Fascinating series charts Python's history

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They're not lumberjacks, and that's OK: the Pythons in their heyday. From left: Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam.

First, the bad news: It's highly unlikely that the surviving members of Monty Python will reunite for any serious sort of performance -- film, TV, stage -- any time soon.

"People say, 'Let's get the Beatles back together' -- well, that just means you want to be young again, not that you want the old buggers to be back (together)," Python original Eric Idle says during the final episode of the exhaustive but never exhausting six-part documentary series Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer's Cut), which premieres tonight at 8 on Bravo.

"You just want to be young, like when the Beatles were new. And I think it's the same with Python, really."

So, so much for the notion of reviving the dead parrot, resurrecting Brian, reprising The Lumberjack Song, reconstructing the exploded penguin on your television set or retracing the silly-walk steps.

Now, the good news: Fans of the legendary British comedy troupe will find more than an adequate Python fix in this series, produced to mark Monty's 40th anniversary.

The six-hour retrospective, which airs in two-hour blocks tonight, Sunday and Monday on Bravo, features expansive new interviews with the five remaining Python members -- Idle, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (Graham Chapman, who died in 1989, also contributes via archival interview clips).

There are also generous helpings from the group's TV and film work, and perspectives from more than a dozen British and North American comedians who have been influenced or inspired by Monty Python's enduringly subversive wit.

Monty Python: Almost the Truth is mostly a chronological history of the troupe, beginning with the not-so-aptly titled first instalment The Not-So-Interesting Beginnings and following with the slightly more self-reverent The Much Funnier Second Episode.

The opener, which is the most history-steeped of the six parts, examines the postwar evolution of British comedy, and how the men who would be Pythons -- middle-class lads who were part of the last pre-television generation -- found inspiration in the rebellious comedy of The Goon Show (featuring Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers) and Beyond the Fringe (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller).

"They were so brilliant," Idle recalls, "and they attacked everything that I'd just spent 19 years being oppressed by -- royalty, police, authorities, teachers. Every authority figure was completely pilloried and destroyed, and my life just changed."

The four British members of Python -- Cleese, Idle, Jones and Palin -- became competitors and then collaborators in university theatrical revues at Oxford and Cambridge, and eventually formed part of a writing/performing network that took part in a number of BBC television series.

(The American Python, Gilliam, grew up in rural Minnesota and pursued a dream of becoming a comic-book illustrator -- a path that would eventually put him on a creative collision course with the four Brits).

With an unexpected push from ubiquitous English TV personality David Frost, the Brit quartet eventually pitched an idea for a show of their own to the BBC. Despite not having much more than a notion that the show ought to be funny, they were given a 13-episode commitment and, with Gilliam brought aboard to provide animated bits between the sketches, Monty Python's Flying Circus was born.

The rest, as they say -- and as is fascinatingly explained in this series -- is history.

"Quality always lasts out," says British comedian/actor Sanjeev Bhaskar, who has played King Arthur in a London production of Idle's long-post-Python theatrical smash, Spamalot. "There have been a lot of sketch shows, and there have been a lot of sketch teams. There's very, very few of them we'll be talking about in 40 years' time."

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 24, 2009 C3