Surreal McCoy

BIZARRELY, the stirring military band music that announced the arrival of Monty Python on our screens, 40 years ago this weekend, conjures up rather different images for me. Instead of the opening animated sequences of what is Britain’s most famous satirical TV comedy series, the music instantly makes me think of Bobby Moncur and Wyn Davies running onto the pitch in the black and white stripes of Newcastle United, circa 1969.

As a teenage fan – and I am not making this up – I can remember the Magpies running out at St James’ Park with the theme from the cult new comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus belting out of the PA system.

What was then a tiny clique of Python fans in the Gallowgate crowd were hugely amused every matchday, and the sniggers grew louder and louder until, after months of hilarity, the penny dropped and the powers that be changed the record to a less risible military tune.

Lord Westwood and Joe Harvey (the then chairman and manager) were obviously not fans. The only Monty they would recognise played in goal for Sunderland at that time.

The first episode of Monty Python went out on the BBC on October 5, 1969. Aired late at night, it failed to attract much attention at first, but by the end of the first of what would eventually be four series and 45 episodes, the word was out and viewing figures soared.

It’s difficult to get across just how daring, revolutionary, subversive and just plain silly Monty Python was when it first exploded onto our screens.

I was comparatively late latching on to the Python revolution, after friends at school said it was the most amazing thing they had seen.

Me and my mates had seen nothing like this – and we were hooked.

It didn’t take long before trademark “silly walks” were cropping up in the school corridor, along with knotted handkerchiefs worn on the head in tribute to The Architect Sketch.

Compared to the traditional TV comedy served up at that time, people such as Eric Sykes, Morecambe and Wise and even Tommy Cooper seemed to belong to a previous age of music halls and end-of-the-pier shows.

Of course, the Goons had pioneered the art of surreal comedy in the Fifties, but the Python team of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin took comedy into completely new territory.

Some critics at the time who didn’t “get”

Monty Python dismissed the humour as elitist, Oxbridge Footlights fodder.

But from the point of view of a 14-year-old comprehensive schoolboy from a North-East pit village, me and my mates in the fourth year thought the Python brand of humour belonged to us.

Over the years of repeated showings and in an age when all of us can own our favourite shows on DVD, many of the Python sketches have become hackneyed cliches.

The whole Python culture became so associated with students during the Seventies that in the Eighties there was a distinctive backlash against any reference to the iconic show.

But it is difficult to overestimate the huge impact of seeing legendary sketches for the first time.

Anyone who was lucky enough to be around at the time has probably got some Python sketches hardwired in the brain, a bit like the greatest hits of the Beatles… they are all still playing in my head somewhere.

But just for the record, a few of my personal greatest hits include The Lumberjack Song; The Spam Song; the German versus Greek Philosphers football match; The Parrot Sketch; The Ministry of Silly Walks and, unforgettably, the quiz show in which a panel composed of (from memory) Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Lenin and Mao managed to come up with the right answer to the question: Who won the 1959 Eurovision Song Contest? Answer: Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson with Sing Little Birdy, Sing.

But my favourite sketch is probably John Cleese’s improbable role as a Hungarian who relies on a distinctly dodgy English phrasebook to get by while shopping.

“My hovercraft is filled with eels” seems to stick in the memory, along with a number of other phrases that are a bit too rude to repeat in a family newspaper.

While the Python legacy is being justly celebrated this weekend, it has to be said that some sketches have not worn well and the humour itself, relentlessly and sometimes self-consciously anti-establishment and anarchic, is very much of its time.

The society of late Sixties Britain, with its bowler-hatted civil servants, hat-wearing Tory ladies, gasmen wearing brown overalls and upper-class twits, is barely recognisable from the perspective of the early 21st Century.

But, arguably, much of the humour is timeless and very British.

Of the films made by the Python team, I would say that one is head and shoulders above the rest.

For me, Monty Python and The Holy Grail almost in its entirety is a work of comic genius.

From the opening sketch with mud-covered villagers being asked how they recognise the king “he’s the only one not covered in s**t” to the fight with the ultimately armless and legless Black Knight, “Come on…it’s only a scratch!” The Holy Grail surefootedly follows the path to Python glory.

Other favourite moments include Cleese’s outrageously French knight rejecting the offer of the Holy Grail and then pelting King Arthur with dead farm animals (“No thanks…we’ve already got one”) and, of course, the moment when the order comes: “Bring Up The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.”

Some people hate Python and they will shrug their shoulders at this passing anniversary, but others will celebrate the Pythons for many years to come.

■ Monty Python – Almost The Truth: The BBC Lawyers’ Cut, tonight, BBC2, 9.15pm.

Followed by And Now For Something Completely Different (10.15pm) and Movie Connections (11.40pm).