The Deep Dive, Monty Python's Flying Circus and
the Anatomy of Absurdity. Join us for a comprehensive
deep dive into the creation, controversy and
enduring legacy of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
We unpack how six university -educated comedians
revolutionized British television with stream
-of -consciousness sketch comedy. From their
battles with BBC censorship and lost sketches
to the strange origins of their name and their
unlikely connection to Elvis Presley, we explore
what made the Pythons tick. Whether you're curious
about John Cleese's disdain for the iconic Ministry
of Silly Walks, Terry Gilliam's bizarre cutout
animations, the groundbreaking ABC network lawsuit
that changed copyright law, or how the show accidentally
named the Python programming language in your
email spam folder, this deep dive is your shortcut
to understanding a monumental piece of pop culture
history. Okay, let's unpack this. If you look
back at the landscape of late 1960s television,
especially in Britain, it was an incredibly rigid
environment. Very formalized. Right. Highly formalized.
You had these light entertainment programs that
followed a really strict, almost mathematical
formula. Setup, punchline, bow. Exactly. The
setups were polite, the transitions were seamless,
and the punchlines arrived exactly when you expected
them to. Right. And then tearing through that
polite veneer like a chainsaw through a velvet
curtain comes a completely unkempt man. looking
like Robinson Crusoe. Oh, the It's Man. Yes.
Sprinting across a jagged cliff face running
right up to the camera lens to just gasp the
word, It's, before immediately being squashed
by a giant animated Victorian foot. which is
just such a jarring image. Welcome to the world
of Monty Python's flying circus. I'm so thrilled
to dive into this today. Me too. It's a massive
topic. It really is. We are working from a very
comprehensive Wikipedia article today, and we're
going to explore the premise, the incredibly
fraught production history, the casting dynamics
and the intense censorship controversies. And
of course, the massive cultural footprint of
this groundbreaking show, which originally aired
from 1969 to 1974. Today is to extract the fascinating
history of how six men Completely broke the rules
of television. They really did. It's hard to
find a comparison for the sheer impact of what
they achieved Yeah, we throw around the phrase
ahead of their time a lot when discussing vintage
media But this group didn't just anticipate the
future of comedy They essentially engineered
an entirely new timeline for it. They hacked
the mainframe of the BBC Basically, yeah, they
altered the basic atomic structure of what a
television show could actually be. And they created
a blueprint for modern comedy that continues
to echo in our daily lives. So speaking directly
to you, the listener, whether you are a diehard
comedy nerd or maybe someone interested in the
history of television broadcasting. Or just someone
who uses the word spam without knowing where
it came from. Right. This deep dive will reveal
the fascinating mechanics behind the madness.
So, when you look at the sheer magnitude of the
Python legacy, what stands out to you the most?
What's fascinating here is that their legacy
isn't just about being funny, it's about being
fundamentally aggressively disruptive. Disruptive
how? Well, you have to remember... These were
highly educated, brilliant writers. They looked
at the architecture of the traditional joke and
decided to declare war on it. They hated punchlines.
Passionately. They viewed the standard punchline
as a creative cop out, just a way to artificially
end a scene that had run out of steam. So they
embraced a legacy of absolute creative anarchy.
But it wasn't just chaos for the sake of chaos.
Not at all. And that is the crucial part. It
was an anarchy that was meticulously planned,
rehearsed and executed. It wasn't just guys goofing
off on camera. It was a highly disciplined deconstruction
of television itself. Meticulously planned anarchy.
That is the perfect way to frame it. Thanks.
So let's look at how this circus was actually
assembled because the background of these six
men tells you a lot about why they were perfectly
positioned to deconstruct that system. Let's
get into it. The core group consists of Graham
Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones,
Michael Palin, and the lone American of the group,
Terry Gilliam. The animator. Right. But before
they became Monty Python, the five British members
were all navigating the very upper echelons of
the British comedy scene in the 1960s. And they
were crossing paths at these incredibly prestigious
university comedy troops. Specifically, the Oxford
Revue and the Cambridge Footlights. And that
university background, it's the skeleton key
to understanding their entire ethos. Oh, so.
Because Oxford and Cambridge are the absolute
bastions of the British establishment. By coming
up through those institutions, these guys learned
the language, the mannerisms, and the subtle
hypocrisies of the British upper classes from
the inside out. So they weren't outsiders. Exactly.
They gained the specific intellectual tools required
to dismantle upper class conventions. If you're
going to effectively satirize a high court judge,
a military general, or a BBC executive, it helps
immensely if you sat in a room with them and
understand exactly how they speak and think.
That makes total sense. They weren't outsiders
throwing rocks at the castle. They were inside
the castle, rearranging the furniture to confuse
the king. That's a great analogy. During the
60s, they were writing and performing on various
radio and TV shows, most notably The Frost Report,
hosted by David Frost. Which was a massive show
at the time. Huge! And this is where their writing
partnerships really started to solidify under
an incredibly demanding production schedule.
