It's not immediately obvious if this has any connection to the 1969 BBC Civilisation series (or the 2018 Simon Schama-presented Civilisations that was an attempt to be a modern updating of the '60s series) beyond the name. But I can't see it being entirely a coincidence seeing as this is a series about history as viewed through the art of the time.
However the resemblances in production style are slight. Schama and his co-presenters were obviously following in the footsteps of Kenneth Clark (not that one), but this series eschews on-screen presenters entirely, opting for a mix of voiceover narration (provided by Sophie "Scream of the Shalka" Okonedo) and 'talking head' experts. This, combined with the way the artworks being talked about are presented to viewers - essentially in their own distinct, cordoned off sections of the programmes - makes the series more closely resemble 2022's Art That Made Us than either of the preceding Civilisation series.
The first episode in the four-part series focuses on the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 410AD. The narration and the experts both take great pains to point out every similarity between that period of history and the present, with talk about the mega-wealthy bleeding their society dry and a refugee crisis leading to mass immigration. No names are named for the modern equivalents, giving the series the vaguest fig leaf* that it isn't referring to anybody specific, while the historic equivalents are the Emperor Honorius, General Stilicho and Alaric the Goth. These three characters give viewers identification figures upon which the episode can hang its narrative.
Rome is a frequent subject of historical documentaries, but this period is not one that I have seen concentrated upon much, so there was a good deal that was of interest here, with or without the parallels to modern times, which were clearly being laboured upon for the benefit of viewers less able to draw their own conclusions than us cats. My biggest issue was how it just feels weirdly distracting to have the word "Civilisations" in the title, which seems to promise something the programme then doesn't deliver. It lacks that "personal view" identity that having a single central presenter gave the real Civilisation.
Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way first - Alastair Campbell appears in this as one of the talking head experts, for no readily explained reason. Why did the makers pick this cunt over any other expert who would surely have been at least as well qualified as him, with the added bonus of not being involved in lying to the British public in order to start a pointless war? I can only conclude that this was yet another BBC 'jobs for the boys' stitch up, probably Campbell was at school with the Producer or something. After all, I hardly think he qualifies as a 'big name' to draw in the viewers - he's far more likely to put them off, mew!
Anyway, his odious presence aside, this episode covers the fall of Ptolemaic Egypt in 30BC, which (for me at least) is more familiar territory than the fall of Rome, being as it was the subject of the BBC historical drama series The Cleopatras, as well as the famous Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton epic Cleopatra.
Cleopatra is very much the main character here, with the other big names of that period of history - Mark Antony, Julius Caesar and Octavian - playing secondary fiddles to her struggle to gain the throne and retain control of Egypt over the course of her reign.
Being a documentary not a drama, this goes beyond the stories of the major players involved to tell us some stuff I didn't already know, such as the fact that a volcanic eruption in Alaska can be blamed for the 10 years of unexpected (and hitherto unexplained) droughts that afflicted Egypt during Cleopatra's reign, depleting her treasury and significantly weakening her personal power as well as Egypt's influence, to the benefit of the rising Roman Empire.
This additional context for the events more than makes this documentary a worthwhile use of your time, presence of Alastair "we could just do what the Americans want us to like we always do but first let's drive a manny to his death for the lols" Campbell notwithstanding.
3. Aztecs
Weirdly I thought this was a bit of a slow one for much of the middle of the programme, almost like they had to pad out the episode to fill the hour. Then the last 15 minutes (or so) packed in a lot of activity as the various events that it had been building up to all hit at once. In a way I suppose this does help convey the sudden and rapid collapse of the Aztec Zone Empire, which fell in only two years (1519-1521) after the Spaniards arrived.
Even in the last forty years the way this period of history is taught has become less Eurocentric - a Marshall Cavendish partwork magazine called Discovery, which came out in the late 1980s, had issues focused on Columbus and Cortes which would never be done the same way today. This episode seemed to be going to the other extreme to begin with - I wondered if the Aztec's sacrifice of mannys was going to get a mention at all. Eventually it did, and not as downplayed as I first feared it was going to be.
But the real emphasis was on how Cortes was "a nobody" (this was one of the first lines of the programme) as if it would have been A-OK if the Aztecs had been conquered by officially authorised representatives of a European power, no doubt led by a prince or an artistocrat or two. As if they wouldn't have had the same motivation as Cortes had - pure greed, mew.
