PASADENA, Calif. – Let’s be parochial here.
“Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” which first assaulted British sensibilities in 1969, made its American TV debut not in New York, not in Chicago, not in Los Angeles but in Dallas on KERA-TV. It was a very good year – 1974. Troupe member Eric Idle remembers it as well as can be expected.
“It was extraordinary,” he says during a recent session with TV critics. “I mean, for us it was just an amazement that people were watching it in Dallas of all places and were loving it. And then it spread, you know, went around the PBS network.”
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, “Monty Python” is still being spread thick. The reigning Tony Award winner as Broadway’s best musical is Monty Python’s “Spamalot,” which opened last year. DVD collections also continue to proliferate, even though the five surviving Pythons (Graham Chapman died in 1989) haven’t worked together on stage or film since 1983’s “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.”
“We’ve discovered that the less we do, the more money we make,” says Idle, 62.
The latest evidence of this is PBS’ three-week presentation of “Monty Python’s Personal Best.” It premieres Wednesday night with an hour apiece from Idle and the late Chapman, whose selections were made by consensus. John Cleese and Terry Gilliam’s hours are on March 1, with Michael Palin and Terry Jones closing the deal on March 8.
“There was a definite pecking order. Cleese got first to go, right?” Idle asks producer John Goldstone, who agrees. “And then I got in second … I don’t know how it happened after that.”
Goldstone, who had to deal with all the dueling egos, says it “became complicated” by the time Jones’ turn came.
“He wanted a whole lot of sketches that everybody had already chosen. So we had to negotiate. But everybody chose “Fish Latin.’ And it’s in everybody’s program.”
The sketches have “been edited to conform to broadcast standards,” it says in a disclaimer preceding Idle’s hour. “The naughty version is on home video.”
The early Pythons were heavy on cross-dressing and effeminate riffs that would flunk some of today’s rigid political correctness tests. Idle’s “Lumberjack Song,” last performed with his mates at the Hollywood Bowl in 1982, is a rather curious and dated choice to end his “Personal Best” hour. Part of its big finish goes like this:
“I cut down trees, I skip and jump.
I like to press wild flowers.
I put on women’s clothing
And hang around in bars.”
Groan. Holding up far better is the “Silly Olympics.” Competitions include the “Steeplechase for People Who Think They’re Chickens” and a “Marathon for Incontinents” whose 44 competitors all have “the most superbly weak bladders.” Then again, “The 1,500 meters for the Deaf” doesn’t sound very funny anymore – and isn’t.
Idle says the Pythons won’t ever reunite or collaborate on new material – “not even for ready money.”
“We hate each other,” he says. “There’s so much animosity. We’re all over 60. I’m sorry to say this, but comedy is really a young man’s game. It’s sort of about what you had to say when you were fresh and young. I’m perfectly happy to get drunk with the rest of them … but I think it should go no further. We’ve earned that, I think.”
Still, it’s nice being recognized as a comedy pathfinder whose influence spread to these shores and led, indirectly at least, to “Saturday Night Live.”
“I love being an older comic now,” Idle says. “You’re part of a league. It’s great. It’s like being an old soccer player or an old baseball player. You’re in the Hall of Fame, and it’s nice. But you’re no longer that person in the limelight, on the spot, doing that thing.”
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