Intercourse the Penguin.

Uncle Thadeus Ramone Esq. wrote:

Intercourse the Penguin.

Hey dude, it's the fourty anniversary...fishy, fishy, fishy, fish...They're the best! frick yeah!

The weakness of The Meaning of Life is that, unlike The Holy Grail and The Life of Brian, it doesn't have a narrative; it's a return to the original TV sketch format but with more bite. Some of the sketches are very good, but it's not too surprising that the team soon went their separate ways.

It oh so shines...

40 years on, Python is an international brand.

It's difficult now to recall that it began as an obscure late-night (10pm) fortnightly slot on the BBC's second channel, BBC 2.

Even then, the team were lucky that the commissioning editors granted them a budget and air-time at all because, in the course of the pre-series meetings, they were unable to give any coherent outline of what exactly they wanted to do. Only the fact that the team members all had a a track record of writing and performing in other TV series gave them air-time. It would never happen these days, which accounts for the blandness of much contemporary TV product.

So, what exactly DID they want to do?

Avoid sketches with punchlines, in a nutshell. Although they were all great admirers of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the Pythons-to-be felt that the ground-breaking Cook/Moore collaboration "Not Only...But Also..." was marred by a reliance on the traditional sketch-with-punchline format. In fact, when Spike Milligan's Q series hit the airwaves in advance of the first series of Python, the team felt that their guns had been (literally) spiked. Terry Gilliam's linking graphics on Python may have had more to do with saving the show than anyone now acknowledges.

Word-of-Mouth saved the series: it became a cult amongst drunken University students. It's ironic that a writing team which so despised the traditional comedy catch-phrase should have spawned a whole new generation of them.

And in the school playground, EVERYBODY was parroting, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition".

God bless the Goon Show.

Two of my favourite things, Colbert and Python, combined:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/255171/november-04-2009/-09-off-year-semi-presidential-electferendum

"For three days we hacked our way thro the dense, steaming tropical jungle which ran alongside the arterial highway...."

Actually, that was a line from The Goon Show, not Monty Python, but the Python would have loved it, I'm sure. My buddy Ray, in secondary school, and I used to listen to the Goons on Monday nights and repeat the show to one another on Tuesday mornibngs, and I still remember routines: "We were carrying an 8-ft high statue of Bessie Braddock [big fat Liverpool MP] and a long thin thing with a red knob on the end, so we threw them into a pile and burned them. So much easier to carry the ashes, y'see...." You had to be there, perhaps. Python clearly were.

Thanks for that laugh-out-loud line from The Goon Show, John! As you say, the Pythons definitely were there.

As kids, we had a silly little song about Bessie:

Big bad Bessie Braddock smells just like smoked haddock
With a face like a rotten faggot, and legs like tree trunks.

Great. Just great.

It's strenghts, the brilliance of those vignettes moving the story of birth to death along, out weight it's weaknesses.