And then you have Terry Gilliam, who meets some
of them while they're touring the United States.
And eventually they decide to bring all these
different comedic sensibilities together for
a new sketch show at the BBC. And the naming
process for this show, it's just spectacular.
It perfectly distills their entire philosophy
of confusion. The naming process is almost a
sketch in itself. Right. Because at the time,
the BBC's head of comedy was a man named Michael
Mills. And he insisted that the word circus be
in the title. Which they hated. They did, but
Mills wanted it because the BBC executives internally
referred to these six guys wandering around the
offices as a literal circus. And Mills actually
wanted to call the show Baron von Tuck's Circus.
Yeah, as a nod to Barry Tuck, the producer who
was instrumental in bringing them all together
at the network. But the group hated the idea
of just being a circus. They didn't want people
tuning in expecting clowns and trapeze artists.
So they added the word flying. And there's a
specific reason for that. Yeah, apparently this
was right around the time the novelty song Snoopy
versus the Red Baron was a massive radio hit.
Oh, right. And the real Red Baron's World War
I fighter squadron was famously known as the
Flying Circus. It gave the title a slightly more
militaristic, erratic feel. Which leads us to
the actual name they settled on. Yes. Because
they wanted something that sounded like a truly
terrible, sleazy theatrical agent. John Cleese
suggested the word Python. because he felt it
sounded inherently slimy and slithery. And then
Eric Idle threw in the name Monty. They later
explained that Monty made them laugh because
it immediately evoked Lord Montgomery, the legendary,
highly respected British general from the Second
World War. So you mash all of that together.
A revered World War II military hero, a slithery
reptile, and a World War I fighter squadron.
Monty Python's flying circus. It sounds so iconic
now, but at the time it was just a random collision
of words. But as much as I love that title, the
rejected titles they pitched to the BBC are what
really get me. Oh, they are incredible. They
seriously pitch names like Wither Canada, The
Toad Elevating Moment, and my absolute favorite,
Owl Stretching Time. Owl Stretching Time. Just
imagine looking at the TV Guide and seeing that
Owl Stretching Time is on at 1030. It would certainly
give you pause. But if we connect this to the
bigger picture, those rejected titles reveal
exactly what their underlying artistic intent
was. Which is what? Well, names like Owl Stretching
Time or The Toad Elevating Moment are structurally
and linguistically coherent. They follow the
rules of English grammar. But they are semantically
meaningless. They're anti -titles. Exactly. The
naming process reflected their ultimate goal,
which was to be completely and utterly uncategorizable.
Right. Because if your show is called the No
Show, which was another pitch, the audience cannot
possibly project their own expectations onto
it. Precisely. They didn't want the audience
to have any preconceived notions. If you call
a show the comedy half hour, the audience expects
traditional jokes. You're setting a trap for
yourself. Yes. By fighting for a bizarre name,
they were actively managing expectations. The
fact that several of these rejected titles eventually
became the titles of individual episodes later
on just proves how deeply committed they were
to this specific brand of absurdity. And then
there's the theme song. Now you would think a
show this avant -garde, premiering in 1969 at
the height of the counterculture movement, would
commission some crazy psychedelic rock track.
Maybe something with a sitar. Exactly. But no.
They chose the Liberty Bell March, a piece composed
by John Philip Sousa, specifically the version
performed by the band of the Grenadier Guards.
It's this incredibly pompous, rigid, brass -heavy
military march. Which is brilliant for two entirely
different reasons, one artistic and one purely
logistical. Let's start with the logistics because
Terry Gilliam chose that specific Sousa March,
which was first published back in 1893 for a
very practical reason. It had fallen into the
public domain. Yes. I always love when high art
is dictated by extreme cheapness. It's a tale
as old as time. Because of the Berne Convention,
which is an international agreement governing
copyright and United States copyright law at
the time, the piece was no longer protected.
Meaning it was free. completely free. The BBC
could use it as the theme music without having
to pay a single penny in ongoing royalty payments.
It was a completely free asset. But artistically
it works on a genius level too. Absolutely. You
have this incredibly self -important militaristic
march music blaring while Gilliam's bizarre,
surreal cutout animations squash the title screen.
Like the giant Victorian foot. Right. The contrast
between the ridgy audio and the anarchic visual
immediately establishes a tone of mocking the
establishment. It tells the audience right away,
we're going to take everything serious and proper
and we're going to step on it. Let's transition
into talking about the cast themselves. Because
even though the show notoriously avoided using
recurring characters in the traditional sitcom
sense, each of the six pythons developed and
perfected very specific comedic tendencies. It's
almost like they each had a distinct psychological
profile they brought to the table. Let's start
with John Cleese. Visually, he stands out immediately
because he is six foot five. He towers over almost
everyone else in the frame. And he utilized that
physicality to become the absolute master of
the ridiculous authority figure. Cleese's height
naturally gave him a commanding presence, but
it was what he did with that presence that was
so funny. He specialized in playing intimidating
maniacs, highly strong bureaucrats, and foreigners
with outrageous, totally incomprehensible accents.
