Monty Python: Some Personal Reflections: 1969 To 2014

[SIZE=14pt]MONTY PYTHON[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=14pt]OBSOLESCENT AND SOON-TO-BE-FORGOTTEN DOCTRINES[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=14pt]Part 1:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]In 1968 a group of young English comedians made a TV special called How to Irritate People. It was released on 1 January 1969 in the USA. At the time I was 24 years old and recovering after being hospitalized and institutionalized as a result of an episode of bipolar I disorder which had hit me for 6 while living on Baffin Island in Canada's Arctic. It took at least two decades for this group of five war-babies to come onto my radar; they've been fully ensconced there now for the last quarter-century.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]Monty Python[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt], sometimes known as The Pythons, was a British [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]surreal comedy group that created Monty Python's Flying Circus[/SIZE], a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. [SIZE=14pt]All the members of the group, which came to be known as Monty Python, began their acting and/or writing careers while I was at university in the 1960s and just starting out on my teaching career. As one media commentator once wrote: “They never had the widest audience, but they had the hippest audience.[/SIZE]


[SIZE=14pt]In October 1969 I had just settled back into the teaching profession in a small rural town in southern Ontario called Cherry Valley; I was renting a room with a family in the small town of Picton where I opened a new Baha’i locality. I have never seen myself as especially ‘hip’ but, more to the point, I did not have a TV on 5/10/’69--not until sometime in 1978. So I knew nothing of Monty Python back then. The sketch continued until 1974. By then I was living in Tasmania and was a tutor in education studies at what is now the University of Tasmania. I still had no TV and still had not heard of Ponty Python.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]On Sunday 6 October 1974 at 10:00pm Dallas’ public television station and program director, Ron Devillier, changed the television comedy landscape forever. It was 6 months later, in March of 1975, that Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Graham Chapman appeared in studio at KERA in Dallas for “Festival ’75″, part of the station's fundraising drive. Python madness had begun, but they were still not on my radar immersed as I was: in my job as a lecturer at a university, in my upcoming second marriage to one of my students who had two children. and in my activity in the Baha'i community of Melbourne.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]Part 2:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]Monty Python’s Life of Brian came out in 1979, the year I had four different part-time jobs. I was living in Tasmania, by then, with my second wife and our three children. I was also in the midst of another episode of bipolar disorder. I did not watch much TV that year, although my wife and children had persuaded me to get a TV. Despite the fame and notoriety of the group, they still had not arrived on my radar.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]When this British surreal comedy group’s The Meaning of Life came out in 19831 I was working 70 hours a week as an adult educator in the Northern Territory, in a remote part of Australia. I was the secretary of the local Baha’i group, had a sick wife and was on the cusp of middle age. I don't recall now, more than 30 years later, whether this zanny, irreverant, and highly successful group and its dozens of pieces of comedy, had become part of my media experience.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]On 9 October 1999, to commemorate 30 years since the first Flying Circus television broadcast, [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]BBC2 [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]devoted an evening to Python programmes, including a documentary charting the history of the team, interspersed with new sketches by the Monty Python team filmed especially for the event. I had just taken a sea-change and an early retirement after a 50 year student and employment life 1949 to 1999 in a little town by the Bass Strait, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean. I was just settling-in to another Baha'i group in what became the northern Tasmanian Baha'i cluster in the first years of the 21st century.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]Part 3:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]In 2009, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, a six-part documentary entitled Monty Python's Almost the Truth was released. It featured interviews with the surviving members of the team as well as archive interviews with Graham Chapman and numerous excerpts from the television series and films.[/SIZE] [SIZE=14pt]When this 6-part doco was televised in the Australian winter of 2011, I had been retired from FT, PT and casual work for half-a-dozen years. My bipolar disorder had been treated and I found myself settling down on a daily basis to television’s delights after midnight and after my day of writing and editing, research and blogging, and pretensions at scholarship and journalism.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]‘Monty Python Live (Mostly) – One Down, Five to Go[/SIZE]’ went live 3 months ago now, in July 2014, for several nights, and ‘The Last Night of the Pythons’ was broadcast live to cinemas on 20 July 2014. [SIZE=14pt] Bill Young wrote on the website tellyspotting: Your Brit TV Pub as follows on 23/7/'14:[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt] "[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]Dressed in white suit jackets befitting the occasion, the five surviving members of Monty Python, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, closed out their run of reunion shows on 20/7/'14 by bidding farewell with the 1979 song from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." I turned 70 that same day. [/SIZE] [SIZE=14pt]For the 15,000-strong crowd each evening – and the thousands more who watched in more than 2,000 cinemas in 36 countries across the world – it was a moving finale. "Their status speeds past ‘comedy royalty’ into ‘godlike geniuses’" wrote Ben Williams at the website Time-Out London on 17 June 2014, and "You’d be hard-pressed to find another comedy group who have had such a profound influence on comedy, heck, even British culture at large," he added. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]The career-spanning Monty Python’s Total Rubbish: The Complete Collection box set was released in June 2104 in the UK by UMC on [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]CD and [/SIZE]vinyl. A new Python video game also came out.[SIZE=14pt]-Ron Price with thanks to “Monty Python” in Wikipedia and Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 22 August 2011 to 7 October 2014.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]Part 4:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]1969 was a hot summer for me,[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]Michael, living near Toronto: &[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]they put a man on the moon as[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]you started your diary1 about a[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]Monty Python world which was[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]a revolution--changed the course[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]of comedy, eh?..It made million$[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]and millions loved it, although the[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]BBC nearly killed it.2 Pythonesque[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]came into our vocabulary & made[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]so many other aspects of modern[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]life’s traditional ways & institutions[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]look like obsolescent and irrelevant [/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]appendages of our society. Perhaps [/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]what underpins the violence, & the [/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]tempest which we all face is in these3[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]outworn doctrines and shibboleths[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]which these bizarre comedians have[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]shown to us over these last 45 years.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]1 [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]'Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years'[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt] by Michael Palin, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), reviewed by Michael Palin 1 October 2006, in The Telegraph, 22/8/’11.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]2 [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt] Anita Singh, “BBC nearly killed off Monty Python, says Terry Jones,” [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]The Telegraph,[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]3 August 2010.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]3 [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]Reading about philosophy and Monty Python goes a long way to explaining [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]some of the dilemmas of modernity at least in many direct and indirect ways. [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]I leave this to readers to [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]Google.[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt] as they try to come to grips with the imaginations of the pundits of error who now fill the air-waves.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]Ron Price[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]22/8/’11[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt] to 7/10/'14.[/SIZE]

