Television - Andrew Billen rues an evening of Monty Python revisited
Was there a more grisly way to spend last Saturday than in front of BBC2's Python Night? When you find Monty Python sketches are more nostalgic than funny you know for sure the world has moved on further and faster than you noticed. The absolute low came in Pythonlands, a bathetic little filler in which, on behalf of their most anoraked fans, Michael Palin revisited the streets of Ealing where the gang filmed their sketches. Arriving at the corner shop where John Cleese had begun his silly walk, Palin offered a blue plaque to its current occupant, a polite woman born some seven years after the sketch was filmed. I fear, poor child, she could have watched the whole three-hour-40-minute tribute and still not understood why the Flying Circus once soared so high.
The advertised "new material" comprised Carol Cleveland, their sex bomb stooge of old, flashing her breasts from an airline reservation desk and a group of gorilla suits (which may or may not have contained Pythons) grumbling about Des Lynam. The much-awaited never previously shown sketch relied on the intrinsic risibility of Morris dancing and English place names. "Well, that wasn't very funny," said Cleese when it had finished, "but at least you hadn't seen it before." Eric Idle, confined these days to Hollywood, was on particularly duff form, insisting that M Python was now "on a wife-support system in an old folks' home in Surrey". "His legendary wit has not dimmed with the passing of time and his colon," we were told by the author of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" - but someone's certainly had.
Even more painful, however, its inspired musical finale aside, was The Life of Brian, the "controversial" 1979 film that the team agreed was their finest 90 minutes. Seen again, it proved to be a series of hit-and-miss sketches that relied on puns ("Blessed are the cheese-makers"), sexual innuendo ("I've got a friend called Biggus Dickus") and Terry Jones doing his Mrs Cut-out voice. I found myself in retrospective agreement with the Bishop of Southwark, who on a chat show scolded Michael Palin and John Cleese for making a film unworthy of them.
No one, however, seemed to be more aware of how tatty the Python cult might look on its 30th anniversary than the Pythons themselves. Palin had, it turned out, personally scuppered a recent reunion tour on the grounds that it was better to be remembered for the "good work that we did rather than clamber up on stage with medical supports". Getting their defences in early, the survivors scripted the great and the good - from Melinda Messenger to Robin Williams - to insult this "good" work on a mini-documentary. "Highly derivative," snorted Hugh Laurie, while Jeremy Paxman spoke of the "irritating and quite frankly mystifying repetition of their material by unimaginative students". Many a true word, and all that. They could have added they were also sexist, toffee-nosed, intellectually snobbish, repetitive, and gave licence to much of the self-indulgence that followed them - not least from Eddie Izzard, who meanderingly narrated the main documentary.
Although From Spam to Sperm, Meatloaf's midnight tribute to the Python music, pointed to one enduring facet of their talents, and although Terry Gilliam's animations looked as fresh as ever, what one really yearned for was for the clock to rewind to October 1969 and to be seeing the programme for the first time. Just as no one expected the Spanish Inquisition, the Pythons hugely benefited from the element of surprise when they pounced upon the schedules. Sketch by sketch by punchline-avoiding sketch, they subverted expectations. The superlative example of this came some 15 years later at Graham Chapman's memorial service, when, from the pulpit, Cleese made his daring "Good riddance to the freeloading bastard" mock-shock attack on his old writing partner. The problem is that the unexpected is just another comedy cliche these days: hands up those who supposed Peter Sissons would really be interviewing the five remaining Pythons at 12.30am.
It was poignant to hear on this week's Heroes of Comedy (9pm, Saturdays, C4) that Eric Sykes came into the business 20 years before the Circus also believing that the secret of comedy was the thwarting of expectations. Sykes, indeed, marvelled at the psychic link between him and his sitcom co-star, Hattie Jacques, who could nine times out of ten predict the next line of his scripts. Sadly, from what we saw of Sykes with his ties trapped in floorboards and office drawers, nine times out of ten anybody would have known what was coming. In the end, John Fisher's programme, compiled with his characteristic TLC, was reduced to praising Sykes's genial forbearance under the yokes of deafness and, now, blindness. Possibly uniquely, his niceness may have been the key to his comedy. To the best of my recollection, in the 20 years he starred with Jacques on Sykes, Eric never once wrote a line that referred to her size. In his hands, Mr Creosote would have never exploded - a twist too far even for the Pythons.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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