40th Anniversary Monty Python
 

Today forty years ago, 5th October 1969, the first Monty Python show went on air at the BBC.

Stupid as it is to do so, I'm going to step out here on this limb which was clearly clipped from a magazine or something, then photographed as a stop action thingie, and say that "Monty Python and The Holy Grail" is, was, and ever shall be officially and unassailably the funniest movie ever made.

It's also a polarizer movie. Most people either reeeealy like it or don't get it at all.

Shortly after, I was conceived. Coincidence?

but you can flip from one to the other. I didn't get it until I moved here......

Sorry Crimson, I don't get it. *Scratches head*

Monty Python was one of the best comedy teams in history.

No it's not!

Every so often, the episode would open with a raggedy old man emerging from the sea, and run towards the camera, collapse on the beach, and say "It's...", then a cut to the opening animation.

I thought I had seen them all, but I don't remember that one. I'll have to review. :D

(Almost?) all of them have the raggety man saying "It's" before the opening credits. Some episodes even close with the raggety man retracing his steps back to where he had come from in the beginning. It wasn't always a beach.

Most episodes "started" with John Cleese saying "and now for something completely different", then SarahMichael Palin saying "it's", then the theme. It could be ten minutes into the show.

True, it wasn't always a beach.
That's just the one I happened to remember at the time.

It's also possible that your local broadcast company might have edited them for syndication.

This one time, at band camp ...

no, this really is a band camp story, and I did play the clarinet, but I didn't do that.

Every now and again the band director would put music on the stands to test people's ability to sight-read.

One day we came in to find a John Phillip Sousa march, called The Liberty Bell.

"Great," everyone grumbled. "Marching band stopped being about John Phillip Sousa years ago! This is LAME!!"

Then we started fumbling our way through.

After the first couple of notes, a good proportion of the band was playing with much more than the usual lack of confidence, and ended with a flourish, and a very loud fart sound from one of the trombonists.

The band director was perplexed.

He had no idea what he had done.

He had never seen Monty Python.

He was subsequently educated.

There was another incident involving an Honors Philosophy professor, who was equally innocent of Great British Comedy. The class walked across the Quad with him serenading him with the Bruces Philosophers' Song. He was quite horrified that anyone would make fun of something as important as philosophy.

I had the good fortune of catching the Pythons when they were first aired in the U.S. One of the regular networks, I think it was ABC ran a couple episodes in a late night time slot, sometime in the mid-70s. I regularly watched the PBS run, and have most of the albums on vinyl. The first one I got was an import ... Live at Drury Lane, which had all of the great bits ... Dead Parrot, Lumberjack Song, Argument Clinic. Ah, the joy of it all.

Scary to think of the shows as being 40 years old, though.