 

The Young Ones
Black Adder 2
Little Britain


In that order, think those three in particular far funnier than anything from MP.

Love Life of Brian, but more because its charming than funny. Maybe its too old school, but always thought Monty Python was a bit bleh

 

Eric the Viking is just as good as Monty python & the holy grail and Life of Brian (imho). The meaning of life is a bit lame although I like the opening with the pirating businessmen.

 

Monty P was innovation,in and of it's day.
It opened minds to the realisation that comedy does not have to be formulaic.

Mind you,it doesn't really affect me,because I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok....

 

Belated thanks for your responses, folks.....I'll add a little piece on the American poet, Robert Lowell. He was witty and humorous. I wrote recently, and post it FY reading pleasure. Many will not be interested in this chap; not to worry: just take it in if it interests you.-Ron
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[SIZE=16pt]ROBERT LOWELL[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=16pt]……and our imperishability[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=16pt]Part 1:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]I have taken a special interest in the American poet Robert Lowell because he suffered from the same illness as I do: bipolar I disorder.It was in the late 1950s that Robert Lowell(1917-1977) threw back an autobiographical curtain to make explicit the horrors of his emotional BPD life and to admit, along with the pain, the radiance of his natural wit and humor. His religious faith faded and, emulating the vigor of another American poet, William Carlos Williams(1883-1963), enabled his poems to speak to his neighbours in the world, not only to his elite caste in Boston and the universities.[/SIZE]


[SIZE=16pt]Life Studies[/SIZE][SIZE=16pt] was the result. He published this work in 1959 after much agony, and he ventured to speak openly about his mental health, his bi-polar disorder. He abandoned his former poetic writing-style in favour of a raw and personal approach—using colloquial language. He described the trauma of the inner experience associated with his mania and his depression, his difficult relationships with his family, and his time spent in mental hospitals.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]Part 2:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]In those late 1950s, when Lowell was turning his autobiographical poetic corner, I was in my last years of primary school and the first years of high school. I was, back then, a local small town celebrity due to my baseball prowess, and I was also in my first years as a member of the Baha’i Faith. My bipolar disorder did not surface until my late teens in the early 1960s.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]Some of Lowell's episodes of psychosis were extreme and, from all accounts, he had a total of 18 episodes. They were different from mine in quantity and intensity; my three episodes during the years 1968 to 1980 were filled with paranoia and, like Lowell’s, stereotypically bizarre.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]In an article in The Atlantic Monthly,[/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]"Madness in the New Poetry,"[/SIZE][SIZE=16pt] written in the mid-sixties, Peter Davison commented on the appeal that mental health issues were then coming to have among the poetic set. In the 1960s, psychiatric disorders were still little understood, and the term bipolar disorder had not begun to be applied. Lowell’s manic-depression was referred to as “madness,” a term that students of mental health now try to avoid.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]"Madness," Davison wrote, "can be construed as the regular and inescapable concomitant of the reach beyond reality; and sanity is construed as the dullness of those who refrain from reaching." Davison assessed the efforts of a number of then-current poets—including Lowell: John Berryman, Alan Dugan, William Meredith, and Theodore Roethke—whose work was in some way touched by madness. He was less than enthusiastic about Lowell's recent efforts; the despairing form that Lowell's madness had lately taken, he argued, seemed to be sapping the vitality of his work.[/SIZE]


