The urge is understandable, but it's a fact long established that one of the most annoying things a person can ever do is relentlessly quote Monty Python at you.
I say this as a fan.
In this respect, Holy Flying Circus, a drama about the furore the Python team faced in 1979 when they made The Life Of Brian, is a difficult one. The film continues the BBC’s obsession with biodramas on pop cultural icons of the recent past.
The genre has produced many programmes of real worth, but, as it has gone on and the formula has solidified, it seems more and more of these things – witness this year’s entries on Hattie Jacques and Shirley Bassey – are the result of a reflex action to just keep making them, rather than any burning desire to tell a story.
It’s to writer Tony Roche’s credit, then, he has tried to do something different. But what he’s decided to do becomes an endurance test to sit through. Essentially, he tries to tell the story of the Python film in the style of a Python film. Wielding heavy stylization, some of it is clever to begin with but, pretty soon, as references and recreations pile up, it gets like being stuck in a lift with someone determined to do the whole of “What have the Romans ever done for us?” in your face.
It’s an unfortunate choice. There surely is a story to be told here, one that’s funny and engrossing enough, without trying to lump in second-hand gags. The moral outrage, blinkered hypocrisy and sheer missing-the-point that met Life Of Brian – which was only finally shown on British TV for the first time in 1995 (closer to home, Glasgow City Council only lifted its 30-year ban in 2009) – may strike us as quaint today. As Roche suggests, though, via allusions to Jerry Springer The Opera and the Danish cartoons of the ProphetMohammed, the issues remain in play.
More than anything, Roche’s drama left me wanting to see a good documentary on the whole episode. With the exception of Graham Chapman, all the Pythons are with us still and would surely supply enough gags themselves. As it is, the drama is best when it finally settles down. Roche builds to the moment John Cleese (Darren Boyd, whose performance is more like Basil Fawlty than Cleese) and Michael Palin (Charles Edwards, whose excellence in the role sneaks up on you quietly) appeared on the late-night chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning to discuss the film and were all but mugged by Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark.
After all the preceding nonsense, the encounter is suddenly staged (largely) straight, and it crackles with tension and feeling drowned elsewhere in the script. As Cleese and Palin go out to debate their film and the passions it has aroused, you sense their desire to drop the jokes and engage with the thinking behind them; you sense their sincerity, and their willingness to engage; almost, their faith. They certainly didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition.
It’s worth staying tuned after Holy Flying Circus, as it’s followed at 10.30pm by a repeat of that entire, jaw-dropping, November 1979 episode of Friday Night, Saturday Morning, during which a despairing Cleese and Palin were confronted by crusty broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge and a bishop, aiming accusations of blasphemy through clouds of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction. Tim Rice is the nominal moderator, but doesn’t do much in the way of moderation, or anything else. A spiky archive TV experience, it actually leaves the drama itself looking more redundant.
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