From that moment, comedy would never be the same again cancelled when it was believed, by BBC bosses, that its scathing lampoons of politicians could influence voters in the forthcoming 1964 general election. It was inside the writers’ room of Frost’s next show, that the Pythons-tobe really honed their craft; working on a live show to tight deadlines in an environment where no idea was too far out for a weekly audience of 14 million. Cleese and Chapman would go on from there to form one half of the four man team that made At Last… the 1948 Show, in 1967; a show that ventured considerably deeper into the surreal with sketches involving deranged psychiatrists and ferrets. Eric Idle, along with Terry Jones and Michael Palin, however, went down the
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT THE TEAM POSE FOR PUBLICITY IMAGES, EACH APPEARING AS ONE OF THEIR MOST FAMOUS CHARACTERS; ERIC IDLE AND MICHAEL PALIN IN THE MEANING OF LIFE (1983); JOHN CLEESE AS THE HEADMASTER IN THE SAME FILM
road of children’s programming, writing and performing in a show called Do Not Adjust Your Set’. Attracting a sizable adult audience, despite its weekday afternoon timeslot, the show had live music from the Bonzo Dog Do Dah Band and its strange, bohemian air caught the attention of Terry Gilliam who, having made his way to London, forced his way onto the show to provide animated segments. Finally, in 1969, it was Cleese who contacted Palin and Jones to ask if the two writer duo’s plus Idle and Gilliam should work together. “They’d just done another show called A Complete and Utter History of Britain”, recalled Cleese. “I contacted them and said ‘Well, you won’t be doing any more of those will you?’ We were always putting each other down.” Nobody can remember where the first meeting of all half dozen men took place in April 1969. Some remember it as being in a park, others in an Indian restaurant. What’s certain is that their subsequent meeting with Michael Mills, head of comedy at the BBC, was the final breakthrough: “We were intimidating because we didn’t give a damn,” Cleese has said. “We wanted it all on our own terms. We weren’t overawed in any way.” Owl-Stretching Time and The Toad Elevating Moment were both put forward as titles before Monty Python was agreed on. And so, finally, in the less than
desirable timeslot of 10:55pm on a Sunday night on the 5th of October 1969, the first episode was aired. Called Whither Canada, the country was, in a style true to form for Python, never once mentioned in the entire programme. From that moment, comedy would never be the same again, Fast forward half a century and with one Python dead (Graham Chapman who died of throat cancer in 1989) and with Terry Jones suffering from dementia, the Python story is now almost at an end; the remaining members of the gang steadfastly refusing to reunite for the 50th anniversary this year. It was Terry Gilliam, the only American and perhaps the closest thing to an ‘outsider’ in the Python gang, who perhaps best described how these young Englishmen from the most unprepossessing provincial backgrounds changed the comedy landscape forever. “There are a lot of people who have come to believe in Python as a form of honesty, as opposed to what is normally presented on television,” Gilliam stated in an interview. “Here is a show that is outspoken, says what it wants to say, does extraordinary things, takes all sorts of chances, is not out to sell corn plaster, or anything. It is out to entertain, surprise, enlighten even.” montypython.com
