Comebacks and reunions are funny things, aren’t they? Let us hope that in Monty Python’s case, their recently mooted reformation for a series of live shows, it’s funny ha-ha rather than funny peculiar. In rock and roll, many bands have grasped the poisoned chalice of a reunion – a prospect that always has the equal capacity to disappoint and disillusion as it does to surprise and delight devoted fanbases – seminal acts such as the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols and the Pixies. The surviving members of two of the most influential bands of their decade, the Beatles and Queen, even proved that the death of a prominent figurehead was no impediment, sparkling studio magic onto unfinished recordings with commercially successful but critically mixed reception.
In comedy terms, the Monty Python troupe occupy a similar place in pop culture to the Fab Four, and similarly the absence of a key member – Graham Chapman, co-author of such quotable classics as Dead Parrot, Argument Clinic, The Upper Class Twit Of The Year Show and The Architects and leading man in their much loved movie breakthroughs The Holy Grail and Life of Brian – seemed to draw a line under the remaining members taking part in a full-blooded collaboration under the Python banner.
Until this week. Eric Idle had been enticing the faithful via his Twitter account, with enigmatic hints about a big Python announcement to be made at a forthcoming press conference on 21 November. The ever-enthusiastic Terry Jones let the cat out of the bag two days prior by informing the press, it would be a “now or never” stage show reunion of the five surviving Pythons (or Py-THARNS, if you’re American).
In this multimedia age, Python as a collective consciousness has never really gone away. Always keen to adopt new innovations, the Python spirit has been kept alive in non-corporeal form with CD-ROMs in the ‘90s and more recently iPad and iTunes apps reconstituting old material in new permutations, with a sprinkling of rare and unreleased material as ‘unique selling points’, and special editions of their movies for DVD and Blu Ray enhanced with special features and commentaries.
Since the Flying Circus hit the big 3-0 in 1999, every anniversary date in their calendar – and like the Rocky Horror phenomenon, virtually every year brings around a tenuous anniversary of one kind or another – has been accompanied by an ‘audience with’ reunion, a nostalgic theme night, a bumper-sized career anthologyor a Sky Arts round table (this year’s The Meaning of Monty Python). In each case, it has been a case of the Pythons unadorned, five well-aged, comfortably well-off, accomplished gents kicking about some well-worn reheated anecdotes, spiced up by the occasionalresurfacing of those famous interpersonal dynamics, usually when the team’s most volatile personalities,John Cleese – as English as Colman’s Mustard – and Terry Jones – the team’s fiery Celt – lock horns.
As the juggernaut-sized anthology series, 2009’s Monty Python: Almost The Truth, proved, the Pythons remain the most erudite, sharp, self-aware and fiercely intelligent and hyper-critical clowns in the business and it’s always a pleasure to hear these five men hold forth on their craft, responsible for some of the silliest and smartest comedy every created, but the prospect of them hauling their frames on stage, behind silly voices, false moustaches and deliberately unconvincing female drag is likely to be greeted with feelings of jaded cynicism.
It’s an entirely reasonable reaction. After all, the work of the Pythons during their imperial period of 1969 to 1983, was the work of six young men, five of whom (Terry Gilliam being an American expat) reaped the once-in-a-lifetime advantages of having come through post-war austerity, reaped the benefits of a meritocratic state education system and social mobility, learnt their televisual craft when the BBC under the aegis of Hugh Carleton Greene was ringing in the cultural changes of the 1960s. They were able to use this background as alaunchpad for comedy that not only broke new televisual ground when the medium was still in its infancy but also picked up the ‘60s mantle of challenging and questioning the attitudes and values of their parents’ and teachers’ generation, pricking pomposity wherever they saw it, and gleefully pushing the envelope as far as they could when it came to matters of taboo and taste – sex, death, authority, the military mind, bureaucracy,organised religion and society’s stifling of eccentricity and individualism were all grist to the Python’s mill.
They did the job so comprehensively that one can safely say that the elder Pythons have nothing left to prove. So what’s in it for them? The Pythons have always been cynical and unsentimental about the Python brand ever since they became early adopters of multimedia with innovative books and records in the 1970s, and every multimedia project they have unveiled since their dissolution has been undercut with jokey comments about pension funds, paying the mortgage and having to pay for expensive alimony cases in Cleese’s case. This has always been a clever bit of subterfuge in order to head off such accusations of cashing-in before third parties can make the case, belying the fact that most of the posthumous projects under the Python banner that they’ve been directly involved with, have had to go through the intense quality control approval of five individuals with equal power of veto.
It’s also why rumblings of comebacks and reunions have until now come to naught. Around the time of their thirtieth anniversary in 1999, a series of live shows at Las Vegas and a film script knowingly titled Monty Python’s Last Crusade, a self-referential sequel to Holy Grail that would also acknowledge the pitfalls of what happens when a past-their-prime troupe attempts to recreate past glories, fell to the wayside due to prevarication from various parties, volatile egos, and impossible schedules – after all, to this day, the Pythons are the busiest septugenerians in the business, with fingers in so many pies, as distinguished actors, writers, directors and performers across many genres.
