Growing Up With Monty Python

Monday 5th October 2009 will be the 40th birthday of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In July 1969 humankind believed it was ushering in a new era when it witnessed the moon landings. What it was instead ushering in was a short-lived era of increasingly pointless strolls across a dusty satellite. What’s the point of playing golf up there if you’re not building the foundations of a colony? Bloody short-sightedness on NASA’s part, if you ask me, all style and no substance. If I had my way I’d kick them in the upper lip with a steel toe-cap…

…Which brings me back to Python. Three months after Neil Armstrong pranced like a transvestite lumberjack across the surface of the moon, the television show Monty Python’s Flying Circus really changed the world. The stream-of-consciousness formula gave a swift kick in the unmentionables to the stale sketch shows prevalent at the time, and made international stars of most of the Python team.

At the time I was a little too young to know what it was all about, or even to be allowed to watch. But I was formerly introduced to Monty Python through a record my brother owned: Matching Tie and Handkerchief. The cover showed what you would expect, given the name of the disc, but Gilliam’s front sleeve illustration could be pulled out from the cover itself, revealing that the snazzy tie and the handkerchief were actually attached to a blue-faced man hanging from the gallows. Macabre, oh so wrong, and extremely funny – exactly how I would describe the Python style of humour. People point to the slapstick element – the silly walks, the fish slapping dances – or to the surrealism of the lumberjack song and the parrot sketch. But what cannot be ignored, and what drew me in when I was seven or eight years old and unable to understand the socio-political aspect of their work, was the ridiculous offensiveness of the Pythons. Eric Idle is immensely proud of any sketches which still offend to this day, and he has every right to be as they were not allowed to utilise the bad language that most modern sitcoms and sketch shows routinely throw in rather than make thier material funny.

The genius of the Pythons was that they adapted their material to various media. Thus the records pushed the boundaries of sound recordings at the time, just as the TV show threw things at its audience that no programme had tried before. Similarly, their books were stuffed with excellently crafted nonsenses and parodies of the literary world. The films were delightfully postmodern before stuff-shirted academics had even begun to bandy the term around.

Matching Tie and Handkerchief’s genius lay not just in the sketches, silly voices and sound effects, but was apparent in the grooves of the disc itself. In olden times, of course, vinyl records had single grooves on either side, into which the sound recording had been imprinted. One side of Matching Tie and Handkerchief, however, had been cut with two grooves each containing different sketches, so that when you put it on, you were never entirely sure which material you would hear. So simple yet utterly fascinating.

I am not going to go through favourite sketches or even snippets – think of your own. Or, if you have never listened to or seen any Monty Python, for heaven’s sake go out and find some. I guarantee you that an hour spent in the company of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam will change your perspective on comedy entirely, and will probably make you see that most of today’s tired sketch shows and dreary sitcoms are an insult to the intelligence of the audience.

It was never just about favourite sketches for me, it was about becoming immersed into an entirely different world, one in which the customs and moral codes of an often still too pompous Britain are debunked, debagged, and hopefully destabilised. Once I’d been hooked by Matching Tie and Handkerchief I used to sneak down the stairs at nine o’clock once a week to watch BBC2 reruns of the television series through a crack in the sitting room door. If I was really lucky I was allowed to sit in with the rest of the family, but only if I made it clear that of course I did not understand a word of the innuendo or any of the two or three uses of ‘adult language’ they were permitted per series.

In a way, then, I grew up with Python. My father took my brother and I to see Monty Python and The Holy Grail at the cinema, possibly lying about my age to get me in. I bought records of my own – Live at Drury Lane stands out. I watched The Life of Brian three times at the local Odeon and remember sitting around at a friend’s house with the script and several of us acting out all the parts. I always wanted to read the Michael Palin parts, he was my favourite Python, and still is. I was slightly disappointed by The Meaning of Life when it came out, but some of it was gloriously dark and savage, and the rest has grown on me with time. I cried manly tears when Graham Chapman died, not just because he was possibly the most genuinely insane of the six of them, but because it meant that there would be no more Python: just like McCartney, Harrison and Starr working on Lennon’s demo of ‘Free as a Bird’, and releasing it as a Beatle’s song, anything that came after would be akin to the remaining Pythons shagging the corpse of their departed friend. Had they tried, I like to imagine Chapman would have appeared before them, dressed in his Colonel’s uniform, shouting ‘Stop that, it’s NOT silly.’

This is, of course, something of a love letter to Monty Python. Without them I might have taken the world rather more seriously, might have failed to notice the contradictions and inanities inherent to British culture. I am eternally grateful to these six wonderfully madcap men for ensuring that my life would never steer me towards the pinstripe suit and the bowler hat. Happy birthday, Python. Cue Terry Jones playing a Hammond Organ naked with his buttocks flopping disgustingly over the sides of the stool.

The remaining Pythons gather to receive a special BAFTA in October 2009