When I Was a Boy, We Didn't Have Internet. We Had To Post Our Stuff On Every Computer Screen With Our Bare Hands

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 16, 2009 at 5:22 PM - 10 Comments

This has been Python Week, but I’ve sort of reached my quota of Python clips. So I will cheat and post a sketch that most people think is Monty Python, but isn’t. The “Four Yorkshiremen” Sketch eventually became part of the group’s stage repertoire, but it was written for, and first performed on, At Last the 1948 Show, which made stars of John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and Marty Feldman. The fourth guy, Tim Brooke-Taylor, never became as internationally famous as the others, but his co-creation of The Goodies made him a notable figure in TV comedy history.

Where To See It…

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 11:13 AM - 2 Comments

By the way, the Python Documentary on IFC will not be shown on IFC Canada, but on Bravo (not the U.S. version of Bravo, the Canadian version) starting October 24 at 9:00 p.m.

For Those Who Cannot Obtain Sufficient Python…

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 9:13 PM - 1 Comment

Tonight is Monty Python night on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon; Mark Evanier has been told that four of the five surviving Pythons will be on the show, and that they will make appearances before the interview proper begins. They’re plugging IFC’s big new “definitive” Python documentary, Monty Python: Almost the Truth, and Fallon, who appears as a talking head in the documentary, will presumably be worshipful.

Two Python-related things I didn’t bring up before:

1. The success of Monty Python over the years makes a great case for independent production of TV shows, as opposed to being network owned. One of the reasons why Python has become such a huge worldwide franchise is that the BBC doesn’t own it. According to the terms of the Pythons’ contract with the BBC, the rights to the episodes, including foreign rights, reverted to Python (Monty) Pictures. The BBC is notoriously bad at even preserving the episodes it owns, let alone marketing them worldwide. The Pythons’ company kept the episodes in decent condition, sold them everywhere, made sure (even to the point of going to court) that they were shown in their original form, and generally has acted like a company with an interest in making it a profitable franchise.

2. I doubt any of the interviewers they encounter will ask the Pythons about their most embarrassing non-Python projects. All of them have done their share of hack work except Gilliam (he’s done some bad work, but personal, quirky bad work). But I don’t think anything can compare in badness to this Idle show; Cleese may have picked up some extra money in monstrosities like Pink Panther 2, but Idle was the top-billed star of this show.

Underrated Python, Take Two

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 9, 2009 at 5:24 PM - 4 Comments

The comments on my “Favourite Lesser-Known Monty Python Sketches” were great. I’d just like to follow up by posting a couple of sketches that weren’t mentioned in the original post.

This early sketch is one of my favourites, even though in some ways it’s one of the most conventional, un-Python sketches except for its lack of a punchline: it’s a very simple, traditional premise, taking a typical situation from theatre or movies and reversing it. (What if, instead of all the plays about a white-collar guy and his blue-collar family, we had a story about a “working-class playwright” confronting his well-dressed coal miner son?) But it’s a nearly perfectly-executed sketch, with one of Graham Chapman’s best performances.

Of the many documentary parodies the show did, one of my favourites is one one on “Ken Clean-Air System,” the stupidest boxer on earth. I think it’s just that I always laugh when John Cleese plays a really stupid athlete (the sketch where he’s a dumb football player on a pretentious sports interview show is also memorable).

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The “Crackpot Religions” sketch is really less of a sketch and more of a series of little vignettes on a theme, but it has some of my favourite bits: Eric Idle’s “Arthur Crackpot” act (“I can’t touch it, there’s no return on it”), Palin’s reaction to winning the entire Norwich City Council, and Idle as John Lennon (whose birthday it is today), saying “I’m starting a war for peace.”

Favourite Lesser-Known Monty Python Sketches?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 4:13 PM - 46 Comments

Here’s a question for the Monty Python 40th anniversary festivities: what’s your favourite Monty Python sketch that isn’t (in your opinion) all that well-known? It’s hard to define which sketches are particularly well-known, apart from the obvious ones like “Dead Parrot,” “Argument Clinic,” “Silly Walks,” and other sketches featuring Cleese and Palin (they did seem to team up a lot in the sketches) plus “Lumberjack Song” and a few others. But everyone who watches a sketch comedy show regularly has a favourite sketch or two that doesn’t seem to be talked about all that much. What’s yours with Python?

One sketch I consider one of their best, even though it definitely doesn’t seem to be one of their best-remembered, is the “Railway Timetables” sketch. An Agatha Christie-style country house murder mystery starts with the characters discussing the train that one of them will be taking to Basingstoke. Then after they find the dead body, they keep talking about train timetables. And every new character who enters is obsessed with train timetables. And finally that’s the key to the murder. The sketch is classic Python for me, because it starts as a parody of something recognizable (in these country-house mysteries, characters are always talking about taking the [fill in time] train to London or some obscure hamlet), then keeps hammering away at its theme until it goes beyond parody into absurdity, keeps ringing in new variations on the theme (“How could anyone shoot himself and then hide the gun without first canceling his reservation?”), and requires all the actors to memorize and recite some pretty complicated dialogue. But no matter how crazy it gets, it never stops being an accurate parody of old-fashioned drawing-room mysteries, so it works on two levels: as parody, and as absurdity for its own sake. Which is pretty much true of most good Python sketches.

Plus it has a decent role for Carol Cleveland, who rarely had much to do in the episodes but was by far the most valuable non-Python performer on the show, since she could keep up with the regulars while playing all the female parts they couldn’t do themselves.

This upload includes the follow-up sketch, John Cleese’s commentary on the meaning of the play we have just seen, which is one of the best stream-of-consciousness monologues the show did, and which many people prefer to the sketch itself.

What are your favourite obscure Monty Python sketches? (I’ll try and find YouTube links to them; most of the Python sketches are there.)

Special Election Coverage

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 12:09 PM - 2 Comments

Come on, you knew I was going to post this. Me, I vote Slightly Silly. Because I’m a lost-cause kind of guy.