The crew of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Photograph: BBC/PA Monty Python's Flying Circus has been voted by UK Gold viewers the most influential comedy series ever - not just the best, but the most influential.
As I trundle my way through the religion which has become anything to do with the very essence of British comedy, particularly over the last forty years, I find myself quite pink with something along side “peeve ness” when discovering an article here on the good old BB of C about how Monty Python was actually not as influential as we all would like to think it was.
I read on, only to find myself, a devotee of MP, actually agreeing with it’s content… According to UK Gold viewers (and they do know a thing or two about good programmes from the glory days, you know) the most inspiring and influential of all British creations, comedy wise, was indeed Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A sentence which in my mind, does not need to be followed up by an explanation. Yet at the same time, I cannot help but feel that this article is indeed right - it was regrettably uninfluencial - we learned as writers a great many ways to explore a joke and yes, the word “spam” will never have such a comical outlook, but only now stand as that very word to describe unwanted emails.
MP was, as we like to say, a void - all on its own, with no means of setting up a bridge or even a fairly reliable train link to it’s shores - a masterful island which sits happily, surviving all that new writers throw at it, displaying all the greatest points of youth and what a jolly good public school education will get you if your parents had enough money. They were for the poor of us - yet a product of very much, the middle class education system. A dying breed. So therefore, I pose the question - what was exactly influential about them? As individuals, I could sit with legs entwined around a Chesterfield all night long, delighting my taste buds around a selection of the highest wit and childlike play of Palin and Idle or I can sit stern faced and morose and discuss like a University 1977 paper on the levels of intellectual silliness of Cleese and Chapman, but what would be the point, I here you say - none - they were, as a group out on their own, never to be repeated and never to be forgotten.
Perhaps, in hindsight, they were the very pinnacle where everyone since has wanted to reach but can’t - the very article when other writers thought to themselves, “damn - that’s exactly what I was trying to do and now some other bugger has come and done it!” One can also imagine many saying the same about The Goons - as much as they were brilliant, silly and downright funny - they never meant to be anything else - influential? No, just innovative, mind-bending and original. Unique beyond copying. As MP were and are - never copied. Just a giant trunk from which everything else grew….
m.duffy 2007
And now for something completely different....
I read on, only to find myself, a devotee of MP, actually agreeing with it’s content… According to UK Gold viewers (and they do know a thing or two about good programmes from the glory days, you know) the most inspiring and influential of all British creations, comedy wise, was indeed Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A sentence which in my mind, does not need to be followed up by an explanation. Yet at the same time, I cannot help but feel that this article is indeed right - it was regrettably uninfluencial - we learned as writers a great many ways to explore a joke and yes, the word “spam” will never have such a comical outlook, but only now stand as that very word to describe unwanted emails.
MP was, as we like to say, a void - all on its own, with no means of setting up a bridge or even a fairly reliable train link to it’s shores - a masterful island which sits happily, surviving all that new writers throw at it, displaying all the greatest points of youth and what a jolly good public school education will get you if your parents had enough money. They were for the poor of us - yet a product of very much, the middle class education system. A dying breed. So therefore, I pose the question - what was exactly influential about them? As individuals, I could sit with legs entwined around a Chesterfield all night long, delighting my taste buds around a selection of the highest wit and childlike play of Palin and Idle or I can sit stern faced and morose and discuss like a University 1977 paper on the levels of intellectual silliness of Cleese and Chapman, but what would be the point, I here you say - none - they were, as a group out on their own, never to be repeated and never to be forgotten.
Perhaps, in hindsight, they were the very pinnacle where everyone since has wanted to reach but can’t - the very article when other writers thought to themselves, “damn - that’s exactly what I was trying to do and now some other bugger has come and done it!” One can also imagine many saying the same about The Goons - as much as they were brilliant, silly and downright funny - they never meant to be anything else - influential? No, just innovative, mind-bending and original. Unique beyond copying. As MP were and are - never copied. Just a giant trunk from which everything else grew….
m.duffy 2007
And now for something completely different....
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