MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS – SERIES ONE / DIRECTORS: IAN MACNAUGHTON, JOHN HOWARD DAVIES / STARRING: GRAHAM CHAPMAN, JOHN CLEESE, ERIC IDLE, TERRY JONES, MICHAEL PALIN, TERRY GILLIAM / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of Monty Python in the history and development of British comedy in the latter years of the twentieth century. The team – all doyens of the Cambridge University Footlights Club and its sister/rival campus at Oxford University – came together to create a comedy sketch show quite unlike anything that ever been seen on British TV. Their style was wild and freeform, surreal and silly, a mixture of highbrow intellectual conceits and references and shameless slapstick; Spike Milligan had been dabbling in the surreal for years, especially in his haphazard Q series, but the Pythons refined and honed the formula, creating characters and sketches which have become iconic and have resonated down throughout the decades and influenced virtually every British comedy performer since their debut in 1969. It’s that 50th anniversary of the very first 13-episode Python series that’s being celebrated in this impressive new Blu-ray release from Network, who have restored the episodes from the ‘ground up’ working from the best available materials – first generation 2-inch videotape masters to surviving negative and print film material scanned in 2K with wildly-varying picture sources graded painstakingly scene-by-scene and intensively cleaned up. The results are astonishing; studio videotaped sequences are crystal clear and filmed inserts and animations are pin-sharp and astonishingly detailed.

What’s surprising about this first long season – hard to imagine any British comedy sketch show today (and they’re sadly few and far between these days) running for thirteen weeks – is how quickly the show finds its feet and how it very much hits the ground running. Received wisdom suggests that Monty Python took a while to find its form and while it’s true that the first two episodes (for some reason Episode One was screened second in the original broadcast run) demonstrate a certain hesitancy in performance and some nervous laughter from baffled studio audiences, the show is quickly hitting it out of the park several times per episode. Many of the classic sketches Python is best remembered for are found here; Arthur ‘Two Sheds’ Jackson in the very first episode, Arthur Putey and the Marriage Guidance counsellor in Episode Two, Bicycle Repair Man and Mr Nudge Nudge in Episode Three, the Dead Parrot sketch and Hell’s Grannies turn up in Episode Eight and Episode Nine sees the debut of the Lumberjack Song. Far from a learning curve, Series One is where the Python legend arrived virtually fully-formed and laid the groundwork for the subsequent series, feature films, and solo projects that would follow. But it doesn’t all work. Episode Seven is, interestingly, the group’s first effort at one long-form narrative in the shape of a rather tiresome one-note story about an alien invasion that turns its victims into Scotsmen who race around with one arm outstretched in the manner of schoolchildren playing Daleks.

By the end of the series, the Pythons are either struggling for ideas or relishing their demolition of the sketch show format. Certainly some of the latter material is spectacularly random but there are any number of forgotten or undiscovered joys across the run including Episode Five’s Confuse-a-Cat, a masterpiece of surreal film editing, Episode Nine’s Kilimanjaro Expedition and Episode Ten’s First Man to Jump the Channel. Throw in the legendary “It’s…” pre-credits hobo, the first sighting of a Gumby, Terry Gilliam’s extraordinary and sometimes disturbing animation and, of course, the infamous Sousa’s Liberty Bell theme music, and it’s clear that the Pythons knew pretty much exactly what they were doing and what they wanted to achieve right from the very beginning. There’d never been anything like it on British television before, nothing quite like it ever since and it’s absolutely brilliant. You could say that it’s completely different…

The remaining three seasons will be released on Blu-ray individually next year and a boxset of the whole series is available now.