Often French or German. Yes. He thrived on playing
characters who were entirely convinced of their
own logic, no matter how der - that logic was.
The perfect example is Mr. Praline, the disgruntled
customer in the legendary dead parrot sketch.
Oh, class. He marches into a pet shop to return
a Norwegian blue parrot that is obviously definitively
deceased, but he maintains this rigid, hyperarticulate
outrage against a shopkeeper who refuses to admit
the bird is dead. It's a masterclass in escalating
frustration. It really is. But the detail that
I find so incredibly interesting is about his
physical comedy. Specifically, the Ministry of
Silly Walks. Ah, yes. Cleese plays this tall,
loose -limbed government official in a bowler
hat doing these spectacularly contorted, high
-kicking, absurd walks on his daily commute.
It is arguably their most famous sketch globally.
Without a doubt. But Cleese actually disliked
doing it. Why would he hate his most famous sketch?
It comes down to his philosophy of what makes
comedy worthwhile. Cleese felt that silly walks
was just cheap slapstick. Really? Yeah. Yes,
it generated massive, obnoxious laughs. But he
felt it lacked a true satirical core. To him,
the joke wasn't supposed to be, look at the funny
man walking weirdly. The joke was supposed to
be a biting satire on the bureaucratic uselessness
of government ministries. The idea that the government
would fund an entire department to develop ridiculous
walks. Ah, so the physical comedy entirely eclipsed
the intellectual joke he was trying to make.
Precisely. The visual of his long legs kicking
up to his ears was so overwhelmingly funny that
nobody cared about the satire of British bureaucracy.
They just wanted to see the walk. Exactly. He
wasn't interested in just falling over or moving
funny. He wanted to punch up at the system. It's
a classic creative irony. Creators often resent
it when the general public latches on to what
the creator considers to be their least intellectually
rigorous work. It frustrated him that this piece
of physical clowning became his defining image.
It did. That makes a lot of sense. You want to
be known for your brilliant writing, and everyone
just wants you to do the funny dance. OK, moving
on to Michael Palin. The everyman. According
to the other members of the troupe, Palin possessed
the widest acting range of the group. He could
genuinely disappear into roles. He could play
these diskepting, downtrodden, working -class
northerners. Which they utilize brilliantly later
in the Every Sperm is Sacred segment of their
film The Meaning of Life. Yes. But then, in the
blink of an eye, he could pivot to playing incredibly
slick smarmy, self -loathing television hosts.
Think of the sketch Blackmail, where he plays
a game show host who exhorts money from the viewing
audience on live TV. And yet he could also dial
the energy completely down to play the weak -willed
put -upon -everyman. Look at the argument clinic
sketch. Oh, that's a great example. Cleese is
the aggressive, contradictory, professional arguer,
but the sketch only works because Palin plays
the client with such earnest, mild -mannered
confusion. And of course he's the iconic It's
Man we mentioned at the start, bursting through
the screen looking entirely deranged just to
get one word out before the theme music hits.
Palin was essentially the glue of the cast. Because
he was naturally so amiable on screen and could
play the grounded everyman so convincingly, he
anchored the absurdity of the others. He balanced
them out. Exactly. If Cleese represented towering
apoplectic rage, Palin was the cheerful, sometimes
befuddled center that the rage was usually directed
at. You need that contrast. If everyone is yelling,
it's just noise. Palin provided the quiet baseline
that made the loud moments pop. Next up is Terry
Jones. Now, it was gandered practice for all
the Pythons to dress in drag to play female characters,
but Teppi Jones was widely considered the absolute
best at it. The absolute best. What they affectionately
referred to behind the scenes as the best ratbag
woman in the business. Yes. When a sketch required
a screeching lower middle class housewife, Jones
was the immediate go -to. They internally call
these characters the Pepperpots. Because they
thought the silhouette of a typical British housewife
that era, bundled up in coats and hats, looked
exactly like a table pepper shaker. Jones's Pepperpots
were iconic. They were the loudest, the shrillest,
and the most utterly disheveled characters on
the show. But his contribution went far beyond
drag. Oh, absolutely. He also played the completely
bizarre nude organist who would randomly punctuate
sketches with dramatic organ chords. More importantly
though, behind the scenes, Jones was the one
pulling a massive amount of the creative strings.
As the show evolved, he essentially took on the
role of an uncredited director. He was constantly
pushing for better camera angles and more cinematic
lighting. Which really set the stage for him,
eventually drinking their feature films like
Life of Brian. Right. But contrasting his shrieking
Pepperpot Housewives with Eric Idle's approach
to drag is really interesting. It highlights
the different comedic instincts within the group.
