just following in the same vein of subversive comedy as the sketch about the hospital run like the army from the tail end of season two.
The second part of Dennis Moore starts with a clearly intentional parody of BBC historical dramas, as Georgian era courtiers discuss the great events of the time while standing around in a drawing room studio set without us seeing anything of the far grander events they describe. This could be a general piss-take of the whole style of BBC historical dramas from the '60s through to the '80s, but it seems most closely to resemble The First Churchills, which had a similar 18th century setting (though a bit earlier) and was broadcast in 1969. Another possible influence is the BBC's Casanova series from 1971.
Dennis bursts in through an open window (accompanied by the off-screen noise of the standard glass-smashing sound effect - must have been some Autons coming to life in the next studio over) and demands their lupins.
"He seeks them here, he seeks them there, he seeks those lupins everywhere."
After he's gone, it is revealed that one of the ladies (Carol Cleveland) has tricked him by withholding one lupin concealed on her person, although eagle-eyed viewers may note that they actually still had a few, since Cleese dropped a couple on the steps as he swung out on a rope. When Dennis delivers the lupins to the poor peasants, it is revealed that they have an abundance of lupins but still lack any of the necessities of life. Sending him back with a list, Dennis arrives in the rich drawing room in the same way, with the same glass-smashing effect, even though his swinging in through the already-open window is even more blatant this time than it was before.
The "Ideal Loon Exhibition" is an excuse for some lolrandom things to happen, then after a couple of short sketches we return to Dennis Moore for part three, where he is now stealing from the formerly-rich nobles to give what few items he didn't get from them before to the now-rich peasants. His backing singers point this out in their Robin Hoodesque ditty
"He steals from the poor and gives to the rich, stupid bitch."
This gives Dennis the realisation
"Wait a tick... blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought."
As a comedic punchline this is alright, although it does come as close as the Pythons ever did (as a group, I mean, not counting some of the opinions later put forward by individual members) to expressing the reactionary idea that one shouldn't attempt socialistic redistribution of wealth on the grounds that it might be a bit tricky.
Don't worry, though, as this episode is unlikely to get repeated on a mainstream TV channel ever again, thanks to the next sketch, Prejudice, in which Michael Palin says 13 racist or xenophobic epithets in the space of 14 words, at least half of which would result in instant cancellation if said today. The satirical intent of this is made clear by the superimposed caption that accompanies this:
"All facts verified by the Rhodesian police"
There's an obvious edit point as Palin moves from a standing to a sitting position, which does make me suspect there was originally something here that even the BBC of 1972 considered a bit much. Of course this could equally well have been a cut for time or because they needed to retake part of it, but given the subject of this sketch I do have to wonder...
"But as you know on this programme we're not just prejudiced against race or colour, we're also prejudiced against - yes, you've guessed, stinking homosexuals!"
The credits roll over Dennis Moore holding up a coach, only to then try to redistribute the wealth of the four occupants so that they all end up with exactly the same amount of money and jewellery.
Thirty-eight
The first sketch of this episode - the choreographed Party Political Broadcast - is missing from the DVD set* I have, which means it must have been taken from the repeat where that sketch was cut because it was so close to an election (almost certainly in 1974, when there were two general elections in the UK). Instead the show begins with the title sequence, without even an appearance from the nude organist, announcer, or It's Manny.
This is a great episode if you enjoy seeing dummies being hurled off castle battlements, since that is what the Kamikaze Scotsmannys sketch mostly consists of. It's supposed to be Edinburgh Castle, but lolno. The framing device of the many TV crew members trying to help the narrator with his barely primary-school level of literacy gives us a lovely array of '70s fashions to look at, especially Cleese with his mismatched suit jacket and trousers, and polo neck underneath.
There's a Gilliam animation that is a very on-the-nose parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the exactness with which it follows the iconic sequence in which the primitive manny throws the bone in the air is what sells the eventual punchline.
The sketch about the intelligence of penguins sees the Pythons having a go at BBC programme planners, almost as though they somehow knew in advance that this show was going to end up suffering interference from BBC management.
The Kamikaze Scotsmannys sketch resumes and finally reaches a level of absurdity that it becomes funny, as the last surviving Scotsmanny, Sapper MacDonald (Chapman) fails to explode when on his mission, and the Russians call in their bomb squad to deal with him. There's an incongruous use of the Mastermind theme to represent the tension over their defusing of the unexploded Scotsmanny - I can only assume that tune didn't have quite the same associations in 1971 as it does today, where you can't possibly hear it as anything else.
