Developing the sub-industry that BBC Four seems to have carved out for itself chronicling the lives of British comics from the golden age of comedy (an era which seems to shift back and forth a few decades here and there, depending on the mood and nostalgia of whoever’s talking), we have a highly fictionalised account of the furore that sprung up around the Monty Python’s release of what is by comment consent their finest work, Life Of Brian.
To be fair, the drama and politics of John Cleese and Michael Palin’s appearance on chat show Saturday Night Sunday Morning is dramatic enough in itself, but the other end of the story, the team coming up with the plot, probably wouldn’t have been a successful drama.
The trick here seems to be to attempt to present a loose approximation of what the Pythons would have been doing today, if they’d been released into the present with no baggage from their earlier incarnation.
So you have scenes that intentionally splutter out of steam before they reach their resolution, several female characters being played by men, and plenty of self-referring scenes about bureaucracy, offence and middle management, including at least two very good jokes about the hand that feeds it, BBC Four.
Holy Flying Circus pulls off the trick that the Pythons always did of having well-informed references infiltrate their sketches while still referring to very contemporary points (a scene with a surprisingly well-informed news vendor wouldn’t look out of place in the original series). It makes you realise how little sketch comedy has progressed in the last forty years.
The real draw of this deliberately silly – and occasionally, surprisingly moving little programme – is to see a ‘new’ version of the Python boys do their stuff. Steve Punt delivers on his promise of looking like he was born to play Eric Idle, while Darren Boyd simply plays a Basil Fawlty version of John Cleese (so much so that the script unashamedly has him say as much).
But the heart of the programme is Charles Edwards’ Michael Palin. This is largely because of the role served by the real Michael Palin, often referred to as The Nicest Man In The World™, but Edwards recognises that there’s real steel behind Palin’s affable exterior. He’s like a reed to Cleese’s bluster – always prepared to bend, but never so weak that he’ll break. Both as a Python, and as a thread in this drama, he is the emotional and moral centre to the arguments that threaten the team.
If the narrative has a fault, it’s that throughout, there’s the very strong suggestion that the Pythons are absolutely right in their quest to get the film made, and that anyone who disagrees is an uptight idiot. Even if you agree that that’s essentially true, it still feels somewhat one-sided (although a short resolving scene with the excellent Mark Heap does something to address the balance).
Extras: The bonus features are almost begrudging. It’s too much to expect any comment from the original team (indeed, the project was not endorsed by them). However, there is a making of feature, some out-takes and deleted scenes.
Released on DVD on Monday 6th February 2012 by Fremantle Home Entertainment.
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