The attempt to draw parallels between the smallpox epidemic that decimated the Aztecs and the Covid pandemic was somewhat undermined by their own talking head expert saying that smallpox killed 33% of its victims while Covid killed only 1-2%. An example of the reach of the episode exceeding its grasp, if this was the best way they could think to illustrate this point.
Still worth watching for the overall story of this period, even if there are bits of the episode that were weak on their own.
4. Japan
Better paced than the Aztecs programme and about as interesting, this tells of events from the 19th century when the Americans forced Japan to trade with them and then fucked their economy. Plus ça change. This then led to the downfall of the traditional Japanse way of life and the beginning of Westernisation, as examplified by the destruction of the samurai class and their archetypal katana swords.
Oddly there's a decision to present the entire 'fall' from the point of view of the samurais, and barely any mention is made of the other roughly 93% of the population of Japan, who might have perhaps been glad of the removal of the right of the other 6-7% to openly carry fuck-off razor sharp swords everywhere and get bowed to in the streets under the unspoken threat of violence.
The real villains of the piece are the Americans under Matthew "Friends" Perry, who come out of it looking like right dicks. The colonial mindset of the mid-19th century is hinted at but not dwelled upon, which for a British-made programme is a bit rich. I wonder how many other 19th century civilisations that fell were considered for this fourth programme, only to be rejected because of who it was that caused them to fall?
The message here is that isolationism is bad, which I think we can all get behind, though unlike in earlier episodes there's no direct and unambiguous parallels drawn with modern states or kingdoms (united or otherwise, mew). Another minor flaw of this episode is that one of the talking heads is an author whose overly enthusiastic style of delivery clashes with the more serious statements of the actual experts. Still, considering the Egypt episode had Alastair fucking Campbell in it, it could have been a lot worse.
Overall, this was a good but flawed series, which probably benefitted from putting its best programme out first. It wasn't a patch on earlier documentary series with the word "Civilisation" in the title, and any comparions with them can only see this one come out looking poorly. And at only four parts, such small portions!
This picks up from where season one left off with an immediate change of emphasis. While the lower classes were almost entirely absent in the first run, they now make their presence felt - albeit only via their interactions with the central characters, the royal family of France in the 1780s.
Queen Marie Antoinette is no longer portrayed as sympathetically as before, with her arrogance coming to the fore as her dominant character trait. And her repeated infidelity to the king is contrasted against his refusal to take a mistress even when it is something that is virtually expected of him by the society of the day.
King Louis xvi (played by Louis Cunningham, giving a stronger performance than the first season allowed him) is presented in such a way that even the most hard-hearted abolitionist will struggle to dislike him as an individual - one of the main plotlines is the terminal illness and death of their eldest son, the Dauphin, and how this affects Louis on an emotional level.
Where he loses our sympathies is in his role as king, since he is a terrible autocrat who makes mistaik after mistaik (the writing cleverly shows us that he makes his decisions with the best of intentions before showing how they backfire upon him) with the goal of retaining as much power to himself and "the crown" as possible. Each time he stubbornly resists pressure to make concessions to his political enemies, the situation then gets worse and he ends up having to concede even more than he would have if he had compromised to begin with.
The king's main opponents are his younger brother (confusingly also named Louis, but helpfully known as "Provence" due to his title), who conspires with the nobles to have the king declared incapable so that he can seize power as regent, and their cousin, the Duke of Orleans, who uses his vast fortune to print propaganda and stage plays to turn the people against the king while at the same time making himself seem like the peoples' friend. They both make progress with these plans, but while neither of them totally succeed in their objectives they do manage to erode support for the royal family in general - not something they want to happen if they are to one day be king themselves.
Meanwhile, the queen becomes involved in a scandal not of her own making but which her reputation (which is in a large part her own fault) makes the people believe is due to her. This is the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, a real historic event which I am most familiar with due to the lesser-known Alexandre Dumas novel The Queen's Necklace, which plays out over the first six episodes of the season, and where the aftermath is felt in the last two instalments.
As part of a plan to steal the world's most valuable diamond necklace, a trio of con artists forge letters which pretend to be from the queen to Cardinal Rohan* who is out of favour at the court but desperate to get back into good graces with the royal family. They trick the cardinal into acting as an intermediary buying the necklace on the queen's behalf, and then handing it over to her "special guard" who is really one of their number. The con is then uncovered when the jeweller wants paid and the queen denies any knowledge of it.
