Late one night in October 1969, a new show arrived on British TV. It was called Monty Python’s Flying Circus and despite arriving without much fanfare – it went out on a Sunday barely an hour before midnight – sketch comedy was never the same again.

The show rapidly became a phenomenon, one which endures to this day. It spawned books, albums, films, sell-out stage shows, and video games, not to mention an endless supply of tedious arseholes who quote entire sketches at dinner parties. It’s celebrated worldwide for its subversive take on comedy to the extent that the word Pythonesque became a byword for comedy that’s absurd, surreal, irreverent and (of particular interest to this article) rule-breaking. Quite an achievement when you realise this show marked the first time the six men responsible – Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin – had all worked together.

In retrospect, we can say that was unavoidable, right? Flying Circus was just so fresh and inventive, there really was no other way things could have turned out. But did it all really erupt from nowhere? Was Flying Circus the result of a group of rebellious upstarts chucking out the rulebook and penning heaps of nonsense? Perhaps not. As you’ll see, the Python team were actually quite an experienced lot by the time they turned their hands to Flying Circus, and they possessed a stronger respect for the rules of sketch comedy than their anarchic reputation might suggest.

Playing Around

Before Flying Circus hit TV screens like a fish slap to the face, the men who would later become known as the Pythons already enjoyed a certain familiarity to UK viewers. The British members of the troupe had all graduated from university comedy in the early 1960s (Chapman, Cleese and Idle from Cambridge Footlights; Jones and Palin from The Oxford Revue) and quickly slid into television careers. While far from stars, they were nonetheless jobbing young writers and performers by the latter part of the decade, popping up here and there on popular TV and radio comedy. Even the American Gilliam was already living in England during this time, contributing to some of the same shows and avoiding Vietnam.

In fact, the gang worked on so many shows pre-Python that a thorough examination of them all is out of scope for this article – which is lucky for me, because I’m far too lazy to attempt one. But to give you an impression of their experience, this table shows each member’s contributions, either in front of or behind the camera:

	Chapman	Cleese	Gilliam	Idle	Jones	Palin
That Was the Week That Was (‘62 – ‘63)	•	•
I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again (‘64 – ‘73)	•	•		•
The Frost Report (‘66 – ‘67)	•	•			•	•
At Last the 1948 Show (‘67)	•	•
Do Not Adjust Your Set (‘67 – ‘69)			•	•	•	•
Twice a Fortnight (‘67)					•	•
Marty (‘68)	•	•	•		•	•
Broaden Your Mind (‘68 – ‘69)			•		•	•
We Have Ways of Making You Laugh (‘68)			•	•
How to Irritate People (‘68’)	•	•				•
Complete and Utter History of Britain (‘69)					•	•

And that’s not even a complete catalogue of their works. After all, they had bills to pay and each man took numerous other gigs around this time, including stage shows, magazine contributions, and more conventional roles like producing. But let’s just stick to this list and see what it tells us about the Pythons and their early work.

For one thing, the Pythons weren’t upstart novices. While not exactly veterans, they had experience on a variety of broadcast comedy shows, and quality ones at that. That Was the Week That Was and The Frost Report were headed by David Frost, one of the most respected broadcasters in British television. Shows like At Last the 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Set attracted respectable followings.

Also noticeable is the overlap between their work. They certainly weren’t strangers by 1969. Chapman and Cleese had formed a writing partnership during university, as had Jones and Palin. All six had been plying their trade in the relatively small ecosystem of British television – remember, there were only three TV channels at this point – and grew familiar with each other as they hopped around from show to show. This was a cauldron of not only collaboration but competition. Palin, for example, recalls being so impressed with Chapman and Cleese’s material on Frost Report that he and Jones felt obliged to up their game. While Chapman and Cleese excelled at the studio-based sketch, Jones and Palin tried going one better by writing film-like sketches with longer durations, stronger narratives and outside filming (something we’d see a lot more of in Flying Circus).

This drive to outdo one another went hand-in-hand with another prevailing attitude of the time. After all, this was the groovy Sixties, man. Experimentation was the order of the day, and the BBC – in its own crusty patrician way – was no exception. Terry Jones recalled:

‘I remember David Attenborough, who was then Controller of BBC2, and Huw Weldon, Controller of BBC1, giving us these brilliant talks about how the BBC worked. Huw Weldon said: “What the BBC tries to do is keep one step ahead of public opinion, so we just keep pushing the boundaries slightly and not conforming to the lowest common denominator.” ’

(I’ll pause here while you decide whether to laugh or cry.)

Looking back at that table, you can actually trace how boundaries were being increasingly pushed. The earlier shows tend to be more conventional, but as the decade moves on, so too does the inventiveness of the comedy¹.

• Watching At Last the 1948 Show is sometimes like seeing embryonic Python sketches, with Cleese’s manic irreverence and Chapman’s pipe-smoking stoics already on display.
• Similarly, you can see the more joyfully silly side of Flying Circus when watching Idle, Jones and Palin in Do Not Adjust Your Set. It features the kind of silliness and mini-movies that remind you of later sketches like Bicycle Repairman and Spanish Inquisition.
• The latter show, along with We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, also featured the first glimpses of Gilliam’s trademark cut-out animation.
• Other shows like Twice a Fortnight, Marty, and Broaden Your Mind mixed the Pythons with other pioneers of inventive absurdist comedy like Marty Feldman, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Garden and Bill Oddie.

As Jones later said, shows like these were the Pythons’ ‘chance to be innovative […] a test bed for things we wanted to do later on.’ While a healthy respect for the rules of sketch comedy was still largely maintained, you can already observe an increasingly tendency to toy with the rules and in so doing develop a kind of proto-Python identity.

It’s almost as though they were chomping at the bit to really push things and in desperate need of an opportunity to be let loose…

1. Of course, actually watching these shows can be challenging to the digital archaeologist. The BBC’s policy at the time of lovingly crafting a show and then erasing all trace of it after broadcast means that some episodes or even entire series will never be seen, leaving us reliant on contemporary reviews. ↩︎