When Eric Idle played female characters, he played
them much more straightforwardly. He would just
alter his voice slightly. a softer cadence rather
than doing the full falsetto shrieking that Jones
did. Idle was generally known for playing the
cheeky, suggestive playboy. Most famously, the
character in the nudge nudge sketch. Nudge nudge,
wink wink. Exactly. The guy who keeps aggressively
hinting at sexual innuendo to a completely oblivious
man. He excelled at playing slick, crafty salesmen
who could talk their way out of anything. Another
crucial detail about Eric Idle is his writing
process. Cleese and Chapman wrote as a duo. Jones
and Palin wrote as a duo. But Eric Idle was the
lone wolf. He wrote entirely by himself. And
he was also the group's undeniable musical genius.
He's the one who eventually wrote, always look
on the bright side of life. How do you think
writing alone impacted his specific comedic voice
on the show? Writing alone gave Idle's sketches
a completely different rhythm compared to the
rest of the show. When you're writing with a
partner, you're constantly batting ideas back
and forth in the room, testing the laughs, adjusting
the timing. It creates a conversational dynamic.
A natural back and forth. Right! But because
Idle was isolated, his writing became highly
structurally complex, particularly in its linguistics.
Lots of wordplay. Heavy wordplay. His sketches
often relied on intricate rapid -fire monologues.
He didn't have a partner to interrupt him, so
he would just build these towering edifices of
verbal gymnastics. It added a layer of sheer
verbal dexterity to the show that contrasted
beautifully with the more situational sketches
of the other pairings. Then we have Graham Chapman.
Chapman had this brilliant knack for playing
the ultimate straight -laced figure. The bedrock
of the sketch. He was often cast as the pipe
-smoking military officer, the stern police inspector,
or the serious medical doctor. But his absolute
genius was that he could be projecting this aura
of total unshakable authority and then suddenly,
without any warning whatsoever, snap into completely
maniacal behavior. And then instantly revert
back to his sober, dignified demeanor as if nothing
had happened. Chapman was the ultimate straight
man, which is a vastly underappreciated skill
in comedy. To hold a ridiculous premise with
absolute, unwavering seriousness is incredibly
difficult. You need that grounding when the world
around the character is descending into total
insanity. Right. If the doctor reacts to the
absurdity, the sketch deflates. The doctor has
to treat the absurdity as mundane. This foundational
skill is exactly why they relied on him to play
the central, ground -in -lead roles in their
feature films later on, like King Arthur in Monty
Python and the Holy Grail and the title character
in Life of Brian. He anchored the narrative so
the others could spin out of control around him.
And finally, we have the sixth Python. Terry
Gilliam, as we mentioned, he was the animator.
He was a guy secluded in a room, creating those
surreal, interstitial cut -out animations that
linked the sketches together. His process was
fascinating. He would take old Sears robot catalogs,
clip out illustrations of Victorian machinery,
gears, and gadgets, and mix them with pieces
of classic Renaissance art. Like the iconic giant
foot that squashes the title screen. Yes. That's
not just a drawing. It's the actual foot of Cupid
clipped right out of the classic Agnola Bronzino
painting Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, which
is hanging in the National Gallery in London.
Gilliam's animations were the secret sauce that
allowed the entire format of the show to work,
which we'll touch on in a moment. But it's also
worth noting his on -screen presence. Because
he was American. Exactly. And because he genuinely
struggled to perform the exaggerated, hyper -specific
English accents the others were doing, he ended
up taking all the grotesque, non -speaking, or
heavily makeup -reliant roles that nobody else
wanted. Right. He was the guy in the full suit
of armor who would randomly walk onto the set
in the middle of a scene, hit someone with a
raw plucked chicken and walk off. or he'd play
a man with a stuffed stoat violently shoved through
his head. He was essentially the human embodiment
of his own bizarre animations. When you look
at all six of these profiles together, this raises
a really important point about creative collaboration.
What's remarkable is how this extreme specialization
allowed the group to avoid redundant writing.
They weren't stepping on each other's toes. They
had distinct, highly specialized comedic weapons
at their disposal. If a sketch needed apoplectic,
towering rage, They deployed Cleese. If they
needed a frantic, sympathetic everyman, they
deployed Palin. If they needed a visual non sequitur
or pure grotesque weirdness, they deployed Gilliam.
It allowed them to cover a massive spectrum of
human absurdity. Which brings us perfectly to
section three. Breaking the mold. because having
diverse talent is one thing, but how they actually
structured the show was the true revolution.
They completely broke the mold of how a sketch
comedy show was supposed to operate. Traditionally,
a sketch has a beginning, a middle, and an end,
culminating in a punchline. The punchline is
the release valve for the tension. But the Pythons
actively hated punchlines. They felt that forcing
a brilliant, absurd premise to end on a neat,
tidy joke often ruined the entire concept. It
was a betrayal of the sketch's internal logic.
