The Way to Success

         On considering Monty Python's popularity today, one might be tempted to believe that the Flying Circus immediately caught the general attention of the British public. The reality is somewhat different. As we already mentioned, it was difficult for the show to built a regular audience because of the late transmission times or the shifts in programme plannings.

         It must be acknowledged however, that this was probably not the only reason for the weak impact that the show had at first on the audience. In fact, although some of the viewers appreciated the show, the reactions of the audience were rather mixed, as shows the audience research report led by the BBC on the second programme of the first series:[1]

1. Size of the audience (based on results of the Survey of Listening and Viewing).

      It is estimated that the audience for this broacast was 2,9% of the United Kingdom population. Programmes on  BBC-2 and ITV at the time were seen by 0,5% and 14,8% (averages).

2. Reaction of audience (based on questionnaires completed by a  sample of the audience. This sample, 74 in number, is the 3% of the BBC-1 Viewing Panel who saw all or most of the broadcast).

The reactions of this small sample of the audience were distributed as follows :

         However, the Pythons persited, and by the beginning of the second series, they got what they had missed in the first series, an earlier and regular starting time, just after ten O'clock on Tuesdays. consequently, the show rapidly grew in popularity in Great Britain to become one of the most successful comedy series ever.

                  a) Pythonmania

         The members of Monty Python themselves thought the Flying Circus was too British to be successfully exported. In fact, their films helped the Pythons to conquer the American and European audiences which subsequently discovered the Flying Circus. Hilary Kingsley and Geoff Tibballs wrote : "Films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Life of Brian helped establish them world-wide, and the Python Empire is still flourishing."[2]

         In 1976, the BBC sold the show to America without the Pythons' permission. In return, the BBC allowed them to buy back the copyright. Michael Palin said :

      "Their attitude was, "oh well, Python's had its day, so you can have the foreign rights and good luck to you" which meant of course they missed, by about two years, the huge explosion in cable and video and ancillary markets, which we can now sell."[3]

         In fact, not only did Monty Python achieve great success in the States and in Europe but surprisingly enough also in Japan. Telecas Japan, the film importer helped the Japanese audience to leap the humour barrier by preparing a programme which "explained" every scene. This programe also included two essays on the nature of satire and on the success of Monty Python. Martin Roth explained :

       "…to understand black humour, we need political understanding ; but Japanese people do not concern themselves with politics in their daily lives, so they do not understand the black humour or the anger of Monty Python."[4]

          Martin Roth is probably right to a certain extent even if the word "anger" is, in my opinion, somewhat inappropriate. As we said before, the Pythons were educated in Oxford and Cambridge, came from middle-class families and had no particular anger towards society.

         The popularity of Monty Python is very much comparable with the popularity of The Beatles ; they both became cults in the same period and still boast a horde of fans. Kim "Howard" Johnson wrote : "Monty Python fans are very often Beatles fans and vice versa. There are a number of similarities between the two groups, and more than once, Python has been called "The Beatles of Comedy".[5] And indeed, the members of each group have admired the work of each other, and some have participated in others' projects. The best example of this would be The Rutles, Eric Idle's tribute/parody. Shot as a ninety-minute special for Lorne Michaels and NBC-TV in America, the pseudo-documentary "All You Need Is Cash" is the story of four lads from Rutland whose legend will last a lunchtime.

         The context in which Monty Python was created probably helped the group to achieve this success. It is no accident, indeed, if the comedy produced by Monty Python and the 'Oxbridge Mafia' in general succeeded in capturing audiences throughout the 1960's and 1970's, at a time when education in general, and higher education in particular, was rapidly expanding in Great Britain. Nor is it an accident that the audience was a cult one in many cases, and relatively young. It was an audience that shared the culture of the writers and performers themselves. This culture included not only philosophy but even more significantly television, an essential staple in Monty Python's Flying Circus. It was an audience that for the first time, grew up with television, that was just as aware as the comedians of its massive expansion, of its provenance, and of its conventions and forms. In 1996, television still has an important place in our everyday lives and this probably accounts for the perennial success of Monty Python.