We follow the prime mover of the conspiracy, Jeanne la Motte de Valois (played by Freya Mavor, a magnetic presence who at times becomes as much the central character of the series as the title character) as she executes every part of the plan, and the addition of this storyline lets this season equal or even exceed the brilliance of the first, due to the way it moves in parallel with the court intrigues and then at times influences it, even in ways Jeanne has not intended and - in many cases - does not even know about.
Dumas's novel makes the Italian occultist Count Cagliostro the mastermind behind the affair, but this series sticks closer to real history (at the same time as giving a female character more agency) by depicting him as a con artist who was active in Paris at the time, and known to both Jeanne and Cardinal Rohan, but who was innocent of any involvement in the plot.
The decision to make the series protagonists act like 21st century people who find themselves living in the past, which was present in the first season, is if anything even more obviously the case here, with multiple instances of anachronistic modern turns of phrase being used. Also, the French financial crisis caused by the massive cost of their war with Britain is described using modern terms that viewers can be expected to be familiar with from real-world events of the last 20 years. The attempts by the king and his "Financial Controller" to reduce the deficit can also be compared and contrasted to 2010s austerity policies or Liz Truss panicking the markets, which gives us a shortpaw way of comprehending why they fail so disastrously.
The season concludes as the French Revolution begins in 1789, with news of the storming of the Bastille prison reaching the court at Versailles. What comes next could be left as an exercise for the viewer, so it will be interesting to see if there is a third (and presumably final) season covering the events of the revolution up to the deaths of the king and queen. There's surely plenty of material from history to fill another eight episodes, not least the royal family's ill-fated attempt to escape from France. With the Duke of Orelans being such a major character in the first two seasons, a subplot about his futile attempts to manipulate the revolution to his benefit could be just as interesting as the fates of Louis and Marie Antoinette.
Both seasons are currently available to watch on the BBC iPlayer.
* Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
I was only put onto this when its second season began showing on the BBC. If historical accuracy is what you're after then this series is not for you, but I get the strong impression that it is not trying to be - there are enough details there as if to say 'we could have been more accurate if we had wanted to.'
Set almost entirely among the highest echelons of the French and Austrian courts of the late 18th century, the characters nevertheless speak and interact in a very modern way, with even the supposed extreme formality of the French court at Versailles seeming laughably informal to those of us who have watched, say, Wolf (...pause for 20 seconds while Mark Rylance takes off and then puts back on his hat...) Hall.
The main character throughout is Marie Antoinette (hence the title, but I suppose they couldn't exactly call it Versailles since there was a different series with that name made between 2015 and 2018), played by Emilia Schüle - a sort of female Matt Smith, I could imagine her playing the Doctor much more easily than I could imagine someone like, say, Billie Piper in the part. The series takes us from her marriage to the heir to the throne of France, the future king Louis xvi who famously lost his head, to the birth of their first son which made the marriage secure.
Louis here is an interesting character because he is so obviously being written and played as what we would now recognise as neurodivergent, what with his extreme social awkwardness. This is possibly the main reason why I cannot decide if the modernisation of the characters is something forced upon the makers of the series as a way of making it accessible (more than just the usual things we take for granted in historical dramas, such as the way they all speak 21st century English instead of 18th century French), or if this was a purposeful stylistic choice to make the main protagonists seem like 21st century people forced to live in the past.
The series tries its hardest to make us feel sympathy for Louis and Marie Antoinette by carefully never showing us how the common people of France lived at that time showing us how they were trapped in their roles as heir to the throne, close to power but essentially powerless, their everyday actions dictated to them by court ritual and etiquette, and surounded by the rest of the French royal family, most of whom hated them.
At the beginning of the series the king of France is Louis xv, magnificently (and scene-stealingly) played by James "Mark Antony" Purefoy (more like Purrfoy) as an old letch. His mistress, Madame du Barry, is the main antagonist to Marie Antoinette for the first half of the season, who is eventually defeated by means of the old king dying. The second half of the series then shifts to being about Louis and Marie Antoinette adapting to their new roles as king and queen.
