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Or Anyway Bits of It
It happens in every medium, I think, in its early days. The fact, lamentable as it is, is that this is not actually the entire series. This is because the original tapes were wiped by the fine people at Thames, known in my head as "the people who produced [i]Danger Mouse[/i] and [i]Count Duckula[/i]." John Cleese managed to save two episodes. Indeed, even by reading the Wikipedia page, I'm not clear on whether or not those are the same two mentioned as surviving in the previous sentence, given a later one says four episodes are extant in their entirety. There are also compilations of sketches which were aired on Swedish television; Wikipedia says that's what I watched here, and I'm willing to take their word for it. Get [i]Doctor Who[/i] fans started about how the series was treated by the BBC, though, and of course essentially no early radio survives. Glass plates of Civil War photos were made into greenhouses.
This, like [i]How to Irritate People[/i], is at least in part Proto-Python. There are Four Yorkshiremen here. (Though if we're going with not-Python variations, sign me up for the one with Alan Rickman and Eddie Izzard!) It is also, though I've never seen the show, Proto-Goodies. Probably there's at least one sketch here which was lifted whole cloth onto that show. At any rate, it's your basic zany British sketch comedy, hosted--if that's the word for it--by the Lovely Aimi MacDonald. The regulars are John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman, and Tim Brooke-Taylor. There are also, at various points, such notable guests as Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Bill Oddie. Eric Idle, even. Also as with [i]How to Irritate People[/i], you can start to see where the various men are going to go from here. The show mostly seems to poke gentle fun at certain British cultural eccentricities, but it might also be that I'm not getting some of the jokes.
To be perfectly honest, I'd never heard of Marty Feldman until relatively recently. Or anyway I don't remember having done so. I know I watched [i]The Muppet Show[/i] with my family when I was small, but I don't remember seeing his appearance until adulthood. I had no idea who he was; he was some guy with big, bulging eyes. Who was funny in a madcap, Muppet-friendly sort of way. Of course, he died a few months before my dad (twenty-eight years ago tomorrow), so he wasn't much a staple of my childhood. Also I don't much like Mel Brooks. I think Raul showed me [i]Young Frankenstein[/i], but I don't remember it very clearly. I kind of regret not knowing more about him, now I've watched some of this. Netflix seems to be having difficulties, so I can't look up if they have any of [i]The Goodies[/i]. It looks like, for now at least, my Marty Feldman viewing will remain limited. Which is okay; I'd never heard of Tim Brooke-Taylor at all.
I must still say, however, that this has the same problem as [i]How to Irritate People[/i]. Marty Feldman, the oldest, was then the age I am now. The other three were all under thirty. This is the kind of show which begs to have the word "formative" applied to it, which I suppose is the acting/writing/directing equivalent of For Its Time. You aren't really seeing it out of its context. Twenty-eight he may have been, but you look at John Cleese, and that's not what you're seeing. (He's older than my mom!) If he's lucky and you aren't deprived, what you're seeing is a man in a pet shop or a man doing a silly walk. (A man singing highly dubious statements about the llama in Spanish?) Graham Chapman is generally either King Arthur or Brian Cohen. Maybe the colonel. Marty Feldman . . . is playing Scheherezade to puppets? Anyway. You can't watch it without thinking about where they're going, and it makes it hard to give a clear perception of where they are.
One might argue that I should just stop watching things which are so heavily laden with context. In fact, I've been told essentially just that, though I don't think the person telling me realized the full implications of the suggestions. It was initially that I shouldn't have reviewed [i]Unaccompanied Minors[/i], because my familial connection to Dyllan made me emotionally invested. It's true that my connection to Dyllan is more emotional, and my connection to where Cleese and Chapman would go is more intellectual. On the other hand, I do have all those warm, fond memories of watching [i]Monty Python[/i] with friends and loved ones. There are also various things which have a social weight behind them, a historical weight, a literary weight. You can't watch most of the Great Movies without the context--heck, Roger reviews 'em, and he's often met the stars and directors. He still reviews Werner Herzog movies, and he has a lot more of a personal connection with Werner than I do with Dyllan.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
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Audience Member
Before Pythons have united and created the immortal BBC series, they'd been involved in various comedy programs within the TV station. And this DVD gives brief look at some of their (Cleese, Chapman, Jones, Palin) previous work. For MP fans mostly.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/30/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Fan-bloody-tastic. Nurses, nurses, nice big juicy ones...
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/16/23
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