The third season's obsession with "loonys" reaches its apex with the Spot the Loony game show (while we're nearly at the end of the season in broadcast-order terms, this show was the third one recorded so maybe the loony obsession was actually started here?). My favourite sketch of the episode is the filmed sketch with Palin and Cleese as two competing documentary makers fighting over the single microphone and camera crew. This escalates into a car chase with Devil's Galop played over it.
The end credits plays over a film of Edward Heath, and the "Spot the Loony" buzzer sounds repeatedly over it - you didn't cut that bit, did you, you fuckers?
Post-credits, there's a series of fake trailers for upcoming BBC sitcoms, taking the piss out of the Pythons' contemporaries in TV comedy since they are mostly variations on actual shows: Dad's Doctor, Dad's Pooves, On the Dad's Liver Bachelors at Large, The Ratings Game ("the loony life of a BBC programme planner with the accent on repeats"), Up the Palace, and Limestone Dear Limestone. As with other fake continuity announcements placed at the end of shows that might fool a casual viewer into thinking they were genuine, the game is given away by Eric Idle doing the voiceover instead of a real BBC announcer. It ends with the declaration that the BBC is closing down for the night, complete with an effect designed to look like a '70s television switching off. Suffice to say this doesn't really have the desired effect on a DVD played on a modern TV set.
* Actually the sketch does appear as part of the DVD set, but separate from the episode, in a lower quality version on the special features disc. I suppose reintegrating it into the show to restore it to what was originally broadcast was too much like W-word for the lazy bastards.
"These enquiries led to certain changes at the BBC..."
Thirty-nine: Grandstand
This episode opens with the iconic pre-1990 Thames Television ident and music, before David Hamilton (a genuine Thames presenter of the era) says
"Good evening. We've got an action-packed evening for you tonight on Thames, but right now here's a rotten old BBC programme..."
The nude organist, announcer and It's Manny appear as expected, but in place of the usual titles we get a title sequence for The British Show Biz Awards instead.
Richard Baker is nominated for an award for saying "Lemon curry?" in an obvious callback to his brief appearance in show 33. Also up for an award is "the Oscar Wilde skit" which links into the subsequent sketch.
Here we see Wilde (Chapman), James McNeill Whistler (Cleese) and George Bernard Shaw (Palin) all trying to be witty to the Prince of Wales (Jones), in a sketch full of great lines and with a proper punchline and everything, but which is somewhat spoiled by bad sound, audience laughter over the top of dialogue, and poor directorial choices in camera angles and cutting, trampling over the funny bits. In my opinion this is a studio-based sketch that could definitely have been improved by a better take.
An excerpt from Pasolini's The Third Test Match fills a game of cricket with sexual and religious imagery, but the exaggeratedly eccentric direction always ends up reminding me of the equally oddly-directed cricket match in The Girl Who Was Death.
Fans of pre-decimalised currency will enjoy the "new brain" sketch, in which the UK's baffling old monetary system is used, despite this having been recorded in 1972 (over a year after the switch was made) and broadcast in 1973. Superimposed captions inform us this was an "Old sketch written before decimalisation" and that "1np = 2 1/2 op". More callbacks to prior shows come when Mrs Zambesi has to give her shoe size when using the telephone (show 31) to order up the new brain from "Curry's" and then the two pepperpots pass unexploded Scotsmannys in the street (show 38, which I suppose forced this show to come no earlier than it in the running order).
After a couple of shorter sketches, including a quite unsettling one with Idle as a manny who has somehow stolen a quantity of a doctor's (Cleese) blood, we get the sketch the programme is named for, being based upon the BBC's Grandstand, a long-running sports programme designed to keep BBC1 from showing anything actually worth watching on Saturday afternoons between 1958 and 2007. The presenter in the early '70s was Frank Bough, and Michael Palin isn't quite doing a recognisable impression of him - I doubt that I would have guessed that he was supposed to be Bough without my having done some internets research beforepaw.
The Pythons aren't done with taking the piss out of the awards ceremony, since we return there to see Attenborough using artificial means to simulate tears, and when he says
"And now for the moment you've all been waiting for..."
the caption "THE END" flashes up.
This isn't actually the end, since first we get "the Dirty Vicar sketch," supposed winner of "this year's Mountbatten trophy, showbusiness's highest accolade." It is an almost willfully unfunny sketch to end the season on, as Terry Jones's vicar character crudely sexually assaults the two female characters (played by Carol Cleveland and Caron Gardener) while shouting out lines like
"I like tits!"
I have to assume this was the Pythons sending up the type of lowbrow comedy of the time that they felt unjustly won awards. Well, that's another thing that isn't any less true today than it was back then. The show ends awkwardly with an anticlimactic fade to black.
