Holy Flying Circus

I have just seen this television play, which I recorded some time ago. I haven't laughed so much in ages. The subject is the events in 1979 when the Monty Python team launched "The Life of Brian", and came under attack from Christians on both sides of the Atlantic. The whole thing is done in the spirit of MP, with fantasy sequences and lots of silliness. The actors, particularly those portraying John Cleese and Michael Palin, are so realistic, that I had trouble remembering that I was not watching the originals. Steve Punt also makes a very convincing Eric Idle. The highlight of the play is the well-known confrontation on the chat show, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning between Cleese and Palin on the one side, and Malcolm Muggeridge, former Communist and then born-again Christian journalist, and Mervyn Stockwood, the closetly homosexual Church of England bishop, on the other. A straightforward representation of the facts would not have been worthwhile, but the hilarious way in which events and characters are represented is like watching MP in their prime. Utterly recommended!

I'll keep this relatively short.

Probably one of the best written comic scripts I've seen for many years.

The acting was absolutely superb especially Darren Boyd's turn as John Cleese. It perfectly shows the absurdity of the censorship battles comedy had to endure thanks to groups including Mary Whitehouse and shows how far we've come in a short period of time.

Most fans of MP know the outcome of this film and the problems with local council's bans with a recent lift of a ban only recently occurring.

Recommend this to anyone who's a fan of well written comedy.

This pythonesque drama about the subsequent controversy of the Monty Python film, Life Of Brian breaks out of the usual docudrama route and instead goes for the surreal, re-imagined route.

It even gets downright silly. The opening scene features Stephen Fry as God. Only the Spanish Inquisition is missing.

The cinema release of Life of Brian aroused a lot of controversy. The film depicts the threats the actors received and the subsequent showdown that had on a television debate with the Bishop of Southwark and Malcolm Muggeridge.

Of course tensions surrounding the event are heightened and parodied. The Python team are exaggerated persona's of themselves, with Palin being too nice, Idle the money grabber, Cleese being Basil Fawlty even doing the funny walk at one point, Terry Jones appears in drag as Palin's wife.

It does show the effect the controversy had on the actors especially Palin who is shown as the reasonable everyman, frightened with the protesters outside his door.

It very much captures the absurd spirit of Python and the actors playing Palin and Cleese come out of it best.

They really did get the Flying Circus feel. Even to the point of occasionally overdoing it and getting monotonous. How they managed to find actors who so well resembled the Pythons in their youth, and even managed to generally sound like them, is beyond me. About the only one I didn't think they quite got right was Gilliam; he seemed a tad over the top with the dopey thing. But a small gripe. Darryn Boyd does a great Basil Fawlty Cleese. And Stephen Fry is a hoot as The Lord Almighty. This is a total must see for us Python fans starved for new material (Eric Idle exploiting Python is only good for so long, y'know?).

I'm not going to get into the whole debate here over the "Life of Brian" which I'll leave to others. This docudrama is as it says at the start a re-imagining of the events & conversations that surrounded the Monty Python team before two of them stepped onto a late night talk show to discuss their controversial movie "Life of Brian".

Film takes the basics surrounding the "debate" and slaps a thick coating of Monty Python comedy references into the mix. The two adversaries in the debate are painted in a bad light, so the program is biased but it's mostly all for laughs.

Should take the show as an excuse to just relive the Pythoneseque humour. The program humourises the darker aspects the Pythons may have gone through (e.g. death threats) but at the end of the day they won the contest (the film is shown often on free-to-air TV in the UK and is widely regarded as one of the greatest comedies ever).

Well acted, well scripted, you will enjoy it. A nice retelling!