It's true. So heavily inspired by Spike Milligan's
groundbreaking and arctic comedy show Q, which
had aired previously, they decided to abandon
the traditional structure entirely. Instead of
discrete sketches, they relied on a stream of
consciousness flow. One sketch would just bleed
directly into another, often mid -sentence. And
this is where Terry Gilliam's animations were
vital. The animations served as the glue. If
a sketch had run its course and didn't have an
ending, a giant animated mouth would just descend
from the sky and eat the actors and suddenly
you were in a new scene. It's brilliant. And
instead of relying on recurring main characters
with catchphrases to anchor the show and build
a traditional fan base, they relied on recurring
interruptions. They weaponized the disruption
itself. That is a great way to phrase it. If
a sketch was dragging, or if they simply couldn't
think of a clever way to wrap it up, they would
literally have Graham Chapman walk onto the set
dressed as a British army colonel. And he would
march right up to the camera, look directly at
the audience and say, stop this, it's getting
too silly. And he would officially, as an agent
of the military, Order the sketch to end. Or
suddenly, the door would fly open and Michael
Palin would burst into the room dressed as a
flamboyant cardinal, flanked by two other cardinals,
and he would shout, Nobody expects the Spanish
Inquisition, completely derailing whatever scene
was happening. Or you would just cut abruptly
to a very proper BBC continuity announcer played
by John Cleese in a tuxedo, sitting at a wooden
desk that was inexplicably placed in the middle
of a dense forest or a beach. And he would simply
say, and now for something completely different.
The genius of the Colonel character in particular
cannot be overstated when we analyze television
history by writing a character who actively critiques
and shuts down the sketch from within the show
itself. The Pythons built a meta layer into their
comedy that was practically unheard of at the
time. They were preemptively mocking the television
critics and the network executives. If a viewer
sitting at home was thinking, well, this is getting
stupid, the show beat them to the punch by having
an authority figure step in and declare it stupid.
It completely disarmed the traditional dynamic
between the television program and the audience.
It made the viewer complicit in the deconstruction.
And it wasn't just abstract concepts of authority
they were mocking. They aimed their sights squarely
at real contemporary politicians of the era.
The sources show they frequently targeted Reginald
Modling, who was a very prominent conservative
politician at the time. They also took aim at
the Secretary of State for Education and Science,
a woman who would later become a highly polarizing
prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. They spoofed
the conservative party leader and Prime Minister
Edward Heath. They even broadened their scope
internationally and went after U .S. President
Richard Nixon. Now, when we analyze these targets,
what becomes clear, and we should be very explicit
about this for the listener, is that the Pythons
weren't operating as a partisan political action
committee. Yes, absolutely. We are just relaying
the targets mentioned in our source material.
We are not taking any political sides here or
endorsing these viewpoints. Completely neutral
reporting on our end. And the source material
shows their targeting of these figures reflected
a much broader general anti -establishment ethos
rather than partisan endorsement. Exactly. They
were equal opportunity offenders when it came
to the establishment. They went after the British
police force, the military brass, the Anglican
church, the legal system, and even the BBC executives
who were paying their salaries. Anyone who wielded
power, authority, or demanded unearned respect
was considered fair game for ridicule. It was
less about left versus right and more about anti
authoritarianism. And that approach naturally
leads us to how the ultimate establishment, specifically
the hierarchy of the BBC, reacted to this absolute
madness airing on their network. because the
battles between the Pythons and the BBC executives
are legendary. Oh, they are incredible. Let's
get into those BBC battles, because the initial
reception of the show was basically a disaster.
The very first episode of Monty Python's Flying
Circus was broadcast on a Sunday evening, October
5th, 1969 at 10 .55 p .m. And to say it didn't
land well is the understatement of the century.
It captured only about 3 % of the total UK television
watching population. That's roughly 1 .5 million
people. To put that in perspective, another very
traditional comedy show airing that same week,
Dad's Army, pulled in 22 % of the population.
But the raw viewership numbers weren't even the
worst part. No, the real crisis came from the
BBC's internal metrics. The BBC used something
called an appreciation index. This wasn't just
a measure of how many television sets were tuned
in. It was a qualitative score out of 100 based
on audience surveys to gauge if people actually
liked, understood, and appreciated what they
were watching. And how did Python do on the appreciation
index? It earned the lowest appreciation index
score in the entire history of the BBC's light
entertainment programming. People didn't just
change the channel. The people who stayed to
watch actively hated it. Internal BBC Demos and
documents from executives at the time actually
described the program as disgusting and nihilistic.
Disgusting and nihilistic. They viewed it as
an assault on the sensibilities of the British
public. If you achieve the lowest audience appreciation
score in the history of a major national broadcasting
network, how do you keep your job? Does that
just mean you completely failed at making comedy?
Well, this raises an important question about
the nature of true innovation. If you score a
zero on an established metric, does it mean you
failed? Or does it mean the metric itself is
incapable of measuring what you've created? I'd
say the latter. I would argue it's the latter
too. They made something so radically new, so
entirely divorced from the established language
of television, that the audience literally didn't
possess the mental tools to process it yet. They
were speaking a comedic language that hadn't
been invented until that exact moment. You can't
appreciate a joke if you don't even realize a
joke is being told. It took time to teach the
audience how to watch the show. And while the
audience was struggling to figure it out, the
chaos was raging behind the scenes too. John
Kreese almost didn't even participate in the
show initially because he was under a strict
contract with David Frost's production company.
