On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
OnTelevision PYTHON'S PROGENY BY MARVIN KITMAN ^^'m one of those people who enjoyed Life of Brian, the notorious Biblical epic by Monty Python's Flying Circus. The boys were, I thought, no more...
...At first I thought its purpose was to give piety equal time, but the program was simply more blasphemy...
...Anyway, the movie satirized left-wing fanatics in the 20th-century Middle East more bitingly than religious affairs in first-century Judea...
...Titled Python, it was a documentary of Michael, Eric, John, Graham, Terry, and Terry, the six men who in 1969 gave miraculous birth to the group that has deeply touched our lives...
...For the existence of Monty Python, and for the miracle of tape, thank Brian...
...But I digress...
...Mary was rescued from sword-wielding, rapacious Roman soldiers on horseback, and so forth...
...blasphemy is their game...
...And the show may have been the single most brilliant and subtle satire ever to grace American television...
...Having had it with Captain Cousteau and his underwater frogs and frogmen on public TV, 1 was ready for Captain Walter Snetterton (Palin) and his hand-picked British frogs (much better actors than their American counterparts), who in 1927 are making the first amphibian assault on the Andes...
...Terry Jones, the other Pythonian involved as co-writer and in secondary roles, is pretty good, too...
...In Ripping Yarns, which began running on WNET on November 11, Palin gives us his finest performances and sharpest bits of writing...
...It featured a lot of out-takes, scenes shot from bad camera angles, and flubs...
...So there's your basic old school tale, "Tomkinson's School Days," a searing indictment as they say...
...Besides being funny, the film was good preparation for a host of other cultural events...
...Only we seem to realize that there is no good comedy on TV other than silly...
...The story of the Mother and Father of the Year (was it 1 BC or AD...
...On Monty Python, only he could convincingly return a dead parrot to a pet store...
...intellectuals, burglars, and closet monarchists...
...It is what American sit-coms are aiming at today and miss: pure sit-comedy...
...In fact—and I'm ashamed to admit this—I often woke up during the three hours it was on and thought I was watching out-takes from Brian...
...The natives in the tiny Bolivian town that served as the base camp for the Snetterton expedition, for instance, were shown listening to the Football (read soccer) Association Cup Match between Cardiff and Manchester or Leeds on the shortwave radio service sent out by the BBC for Third-World-ers...
...Did he not know an NBC correspondent had been killed in Jonestown...
...The acting and the writing were extraordinary...
...Or it may show the influence of the co-author, his wife Connie Booth, an American actress who plays the part of the hotel's waitress...
...Eventually, each Python sat down in front of the camera to tell us what he has done since we last saw him...
...Life of Brian also prepared me for a little movie shown December 6 on the New York public television station, WNET/13...
...It's a bit hard to catch when the British consul (Denholm Elliot) comes running out of the local whorehouse, buttoning his fly, and asks a native who sits sleepily listening to the soccer match on the old radio, "The score...
...I can't get enough of him...
...As the character in the movie who couldn't quite catch the Sermon on the Mount said: "Blessed are the cheesemakers...
...On Towers, only he can evoke sympathy while beating the daylights out of Manuel (Andrew Sachs), his immigrant waiter...
...He recently told me that he had wanted to open the Saturday Night Live program of last January 29 with a Jonestown parody: The whole audience would be playing dead with their little Kool-Aid cups, then he would rush on stage and shout, "Live from New York...
...The boys were, I thought, no more tasteless than usual...
...Moreover, it "is something completely different...
...The hour-long Python had its positive and negative sides...
...Fawlty (Cleese) trying to cope with Manuel, his own wife Sybil, the moosehead, and the German tourists is too much...
...the murder-mystery thriller ("Murder at Moorstones Manor"), and so forth...
...Well, miracles—such as seeing the truth in a TV docudrama—happen, too...
...Richard Gilbert of the Princeton Theological Seminary (who also happened to be a paid consultant on the project for NBC...
...Or that I, a City College man, would appreciate the zaniness...
...The installment also includes one of Palin's greatest lines, "The frogs are restless tonight...
...The notion that Bolivian natives are interested in such minutiae of the British way of life is so funny, I'm doubling over laughing as I write about it here...
...Then there is the standard war yarn ("Escape from Stalag Luft 112-B...
...I must be a very silly person...
...Palin is my favorite Pythonian...
...He said the show followed the doctrine of "writing to silence...
...Eric (Idle), for example, spoke of his Rutland Weekend series for BBC television...