Louis now has power but his wife still has almost none, unless and until she can give birth to a male heir (the French never allowed women to be monarchs so a daughter wasn't good enough), and she remains surrounded by enemies since anyone at the court who wants to end the French alliance with Austria wants to get rid of the king's Austrian wife. Marie Antoinette doesn't do herself any favours here since her behaviour, rebelling against the constraints placed upon her and spending lavishly on her favourites, gives her enemies plenty of ammunition to use against her. And foreshadows her eventual fate.
Filming at the actual palace of Versailles makes the series look fantastic, so the authentic appearance of the locations (and interior sets and costumes, to be fair, although this is par for the course when it comes to costume dramas) contrasts with the purposefully anachronistic characters inhabiting them to create a distictive take on the story of the period.
At the time of writing this I haven't watched the second season yet (it is all up on the BBC iPlayer already, though it won't finish being broadcast until near the end of June) so I don't know how far that will take us towards the revolution. It will be interesting to see how long the series can maintain viewer sympathy in Marie Antoinette, or if it even tries to.
Made by the BBC in 1967 and not, as one might expect given the title and the vintage, a series of unconnected episodic adventures about the Four Musketeers taking the characters from the books but not the plots (in a similar vein to The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, among other series of the black & white era of television), but rather this is an adaptation of the middle of the three Musketeers novels - not the most famous one where they save the honour of the queen of France by recovering her necklace (as used for the main plot of Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds), nor the final one involving the manny in the iron mask, but the one where they lol about in France and England getting involved in various civil wars.
No? Me neither.
Joss Ackland stars as DogD'Artagnan, with BRIAN BLESSED backing him up (and stealing the show as often as not) as Porthos - superb casting - and the title characters are rounded off with John "Armageddon Factor" Woodvine as Aramis and Jeremy Young (a familiar face, but I'd be hard pressed to say what he's best known for) as Athos.
The most notable in the secondary cast are Edward "As you can see, the INTERNET is extremely complicated" Brayshaw as Rochefort, Nigel "Look Around You" Lambert as Planchet, Vernon Dobtcheff as a minor antagonist Monsignor de Gondy, and - during the episodes where the Musketeers are loling about the England of 1649 (this can be dated precisely due to the actual historical execution of King Charles i being a key plot point) - Geoffrey "Masters" Palmer as Oliver Cromwell, in a surprisingly nuanced (and almost sympathetic) portrayal, even though he is an antagonist to the royalist-supporting Musketeers.
I have no idea if the depiction of Cromwell was lifted from the novel since, although I have read a few of Dumas's novels (English translations, naturally, since translations into Cat are surprisingly hard to come by) including The Count of Monte Cristo and the Marie Antoinette romances, I haven't ever read any of his D'Artagnan stories. This means I can't judge the series' quality as an adaptation either - although you can pretty much tell that it must be an adaptation because the pacing and episode structure feels different to most stories written specifically for the format of a television serial. For example, despite being 16 half-hour parts, it fair flies by with constant twists and turns, but the most dramatic moments don't often line up with the climactic moments of individual episodes.
There's an unusual format point where each episode begins with a recap of the story so far that is delivered in-character by one or more of the main characters (often including D'Artagnan, but not always) addressing the audience directly, but in a conspiratorial fashion, as if letting us in on a secret. This is done in voice-over only, with still images of the characters as the only visuals, so I wonder if this was added after the main filming of the story was complete.
Loads of swashbuckling tropes are included, as you might expect, and a lot of swordplay - plenty of which occurs out on location, so this was no studio-bound production as might have been expected from the BBC in the 1960s. Some of the duels were really well done, inclusing several between our heroes and Brayshaw's villainous Rochefort (he's no Christopher Lee, but still very good in the part), but my favourite fight was between Porthos and Rochefort and didn't involve swords - Porthos used his fists and Rochefort used whatever props and bits of scenery he could get his hands on that BRIAN BLESSED hadn't already been chewing upon.
It was directed by Christopher "First Morbius Doctor" Barry so no wonder this was a polished production for its time. That said, there was still a lot of studio-based action, and at least one scene where a door needs to be broken down and the whole wall wobbles as it is struck, lol. Also a few fluffed lines, and I think I caught one bit where Ackland seemed to forget his line entirely for a moment. None of this detracted from my enjoyment - in fact I would say it added to it, since it is fun to watch these old series warts and all.