And the Pythons, being the anarchists they were,
decided to get back at David Frost for his tight
grip on their careers. In the second episode
of the series, during a sketch called The Mouse
Problem, they actually slipped David Schross'
real personal phone number onto the screen. Which
is just a phenomenally reckless prank for 1969.
Viewers actually called the number and harassed
him endlessly. And the BBC executives panicked
and had to scramble to force a re -edit of the
episode to remove the number before it aired
again. And that prank was really just the opening
spurmish in what would become a protracted war
of censorship. As the show progressed through
its seasons and began to build a massive devoted
cult following, particularly among young people,
the BBC executives started paying much closer
attention to the content and they really did
not like what they saw. Not at all. There are
several famous lost or heavily censored sketches
that illustrate just how tense the relationship
got. For example, in a highly intellectual sketch
about summarizing the works of Marcel Proust,
the BBC forced them to cut the word masturbating.
In another famous sketch about a travel agent,
Eric Idle plays a character with a severe speech
impediment who consistently pronounces the letter
C as a B. The BBC completely excised the line
where he says, what a silly bunt, because the
phonetic implication was too much for them to
handle. And it wasn't just dialogue they were
cutting. They were pulling entire concepts. The
network totally removed the Undertaker sketch
from all repeat broadcasts. In that sketch, a
man goes to an Undertaker to dispose of his dead
mother and the Undertakers casually suggest eating
her. The comedic references to necro cannibalism
were deemed a bridge too far for the viewing
public. The tension between the creators and
the network was palpable. The show's producer
Ian McNaughton was repeatedly called into meetings
and severely reprimanded by BBC executives for
not alluding them beforehand to the content of
sketches like The Undertakers or another sketch
that blatantly mocked the UK national anthem.
It reached a boiling point where Michael Palin
noted in his personal diary that the BBC was
actively aggressively starting to censored the
program during its third series, they felt their
creative freedom was being strangled. And the
tragedy of this era of television is that because
of the way archiving worked, which is to say
it barely worked at all, some of this censored
or cut material was considered lost forever.
The BBC routinely wipe their master videotapes
to save money and reuse the expensive magnetic
tape for new programs. They didn't view these
shows as historical artifacts. They viewed them
as disposable entertainment. But history has
a funny way of surviving. Years later, some incredible
discoveries were made by the fans themselves.
There was a legendary sketch called the Choreographed
Party Political Broadcast. In it, John Cleese
plays a very stiff conservative party spokesman
who is attempting to deliver a serious political
speech, but he continuously breaks out into ballet
dancing, being aggressively coached by a flamboyant
choreographer played by Eric Idle. Because of
the BBC's tape wiping policy, it was deemed completely
lost to time. But in 2008, a home recorded tape
of this exact sketch miraculously turned up on
YouTube. And where did it come from? It had been
captured by a dedicated fan off a television
broadcast on a PBS outlet, WNED TV, all the way
over in Buffalo, New York. It's a truly incredible
story of grassroots media preservation. The fans
essentially saved the cultural history that the
network actively tried to erase, whether that
erasure was through deliberate censorship or
just sheer corporate negligence. Here's where
it gets really interesting, though. You mentioned
that. Buffalo, New York, PBS station. That perfectly
pivots us to section five, going global. Because
taking this incredibly specific, incredibly British,
entirely weird show across the Atlantic to an
American audience was not a smooth process. This
is a massive uphill battle. Initially, Time Life
Television, which handled the distribution of
BBC shows in America, took one look at Monty
Python and gave it a hard pass. They said, no
way. This is way too British. The references
are too local. The pacing is too strange. Americans
will never, ever understand this. And for a brief
agonizing moment, Time Life was proven absolutely
right. During the Python's first major North
American promotional tour in 1973, their management
booked them an appearance on live U .S. television.
They were slated to perform on The Tonight Show,
which was being guest hosted by the comedian
Joey Bishop at the time. This was supposed to
be their big introduction to the American public.
And it was an unmitigated catastrophe. Eric Idle
has described the experience in vivid detail.
They went out and performed 15 minutes of their
best, most tested material for the studio audience.
And they received zero laughs. Not a polite chuckle.
Not a titter. Absolute dead silence in Burbank,
California. Idle said they were so shell -shocked
by the failure that they literally ran out onto
the grass outside the studio after the segment
and just lay down and laughed hysterically for
15 minutes because the failure was so monumental.
