How Monty Python destroyed western civilization.
Now, I love me some Python as much as the next guy- possibly, a bit more. On the gripping hand, though, you have to look hard at what they did to our culture.
Not one network TV station would ever have broadcast the Flying Circus. It had to come to the US via local affiliate PBS stations like a thief in the night. A thief in sunday nights at eleven, actually.
If the local PBS stations were lucky, they’d have a show on a couple times a week with a 1 share or maybe 1.2.
In Chicago, Python gave Channel 11/WTTW their first double digit shares, and all of a sudden there was money in PBS. People sent money in at pledge drives, and of course there were big supporters.
Python was cool, it was counterculture, it was irreverent and most of all it appealed to the dopesmoking dorks who didn’t do well enough at Columbia to get a real gig at one of the networks. So it became a dog whistle for hippies and liberals and morons of all stripe, who saw it as a tool to gather converts, and did it ever.
Now, the Python comedy is genius, there is no question of that.It just happened along at a time and in a manner that made it possible for the PBS assholes to become wealthy and strong enough to use it to further their agenda, and it did.
Now if we could only get Harvey to write for TV, we could start turning the tide.
Give some credit to Dr. Who as well.
We have Gutfeld, almost as good. Adam Corolla CAN be funny too.
Python is the product of British universities (Oxford and Cambridge) and American insanity (you forget Terry Gilliam is from Minneapolis).
The British sketch comedy has been a staple of the culture long before tv or radio or even music hall, though you can look back and see the connections — a lot of the Python silliness was seen in Shakespeare’s time, in Gilbert and Sullivan, etc.
The people around the Pythons and the Pythons themselves have had a major impact on entertainment and culture in their homeland — all those British comedies PBS has brought to these shores (Are You Being Served, Yes Minister, Blackadder, etc.) all got their start by people who went to school together with the Pythons and worked together in college improv and comedy troupes.
See also The Goon Show (Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers!), Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Fry and Laurie, The Young Ones, and the entire cast of “Whose Line Is It Anyway??” (both sides of the pond), and lots more.
As far as any political or other sociological connections you may wish to make, I don’t know that there’s this conspiracy that you seem to make out here … funny is funny, period. Are all these people liberals? Possibly. Does it matter? I don’t think so.
Jenny
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nebe1zuEtbc
Soooo, you didnt actually read the post, didja.
Yep. Python was the product that brought government propaganda into the main stream through PBS.
Like python, the rest not so much.
Like red green as well, but I think had he had some ambition he might have made it on regular tv.
I read it, teacher! Python was only the instrument used by PBS to grow from crap nobody watched to the dominant place it holds in television today.
Do I get a cookie? :-)
Indeed!
What dominant place? I watch a few selected shows; Doc Martin, Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders, and Morse. The rest of the tripe on Proletariat
Bullshit System, never.
Any money they get from me is extorted at gunpoint by the IRS.
I had a dozen and a half (18 to Gov’t Indoctrinees) postcards made up to that effect some years ago and send my local PBS station one every time they have a
Gimme, Gimme whine session.
And here I thought moving NOVA, Jacques Cousteau, and the National Geographic specials from NBC to PBS were the programs that were to make PBS a legitimate fourth network.
I’d sneak in Monty Python to have something to talk about with my classmates in school, since we were all so cool to watch “sophisticated adult” programming. Sometimes funny, a lot of times not – kind of like SNL, or your average MLB hitter. Now Dave Allen was the Man. He had a few skits, but it was just a director’s chair, a cigarette, a glass of whiskey, and the man himself, just being a story-telling, gregarious Irishman. Every week.
But really, PBS was going to get its darn money, pledges, Python, or not, as long as they has Mr. Rogers going to Congress like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXEuEUQIP3Q