A straightforward live revue reviving all the old favourites seems the most likely outcome at this point. The prospect of five limber but elderly gents reviving ancient routines may not set all hearts alight, but there’s no reason to speculate why this couldn’t still be surprising or interesting. The last time Palin and Cleese performed the Dead Parrot, for a Secret Policeman’s Ball in 1988, they surprised everyone when Cleese’s customer not only received a refund for his purchase but also shot back to the audience, “Well, you can’t say Thatcher hasn’t changed some things!”
There’s also the potential the Pythonic alchemy is still dormant, ready to be awakened. In less guarded moments, many of the surviving Pythons have acknowledged that, no matter their eminently respectable solo achivements in numerous spheres, nothing quite matches the perfect storm and culumative energy that happens when they are working together.
Michael Palin recently observed, during an interview I held for a Python book I am currently researching that, “I think that was an important part of the success of Python, that we all brought different preferred areas of performing into the mix and no one merely duplicated what anyone else was doing, everyone came in with a different kind of performance from a slightly different direction, informed by a different interest in life and characters. All of us could realise these characters, could play them pretty well, but they’re all different.”
If the five remaining Pythons are to reband in order to recreate that very special magic, they would be best to keep in mind what kept them functioning during their most active period – they wrote and performed in order to keep one another amused and surprised. One would sincerely hope that old age and their own individual achievements would not dilute this, but intensify it – if they were to simply recreate the past without adding anything new or original to it, I am pretty certain they would be the first to detect a sense of routine, a feeling of the familiar.
The big question is, how to incorporate the absence of chief loony Graham Chapman amongst the proceedings? In many ways, the most underrated performer of the team, Chapman had a unique ability within Python to occupy two extremes – on the one side, buttoned-down, repressed and stoic ‘straight men’ (pun fully intended), often wrestling with some form of incipient madness, and in contrast to that, freewheelingloonies who didn’t only accept the liberating effect of unconventional behaviour but embraced it, often sailing right over the top with a commitment to manic intensity that was second to none.
The advantages of technical wizardry means there’s every chance Chapman could manifest himself in the archive of the Pythons’ recordings for Charisma Records, but also the footage from their two shows made entirely on film for Bavarian television, which could indeed by interspersed into the proceedings one way or another.
The other outstanding question regarding a Python stage show is, what’s in it for the surviving members creatively, is there a sense of unfinished business?
It’s fairly well known that their last cinematic venture, The Meaning Of Life, was felt to be something of a disappoint to all involved. This in itself says something about the incredibly demanding standards the Pythons set for themselves, as thirty years later, to my mind it is still an incredibly accomplished, audacious and inspired movie, with moments of genius other filmmakers would kill for.
Eric Idle once told biographer George Perry that it was one rewrite away from being a perfect movie, and evidence suggests that as with their last long playing record, the pointedly titled Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album, there’s a sense of compromise andthat one last big push could have provided the project with some grace notes that would have offered a stronger sense of coherence that their most accomplished work shares.
Eric Idle is a much maligned and often misunderstood player in the Python story. It’s become received opinion that he’s the “money man”, but if Idle’s goals were merely material, would he have slavered away at Spamalot to repurpose the Holy Grail, a film that subverted all the clichés of heroic, Gothic, medieval epics, into a musical that similarly pays cynical homage to all the tropes of the Broadway musical? There’s a strong, little made, counter argument that Idle is the keeper of the Python flame – he curated Monty Python Sings! and The Illustrated Monty Python Songbook;edited Monty Python Live!, a keepsake of the team’s live shows over the years; and reconfigured Life of Brian into a mock-oratorio Not The Messiah!
These are not lazy choices for the lowest common denominator. They all suggest a determination to continue the spirit of the Python books and record albums, where familiar material was repurposed and complemented with original material that took advantage of a particular medium, simultaneously subverting and exploiting it.
Idle was often the unofficial script editor for the shows, the man who would suggest during the Pythons’ infamously combative and brutal writing meetings how one sketch could be grafted onto another before seguing into a particular link in order to give an episode a distinctive shape and form, and was the man who turned the Contractual Obligation Album into something releaseable when tentative stabs at various concepts – a day in the life of a public school, a Silly Olympicscommentary, a song by song tour through national stereotypes, the world’s worst audition – failed to coalesce into something album-worthy.
As a seasoned Python watcher and commentator, my own personal fancy is that, having taken on the Holy Grail and Life Of Brian on stage, the remaining Pythonsreturn to their last swan song, The Meaning Of Life, and turn it into a conceptual whole, that can embrace well-loved existing material, pieces that were abandoned and brand new material that could acknowledge head-on the seventh age of man, the age that the Pythons themselves are currently inhabiting. It’s a flexible format that could offer something old and familiar alongside something new and refreshing.
Comedy is ostensibly a young man’s game, but when you have five of the most ferociously intelligent, critical and exacting writers/performers interacting creatively,Pythonic humour is dark and delicious, and there’s definitely massive potential in seeing how these five men could milk comic potential from staring their own mortality right in the face.
It’s.,. one last chance to see something completely different.
Author biog: James Gent is currently writing and researching Flogging A Dead Parrot: The Complete Monty Python TV Companion (due out 2014), is interested in retro popular culture and his essays on Doctor Who have been published in the books Shooty Dog Thing (Hirst Books, 2010) and You & Who: Contact Has Been Made (Miwk, 2013)
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