The second and final season of the BBC's Wolf Hall was the best thing I saw on television last year - yes, even better than the new Gladiators - and it reminded me that the novel Wolf Hall (the first book of the trilogy that the TV series was based upon) was written as a counterpoint to the play A Manny for All Seasons.
The play and the novel cover the same events, which lead up to the execution of Thomas More (all the books in the Wolf Hall trilogy end upon an execution). Where they differ is in the perspective - the play is written from More's point of view; it very much takes his side, and his main opponent Thomas Cromwell is the play's antagonist. Wolf Hall reverses this, and while it is not written as though Cromwell is speaking to the reader in the first person, it does everything short of this to show us events entirely from his point of view - this explains why, in the TV adaptation, Mark Rylance appears in virtually every scene.
In 1966 the play A Manny for All Seasonswas turned into a film starring Phillip Paul Scofield as Thomas More and Robert "red wine with fish" Shaw as king Henry viii, and it featured Orson "Unicron" Welles as Cardinal Wolsey in a couple of scenes, and was a very early role for John "Caligula" Hurt as Richard Rich.
But the actor who most interests me in this is Leo McKern as Thomas Cromwell, particularly given that a certain TV series was also in production in 1966, although it would not be broadcast until the following year - by which time the film would have become immensely successful in both the UK and USA, winning six Oscars* at the awards in early 1967.
Now I'm not suggesting that McKern was cast as a Number Two on the basis of his portrayal of Cromwell in the film, since he would presumably have already been cast and may even have filmed some or even all of his scenes for The Chimes of Big Ben by the time of the film's release. However he had previosuly played the same part in the play, as early as 1961, so the makers of The Prisoner could easily have seen his interpretation of Cromwell on stage.
The Thomas Cromwell of A Manny for All Seasons is not at all like the Thomas Cromwell of Wolf Hall. As the antagonist we are not privy to his private moments and motivations, and we view him only through his interactions with Thomas More. Scenes in which we see Cromwell without More are scenes in which he plots against More with other characters, such as Richard Rich or the Duke of Norfolk.
McKern plays Cromwell as cloaking his deviousness behind a facade of friendliness and superficial joviality, right up until the moment comes to strike at his opponent. I don't think it is a coincidence that McKern's Number Two possessed these traits as well - particularly in his first appearance, but there are moments of it in Once Upon A Time and Fall Out as well (though in the latter his opponent is not Number Six). One could even detect shades of his lawyerly manner from the trial scenes in the way McKern would later play Rumpole - at least in the early years before he became cuddly Rumpole, when the character was still ruthless in his cross-examinations.
From the casting of McKern as the most memorable of the Number Twos and the parallel we can draw between how he played him and how he played Cromwell, we can perhaps infer that Patrick McGoohan saw something of Thomas More in Number Six. Both mannys firm for what they believed in, and stood alone, against the pressure from authority to confirm. And both expressed their defiance by keeping silent: More by refusing to take an oath of loyalty to Henry viii; the Prisoner by refusing to explain why he resigned.
* I know that Oscar success is not a guarantee of quality - for instance, Braveheart won five Oscars in 1996, including Best Picture, and is shit - but it does indicate a certain level of popularity and cultural penetration at a moment in time.
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
"Oh, rubbish."
The end of that sketch leads into the Whicker's World sketch. This was a series that began in the '60s but continued to be made until 1994, so being ruthlessly sent up by the Pythons here obviously didn't do it any harm. The five main Pythons each impersonate the distinctive appearance and mannerisms of Alan Whicker, and take it in turns pointing out all the clichés of his show.
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.
The title sketch is supremely silly - though I've always found it never reads as funny on paper so I'm not even going to try to summarize it here, save to say that its use of the word "masturbating" as a punchline (technically a double punchline, since the following gag also relies upon it) seems surprisingly risqué considering the relatively tame level of bad language the Pythons normally used while on the BBC.
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.
The sketch which follows is a scathing attack on luvvie awards ceremonies, and while the specific celebrities may be different now the general target of the satire is just as valid as it was 50 years ago. Eric Idle plays Richard "Dickie" Attenborough, who at the time was considered an arch-luvvie (perhaps today's equivalent would be Sir Stephen Fry?) who presents the awards ceremony by trotting out clichés in such quick succession that they become jumbled together.
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.