The American audience genuinely had no earthly
idea what they were looking at. It was like they
were performing in Martian. But the breakthrough
didn't happen through the traditional mainstream
late -night networks. It came through an entirely
different, far more grassroots avenue of American
television, public broadcasting. Their American
manager, Nancy Lewis, tirelessly pushed the show,
refusing to accept defeat. Finally, in 1974,
a PBS member station in Dallas, Texas, Cara,
took a massive risk and became the first U .S.
station to broadcast full episodes of The Flying
Circus. Dallas, Texas. Yeah. Of all places. And
it caught on like wildfire. It did. It resonated
deeply with a specific demographic, a younger
college educated audience who were actively looking
for countercultural entertainment that didn't
talk down to them. The absurdity matched the
general disillusionment of the 1970s. By 1975,
thanks to the syndication network, it was often
the most popular show on PBS stations across
the entire country. The ABC network saw how huge
it was getting on public television and bought
the rights to show select episodes on their wide
world of entertainment late night showcase. But
ABC didn't just take the BBC tapes and air them.
They heavily re -edited them. They chopped the
episodes into pieces to forcefully insert commercial
breaks, which, as we discussed earlier regarding
their stream of consciousness structure, completely
destroyed the delicate flow that the Pythons
had so carefully designed. You can't put a soap
commercial in the middle of a sketch that relies
on unbroken momentum. The Playthons were absolutely
furious. So what did they do? Six comedians sued
one of the largest broadcasting networks in America.
And this lawsuit is a monumental watershed moment
in the history of entertainment law and copyright.
When they sued ABC initially, a lower court judge
agreed that their artistic rights had technically
been violated by the crude editing, but the judge
refused to grant an injunction to stop ABC from
airing the butchered episodes. The network thought
they had won. But the Pythons didn't back down.
They appealed the decision and they won a landmark
appellate ruling that gave them complete control
over all subsequent U .S. broadcasts of their
programs. But from a legal standpoint, didn't
ABC buy the broadcasting rights? Why wasn't the
network allowed to edit the content they paid
for? That is the crux of why this case is so
vital. The ruling established a powerful legal
precedent for moral rights for artists and television.
Moral rights are distinct from economic copyright.
It's the legal idea that a creator has an inherent
right to protect the integrity of their work
from being mutilated, distorted, or fundamentally
altered by a distributor, even if that distributor
has paid for the broadcast rights. Wow. The court
ruled that ABC's edits were so severe that they
constituted a mutilation of the artist's original
intent. And furthermore, this grueling battle
gave the pythons the leverage they needed to
eventually gain control of their own physical
master types from the BBC once their original
contracts expired. They literally wrestled their
intellectual property away from the corporate
giants, which is incredible Yeah They fought
the law and the weirdos won and once they had
that control their global reach just kept expanding
in the most bizarre ways I mean they went to
Germany in 1971 in 1972 and actually produced
two special brand -new German episodes titled
Monty Python's Flegender Zirkus For the first
one, they actually memorized and performed their
lines in German phonetically. Can you imagine
John Cleese shouting his apoplectic rages in
phonetic German? It's mind boggling. And decades
later, they even supported a 2005 French theatrical
adaptation of their sketches. Though the translations
in the French version were interesting. Let's
just say the famous song Sit on My Face was translated
into something so incredibly anatomically explicit
in French that we definitely cannot translate
it back to English on this deep dive. It just
proves that the core mechanics of their comedy,
the disruption of logic, the mockery of authority,
the embrace of the surreal, translates across
almost all cultural and linguistic barriers.
Even if the specific political or cultural references
have to change, nonsense is a universal language.
But of all the people across the globe who fell
in love with this show and spoke that language
of nonsense, there is one fan mentioned in the
history books that just absolutely blows my mind.
Elvis Presley the king of rock and roll yes according
to his cousin Billy Smith during the final tragic
months of Elvis's life in 1977 when he was mostly
confined to his bedroom in Graceland heavily
isolated and struggling with his health and addiction
he would sit for hours and hours just endlessly
chatting with his cousin about his absolute favorite
Monty Python sketches just visualize that scene
for a second the cloistered king of rock and
roll in the deep heart of Memphis, Tennessee,
sitting in a lavish, heavily draped bedroom,
analyzing British sketch comedy about dead parrots
and silly walks. It is a surreal image that I
think Terry Gilliam himself would be proud to
animate. It is deeply surreal, almost incredibly
sad in a way, but it also speaks to the absolute
universal appeal of the absurd. When the pressures
of the real world are the crushing pressures
of immense unprecedented global fame. Elvis's
case become too much to bear. The pure, unadulterated
nonsense of Python provides a very specific kind
of psychological relief. It's a reminder that
nothing is really that serious. It offers an
escape into a world where the rules don't apply.
There is a genuinely beautiful way to look at
it. Let's move into our final section, the enduring
legacy. Because for a show that changed the world,
the flying circus didn't actually last that long.