[SIZE=16pt]Over and over agonizing mental, emotional and relationship tunes were played in Lowell’s poetry, wrote Davison: helplessness, desperation, impotence, the lapse of the present from the promise of the past, flawed vision, the malign dissociation of the self from the senses. These themes were played so frequently that readers foundthemselves forgetting that life and poetry have happy, major keys as well as other minor themes, victories as well as defeats. Davison saw all of Lowell's keys as sad and minor ones. The note of triumph is never struck, wrote Davison.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]Part 3:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]Despite such criticism, Davison asserted two years later in October 1967, in [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]"The Difficulties of Being Major"[/SIZE][SIZE=16pt], that Lowell, along with James Dickey, might be one of only two contemporary poets worthy of the title "major poet." He cited a set of qualifications for such an honor that had recently been proposed by the poet W. H. Auden: [/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]1. [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]He must write a lot.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]2. [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]His poems must show a wide range in subject matter and treatment.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]3. [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]He must exhibit an unmistakable originality of vision and style.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]4. [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]He must be a master of verse technique.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]5. [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]In the case of all poets we distinguish between their juvenilia and their mature work, but the major poet's process of maturing continues until he dies.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]By October 1967 I was teaching Inuit kids on Baffin Island and writing poetry had scarcely made its appearance in my life. When it did, after writing thousands of prose-poems on an immense variety of topics, I did not qualify as a major poet using these criteria.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]What is perhaps most notable about the poems in both Lowell’s collections and mine is their expansiveness. They include everything from historical events to wide-ranging literary allusions to intimate details of our family life. Given the "range and extent of Lowell’s literary atlas, historical and geographical," Vendler suggested that his last books of poetry in the 1970s represented "the whole litter, debris and detritus of a mind absorptive for fifty years." In her view, he had tapped a rich new vein:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]Part 4:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]The subjects of these poems will eventually become extinct, but the indelible mark of their impression on a single sensibility will remain, in Lowell's votive sculpture, bronzed to imperishability.-Ron Price with thanks to several articles in The Atlantic Monthly and several sites in cyberspace.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]I’ve had a pretty good run, Robert,[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]compared to yourmental struggle[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]with BPD…..[/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]Confessional poetry [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]gotoff the ground, thanks partly to [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]you, just as my life with the Baha’i [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]Faith was getting off the ground, and[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]a[/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]nother bipolar poet was your student[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]back then in 1959, Sylvia Plath…Like [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]you, she had a grim timeuntil her life[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]ended in the kitchen in 1963….I knew [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]nothing of any of this, occupiedas I was[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]with life in a small town: safe& familiar, [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]comfortable, until a cold winter set in in [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]the autumn of ’63, and blew me on & on, [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]year after year, town after town, & house[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]after house until I decided, finally, to stop.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]I don’t think I settled-down, really, until[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]I retired early and took a sea-change, and[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]began to reflect on what it all meant….I’d[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]caught a glimpse of It when the smoke had[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]cleared in the barrack-square of Tabriz, and1[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]heard about the birds flying over Akka, and [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]all those men with beardskept appearing in [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]those books year after year during my life.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]I had a better run with medications than you[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]did, Robert. I think they knew more about the[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]BPD by the time I was in my fifties-&-sixties.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]And, finally, I heard a new song all my years,[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]up from the Siyah-Chal it rose when I was in[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]my teens & I’ve been singing all these years.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]It’s given me joy….So many indelible marks [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]on my single sensibility, bronzed-now to an[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]imperishability as I head into these evening[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]hours& the dark heart of night in the years[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]ahead in this millennium, this 21st century.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]1[/SIZE][SIZE=16pt] Roger White, New Song, Another Song Another Season, Goerge Ronald, Oxford, 1979, p.118.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]Ron Price[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]15/6/’13.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt](final draft)[/SIZE]

 

The spanish inquisition is my fave.

 

The stoning !
seriously
http://youtu.be/bDe9msExUK8

 

非常感謝

 

i thought they were ok, but i also thought there were a lot of other brit com they were lame compared to.
i liked 'are you being served', but couldn't stand 'faulty towers'. 'black adder' is somewhere in the low middle range for me.
'benny hill' was right up there on top, with 'are you being served'. the pythons i'd put somewhere around the same level as 'black adder'.
not great, but not as awful as 'faulty towers', which seemed to be competing for the bottom with american type pratfal sit comes.

there were a number of other things i can't remember the name of i liked better.
the magazen 'punch' was good back in 70s and 80s.