Monty Python has been written about many many many many many many many times before. But for the novice who may have happened across this blog by chance, which happens often here in blogdom, here's a brief introduction to the group who created the brilliant comedy albums I wish to discuss in this blog.
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From left: Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese.
a.k.a Monty Python. |
First of all, Monty Python -- not unlike Jethro Tull or Toad The Wet Sprocket -- is a group often mistaken for an individual.
(Oh by the way, which one's Monty?) They are indeed six men from mostly England. Gilliam is the lone American in the group. In the 1960s, all of them worked in the London television industry as writers or performers or both. Their paths crossed here and there and at one time or another they had all worked together. Admirers of each others work, sometime around 1969 they decided to team up and do a television series of their own. They eventually came up with a sketch comedy show and called it
Monty Python's Flying Circus, for no better reason than they liked the way it sounded. As it happens so often in television, nobody expected the show to last more than a few episodes, or one season at the most. After about five or six episodes, however, it begat a following. And after thirteen episodes, it was renewed for a second season, and grew from there. The TV series, back in the days before home-video, spawned a soundtrack album, also called
Monty Python's Flying Circus, and a feature film entitled
And Now For Something Completely Different, both made up of favorite sketches from the first season of the TV show.
From there it grew even more. Charisma Records in England agreed to release more albums, and PBS in America began to run the TV show. By then (1974-75) a second, more proper film was in the works,
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a comedic retelling of sorts of the Legend of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. The
Grail film and the TV show in America shot them to superstardom, and they went on to make more TV episodes and more movies, and more live concerts, and more live concerts made into moves and... best of all,
more albums.
