TELEVISION
British fun
Patrick SKENE CATLING
If the enc's entry for this year's 'Golden Rose of Montreux' doesn't win it, we shall know once and for all that a Rose isn't a Rose isn't a Rose and the Common Market's a rotten egg. This statement is no mere vainglorious chauvinistic rodomontade. I Etc, cept, though I cannot endorse, the verdicts of the judges of Eurosong and Unisoccer and Cosmosex and all the other internationallY
televised rites of the global village. I don't care who wins the table tennis, if we can all use the telphone. But Blicl's special edi- tion' of Monty Python's Flying Circus last week was something else.
The programme was specially conceived (imagine the heaving conjunction of talents), written and performed by Graham Chap- man, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, and also pre- sented Carol Cleveland, David Ballantyne, John Hughman, Stanley Mason, Helena Clay- ton and Derek Chafer, with animations by Terry Gilliam, and the whole Thing was produced by Ian MacNaughton, and I thought it was funny.
G illiam's animations set the tone, which might have been achieved otherwise only if J. B. Morton, Heath Robinson, Rowland Emmett and Ezra Pound, as coeval adoles- cents, had been taken behind the fives courts of some penal school for boys and inflamed With slanderous erotic anecdotes about mach- inery. Add to this notion, if you can, a cer- tain amount of subversively radical dogma about orthodontics. And, while you're at it, You may as well consider the implications of a sequence in which Michelangelo's David was depicted wearing a fig-leaf, which was removed by a prurient masculine hand, to reveal the face of a blue-nosed film censor.
The anthology of sketches included 'It's the Arts', 'The Ministry of Silly Walks', 'Blackmail' and 'The Romantic Movie'. The complacent commentator on the arts slowly subsided in an Italian plastic chair that was Slowly leaking, while he showed 'The Sema- phore Version of 147tithering Heights (1970)' (bigger flags represented more exclamation marks in the dialogue) and 'The Exploding Version of The Blue Danube' (the conductor Used a detonator for musical emphasis, even- tually blowing up the entire orchestra). The walks are already too famously silly to re- quire further comment. The blackmail sketch was about Tv private-eye films which can be stopped by their exposed victims only with telephone calls promising bribes. The ro- mance was mainly symbolic—a factory chim- ney, an Apollo lift-off, the steamy labour of a railway engine, the collapse of the factory Chimney, a crowd of middle-aged women applauding. There was a good Gilliam bit about a humanoid caterpillar that crept over leaves to a house and got into bed until an alarm clock rang; from the grey chrysalis emerged a veritable Liberace of a butterfly. One or two moments reminded me of Coc- teau and his camp inventiveness and facility, but when I delved a millimetre beneath the surface of Monty Python I found, much to my relief, that there was nothing there.
The farcical amorous inconvenience of girls who share a small flat in London's bed- s.nterland is a•Tv convention too long estab-. lished and thoroughly explored to provide many surprises. It's Awfully Bad for Your Eyes, Darling . .. by Jilly Cooper a,nd Chris- topher Bond, on Comedy Playhouse (and), Was squarely in the centre of the tradition, With u-girls brightly babbling about Kama Sutra, knickers, lesbian vampires. sports cars and May balls in Cambridge. One of the gds, of course, was called Samantha and another was called Pudding and there was awkward Mummy. But this was Miss Cooper's first play for television and it was a I.ot better written than many other plays of tbIs genre. She has a keen car for girlish Nile and she transcribes it succinctly. May- be one year she, too, will be writing British laughs for Montreux.
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