         Thus Monty Python has become a cult and its fans receive everything Python or Python-related with the same unreflecting enthusiasm. Kim "Howard" Johnson wrote in the preface to his book And Now For Something Completely Trivial :

      "It seems that Monty Python followers are a fanatical lot, eagerly devouring everything they can find related to the group. They are interested in the smallest minutia about the TV shows and films and take fierce, perverse pride in their knowledge of all things Python."[6]

         It may be interesting to note that this book destined for Python fans was first published in 1993, that is to say almost twenty five years after Monty Python's creation. This shows that even if Monty Python ceased to produce anything a long time ago, Pythonmania does still exist nowadays.

         To measure Monty Python's popularity today, one just has to wander the World Wide Web to consult one of the numerous services offered to Python fans.

         France is no exception to the rule and the complete series of Monty Python's Flying Circus as well as the films, the audio recordings and the CD-ROMs have invaded the French video shops and record dealers.

                  b) Monty Python's legacy to television comedy

         Monty Python, possibly the most inventive comic team ever, radically changed the face of comedy, not only in Britain, but also in the States and in many countries in Europe. Monty Python's Flying Circus had a profound influence on the next generation of televisual comedy. The Guinness Book of Classic British TV says : "They took the stylistic risks that others have copied, and their manipulation of the medium paved the way for much of the "new wave" of comedy in the late 70's and the 80's."[7] And indeed, Not the Nine O'Clock News in Britain and Saturday Night Live in the States have been able to hit the targets they have chosen because of the precedent set by Monty Python. As far as France is concerned, Les Nuls, among others, owed very much of their style to the British group and French comedian Patrick Timsit recently paid a homage to the group in the programme Les Enfants de la télé  on France 2, on March 30. 1996. After the viewing of a sketch from the Flying Circus, the only comment was "So modern!".

         In fact, the great advantage of Monty Python is that it never followed any fashion and will therefore never go out of fashion - at least as long as television, as we know it, continues to exist.

         Thus Monty Python indisputably represented a change in television comedy. There had been a  certain form of comedy before Monty Python, and there is now another, after Monty Python. But apart from its artistic legacy, Monty Python has become a reference in Britain in everyday conversations. For instance, everybody knows the "Dead Parrot" sketch, even Margaret Thatcher who once reeled off several subtly adapted lines in a speech attacking the SDP. The original sketch went as follows :

      "Praline (Cleese) : It's not pining, it's passed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot."[8]

         Margaret Thacher adapted it into : "This party is dead, it has ceased to be…". Margaret Thacher probably did not even know where the lines came from but, apart from the anecdote, it simply demonstrates that Python classics are deeply rooted in the British culture. The adjective "Pythonesque" has even entered some dictionaries. Thus, The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definition :

      "Pythonesque, a. [-ESQUE.] Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Monty Python's Flying Circus, a popular

British television comedy series of the 1970's, noted esp. for its absurdist or surrealistic humour."[9]

         Likewise, it quotesThe Listener,  dated  June 28th, 1979 :

      "It is doubtful if anyone looked up a dictionary for a definition of 'Python', but it is certain that future compilers of dictionaries are going to have to append a new meaning to 'Pythonesque' for the word is now common English usage on both sides of the Atlantic…It describes a set of events that are more than bizarre, yet less than surreal".[10]

         In my opinion, the last words of this quotation are absolutely accurate and very important in the sense that, unlike the definition given by The Oxford English Dictionary, they insist on the fact that Monty Python is not so much surreal as nonsensical. Monty Python offered an absurdist view of the world, but it always dealt with real life. Unlike the Goon Show, Monty Python's world is not a strange land peopled with strange creatures but the observable world around us even if surrealism is not totally absent from it, especially in Gilliam's cartoons. Mark Edwards wrote in the Sunday Times :

      "Clearly, over the past quarter century the distinctions between the Python way of thinking and reality have become blurred. Either reality has become more Pythonesque, or perhaps the Python point of view was always closer to reality than we realised."[11]