John Cleese actually chose to leave the show
after the third series. He felt the material
was getting repetitive, that they were starting
to repeat their own formulas, and he was finding
it increasingly difficult to work with his writing
partner, Graham Chapman, who was struggling severely
with alcoholism at the time, which made the writing
process erratic. The remaining Pythons did go
on to produce a shortened fourth series without
Cleese, but they ultimately decided to end the
show prematurely. The final episode was broadcast
on December 5th, 1974. Only 45 episodes were
ever made. 45 episodes. That is a remarkably
small output for the impact it had. When we look
at the legacy, you see the direct DNA of Python
in almost everything that followed. Lorne Michaels
has explicitly cited Monty Python as a massive
foundational influence on the creation of Saturday
Night Live. They paved the way for that kind
of late night subversive television. Douglas
Adams, the legendary author of The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy, actually co -wrote a sketch
for that fourth series and famously stated he
spent years just wanting to be John Cleese. They
influenced the entire rhythm of modern sketch
comedy, the embrace of the surreal, and most
importantly, the refusal to talk down to an audience.
But the legacy leaps completely out of the limb
of comedy and into the real world in the most
unexpected ways possible. And if you are listening
to this right now on a smartphone, a tablet,
or a computer, you are interacting with the legacy
of Monty Python. In the late 1980s, a brilliant
computer programmer named Guido van Rossum was
creating a new, highly structured programming
language. He wanted a name that was short, unique,
and slightly mysterious. He happened to be reading
the published scripts from Monty Python's Flying
Circus at the exact time he was developing it.
So he named the language Python. Today, Python
is one of the most widely used coding languages
on the entire planet. It powers massive parts
of our global digital infrastructure, from search
engines to artificial intelligence. It is truly
one of the greatest, most poetic ironies of modern
history. You have a television show that was
built entirely from the ground up on chaotic
absurdism. It was designed to defy logic, to
break all the rules, and to celebrate total anarchy.
And yet, it ended up providing the naming convention
for the highly logical, incredibly rigid, mathematically
rule -bound digital of infrastructure that runs
our entire modern world. It is the ultimate subversive
act. Oh, and it gets better. Think about your
email inbox. Think about the folder where all
the relentless, unwanted junk goes. The term
spam comes directly, 100%, from a Monty Python
sketch. In the sketch, two customers are sitting
in a greasy spoon cafe where the menu is read
out loud and almost every single item includes
the canned meat spam, egg and spam, egg, bacon
and spam, spam, egg, sausage and spam. As the
sketch progresses, a choir of Vikings sitting
in the cafe starts drowning out all the dialogue
by loudly, repetitively singing spam, spam, spam,
spam. Early Internet pioneers in the 80s and
90s used the word spamming to describe the act
of flooding a chat room, a bulletin board or
an email inbox with repetitive unwanted junk
drowning out the actual conversation exactly
like the Vikings drowning out the dialogue in
the sketch. It's a literal linguistic virus that
leaped off a BBC soundstage in 1970 infected
early internet culture and embedded itself directly
into the Oxford English Dictionary and the daily
vocabulary of billions of people. So what does
this all mean? Let's synthesize this incredible
journey. We started with six guys in 1969 who
took the established polite rules of television
and threw them completely out the window. They
experimented with stream of consciousness, they
eradicated punch lines, they glued it all together
with surreal Renaissance art cutouts, and they
mocked everyone from the military generals to
the BBC executives paying their salaries. They
were deemed disgusting and nihilistic. They earned
the lowest appreciation score in the history
of the network, and they bombed so hard on American
television that they had to lie down in the grass
and laugh at their own failure. And yet, they
fought for their creative rights in federal court,
they found their audience, and they became a
cultural juggernaut. A juggernaut that literally
named the code that likely built the podcast
app you are using to listen to us right now.
They prove that uncompromising artistic vision,
even when it is initially rejected, misunderstood,
or despised by the mainstream, has the power
to fundamentally reshape the culture. They didn't
change their comedy to fit the world. They forced
the world to understand their comedy. Exactly.
So to you listening, whenever you have an idea,
whether it's at work, in your creative life,
or just a project you're passionate about, and
you start to doubt yourself, wait, strike that
whenever you feel like your ideas are too weird
or too niche, or just won't be understood by
the people around you, I want you to remember
this deep dive. Remember that Monty Python's
flying circus was once deemed unwatchable. too
strange, and far too British to ever succeed.
Weirdness, when you commit to it fully and execute
it with discipline, can literally change the
world. And I want to leave you with a final thought
to mull over, building on everything we've unpacked
today. The Pythons revolutionized television
precisely because they were able to recognize
the invisible rules of the medium. The mandatory
punchlines, the clean continuity, the polite
endings, the respect for authority, and they
deliberately chose to break them. Fast forward
to today. What are the invisible assumed rules
of the media we consume right now? Think about
the infinite scroll of TikTok, the algorithm
driven content on streaming platforms, or even
the structure of deep dives like this one. There
is a rhythm and an expectation we all just blindly
accept as normal. What are those rules? And what
would it look like if someone today had the courage
to just stop doing them? Now that is a brilliant
question to end on. Thank you so much for joining
us on this exploration into the anatomy of absurdity.
Keep questioning the rules, keep embracing the
weird, and we will catch you on the next deep
dive.