50 years since Monty Python last aired on the BBC. More social history than comedy
Its 50 years since Monty Python last aired on the BBC. The last programme was shown on 5th December 1974 on BBC2 (previous series had been on BBC1)
The original run for three and half series 3×13 programmes plus one of six between 1969 and 1974. After that a series of feature films, records and live performances followed until quite recently.
As the Murdoch Sunday Times has noted the Britain Python was satirising has largely gone and the programmes are best watched as social history.
In 2022 I watched episode 14 (first screened September 1970) which I would almost certainly have watched at the time (aged 14). As my partner noted the sketches for 2020s tastes were overlong and contained not much which is now funny. A lengthy sketch about the number of operatives required to install a gas cooker, the well-known sketch about the Piranha Brothers (i.e. the Krays) and the Ministry of Silly Walks. This is still funny but so familiar as not to be that funny 54 years on.
Perhaps the thing that has stood the test of time best were Terry Gilliam’s visuals. Then ahead of their time they still work. The Piranha Brothers had an enemy called Spiky Norman, that is a giant hedgehog, whose cartoon form appeared in various locations intoning the name of Dinsdale Piranha
There was also some, for the time quite daring, gay humour, focused on Graham Chapman (but only him). Homosexuality had only recently been legalised and while the various drag scenes might raise other thoughts for some(not me) in 2024 in the 1970s they were liberating. The idea that people could dress and appear as they wanted- men with facial hair wearing dresses for example- was liberating. Trust me, I was there.
The wider question is however why the humour of Monty Python is now more social history than anything while the music of 1970 is in the main anything but. Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan… old men certainly now, but yesterday’s men I’m not so sure. Monty Python though really is now All Our Yesterdays
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