...Who would ever have thought that by 1980, the Pythons would be the only humor heard on an American public television system...
...The writers are to be credited with making Mary and Joseph (Jeff East) teenagers, surely an original presentation of the well-publicized couple...
...Not everybody does, you know...
...One of these was Mary and Joseph: A Story of Faith (NBC, December 9), the season's most controversial TV show...
...Manuel is the classic ethnic trying to make it in a new land...
...ome of the humor is more difficult...
...You know something...
...You miserable ticks, Palin's characters might say, you unspeakable slimes, you can't expect to "get" the jokes...
...My favorite word of his was "gerfer," meaning grapefruit...
...Or simply that Cleese watched a lot of American TV while growing up...
...was, as they say in Hollywood, fleshed out from the sketchy accounts in Matthew and Luke...
...We were repeatedly shown the What-Have-the-Romans-Done-for-Us-Lately scene (the secret meeting of the People's Front of Judea, which is plotting to overthrow the Roman Empire...
...The good book all this came from could just as well have been The Bastard by John Jakes, which did very well on TV as a miniseries...
...Or that these Oxford and Cambridge graduates would be making silly jokes and dressing up and being funny in that British way...
...It stars that silly walker himself, John Cleese, who plays the cantankerous, rude, incompetent proprietor of a small hotel in Devon, where the strawberries and cream come from...
...Joseph, after all, didn't go surfing in the Sea of Galilee and Mary didn't get around the Old City on her skateboard...
...That such brilliant American humor can be written by Cleese, an Englishman, may indicate something about his genes...
...In the world of television, that's a miracle...
...It is truly amazing—unless you believe, as I do, that deep down we are all British...
...Maybe that's how the real Mary spoke, but I would have imagined people in that time and place sounded more, what, Jewish...
...I had the distinct feeling," Palin told me, "that if a CBS correspondent had been killed the skit would have been fine...
...I keep remembering his earnest New English...
...The creators should be applauded for their restraint, too...
...The series is absolutely smashing...
...In my favorite page of the New York Post (six), Claudia Cohen talked to the Rev...
...At any rate, he is terrific...
...Those of us who do are a very small minority, a sort of lunatic fringe of TV viewers—a cult composed largely of insomniacs (the original shows were on late, for public TV watchers, 10:30 p.m...
...Oh, he's appeared occasionally on Saturday Night Live, but it was not his best work...
...The bitterness between the Free Galilean movement and the United Judea Front was the butt of the film...
...That was one of their silly jokes...
...Joseph, we were told in the show, was no ordinary carpenter...
...One should not ask did it actually happen but could it reasonably have happened...
...They have become too successful individually to speak on camera without getting $250,000 each...
...Life of Brian was, in short, Pythonesque, and just my glass of tea...
...he was a handsome nobleman by birth, forced to learn woodworking when his family was killed...
...Fawlty Towers, a six-part series that has run twice on New York's public TV station, is almost as good as Yarns...
...But they consented to wave at us...
...Nonetheless, in "Across the Andes by Frog" the usual British mumbling, understatement and overbite were complicated by the natives speaking a mixture of their Andean dialect and British English...
...On the negative was the fact that the film was a crassly commercial plug for the Life of Brian...
...Other times she sounded like Farrah Fawcett, whom Peter Cook calls Farrah Tap...
...Each yarn is a half-hour spoof of a classic pulp genre—the shilling novels and adventure stories the average British chap grew up with...
...From under the sombrero we hear, "Cardiff, one-nil...
...But NBC said it would be in bad taste...
...John (Cleese) did Fawlty Towers for the BBC...
...the haunting tale ("Curse of the Claw...
...Blanche Baker (Mary) sometimes sounded like Gidget—going to Jerusalem...
...The yarn I have liked best to date is the old adventure-scientific expedition tale, "Across the Andes by Frog," aired in New York on December 16...
...Still, according to the newspaper reports, some scholars thoroughly approved of the project...
...I feel sorry for the people who don't "get"—nudge, nudge, you know, wink-wink—Monty Python humor...
...Yet the negative features were for me outweighed by seeing the Python-ians together for the first time since they stopped making TV shows in the early '70s...
...Michael (Palin) and Terry (Jones) did Ripping Yarns for the BBC...
...Graybridge (the school) is so tough, when the boys are bad they must whip the headmaster...
...They were, of course, blasphemous...
Vol. 62 • December 1979 • No. 25
