Imagine having won a competition 40 years ago, then imagine that until now people do not remember you or relate you with anything other than having won that bleeding competition! All your life's journey, all your successes and failures, your whole existence on earth has been reduced into one achievement that happened almost half a century ago...as if all what you've done since then didn't count! That is what a person like, say, Douglas Adams always felt when people remembered him only as the writer of his very first novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, even though he had written 8 other books. That is what people like Arthur C Clark smiled bitterly whenever people remembered him only as the Author of 2001 Space Odyssey.
And that is how the five great geniuses who participated in this show would feel when, after 45 years of amazing achievements and spectacular successes in transforming the humor culture of the whole world in all of its visual, musical and conceptual aspects, they are remembered only as "Pythons", the group they had once belonged to 40 years ago!
People Always kept pestering Douglas Adams to write "another hitchhiker's book", and forcing Arther C. Clark to finish yet another 2001 Space Odyssey sequel, as if writing sequels to those particular works was the only thing those great minds could do, as if the rest of their creations wasn't significant. Similarly, people(myself included) hoped 'The Pythons' would come up with 'new Python material' for this live performance. 'The Pythons', no doubt, were not very excited about doing so. Quite understandably in my opinion.
We don't consider pestering John Cleese to create another Fawlty Towers, or Fish Called Wanda, or even Fierce Creatures. We don't Ask Terry Gilliam to give us another Brazil. We don't believe it is a very good idea that Terry Jones would try his hand in a sequel for Starship Titanic, and only a few of us ever watched Michael Palin's travelogues, but whenever one of those names is mentioned our mind flashes 'Pythons'! Yes, that was great. We want more of that. And the more we want it, the more we prove to the Pythons that they were really nothing else than Pythons. That was their finest hour. And the past half century really didn't count. Do not expect them to be happy about this!!
It is then understandable that they would've never bothered to comply with our sadistic desire to lock them inside the Python's sarcophagus... if it wasn't for money. Especially at this old age when they would've enjoyed their retirement, or at least their attempt to make use of their remaining years in creating something good enough to be remembered for other than their one and only achievement that counts in the past half century!
And since the money they needed wasn't a huge amount, for John's Alimony is almost paid for, and the costly legal dispute that forced the group into reunion would require less than a million quid, then their collaboration can be as brief as possible. In fact they mentioned it several times that they turned down a huge number of offers to perform this show all over the world.
Wouldn't it have been wonderful if they had came up with new material? New sketches? New brilliant Pythonic insights on the social and political dilemmas of our age, and the absurdity of the human condition in general? Of course it would. It would've also been a great farewell from them to their audiences, and a great generator of huge sums of money. But, above all, it would've cemented them in our memory and in the deep bleeding annals of history as nothing but 'The Pythons'.
Think about it.
