From the early 1960s, a new generation of comedians was starting to emerge from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Terry Jones and Michael Palin learned their craft in the Revue at Oxford, Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Eric Idle were members of the famous Footlights theatrical club at Cambridge and Minneapolis born animator and satirist Terry Gilliam met Cleese when the Footlights’ Cambridge Circus revue reached New York. The British contingent kept crossing paths on British television in shows like The Frost Report (1966-1967), At Last the 1948 Show (1967), Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967-1969) (which featured animations from Gilliam, newly arrived in the UK), The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969) and others until, according to legend, they all decided to pool resources following a meeting at a Kashmir tandoori restaurant in Hampstead on 11 May 1969 and form a new television comedy troupe. The result was Monty Python’s Flying Circus and British television comedy was never going to be quite the same again.

Fans of both the satire boom of the 1960s and the earlier madcap tradition of The Goon Show (1951-1960), the much-loved BBC radio show that made surreal comedy a commonplace in British culture, the group knew from the start that they were going to do something that had rarely been seen on the small screen before. A little of the wind was taken from their sails when former Goon and chief inspiration Spike Milligan brought his own comedic insanity to his series Q5 which debuted on the BBC seven months before the Pythons were unleashed. But they didn’t let them get them down and, after famously considering dozens of potential titles for their new show, the team settled on the Monty Python name and their first program was broadcast on BBC1 at 5 minutes to 11 on the night of Sunday 5 October. Today the team is regarded as one of the cornerstones of British comedy but even a half-hearted listen to the audience reaction that first episode and the subsequent few episodes suggest that in 1969, not everyone was quite ready for them yet.

The heady mix of absurdist comedy, Gilliam’s distinctive animation, gags without punchlines and sketches that tended to wander one into the other rather than end in a traditional manner was a shock to the system and all too often you can feel the studio audience’s bemusement, that certain reticence when the jokes get too odd, the characters too wacky. While the shows that the various members had appeared on or written for had dabbled in this kind of humour, there had been nothing quite like the full-on barrage of unrelenting silliness that was to rapidly become Python‘s trademark and it took some audience members a while to adjust to it, though the reactions to later episodes of series one are notably more raucous. Viewing figures and the Audience Appreciation Index (the measure that British broadcasters used to understand a programme’s popularity) for the first episode in particular were disappointing and seen today the episode, advertised as Wither Canada?, is full of odd moments where the jokes seem to fall flat, the audience barely responding at all.

Public reaction to the series improved across the first series however, audiences warming to now classic sketches like Self-Defence Against Fresh Fruit, Crunchy Frog, the Kilimanjaro Expedition, Upper Class Twit of the Year and above all the immortal Parrot Sketch. Two more series followed with the troupe at loggerheads throughout with BBC executives who were even more baffled than the viewers and constantly kept trying to interfere with the content of the episodes, before Cleese left and a final season was broadcast under the truncated title Monty Python.

Over time, the series struck a chord with its defiantly anti-establishment stance, the troupe using the absurdity of its oddball sketches to launch a series of stinging attacks on the stuffiness of 50s British society that was still to be found abroad in the land despite all the recent youthful attempts to blow away the cobwebs (it’s always worth bearing in mind that while we talk of Swinging London, we rarely talk of Swinging Bradford or Swinging Milton Keynes – outside of the capital most of the country was determinedly not swinging at all). Sketches were populated with ludicrous authority figures from faux BBC presenters to puffed-up military officers, idiotic judges to dreary politicians and stuffy civil servants to pompous clergymen which helped the team chime with the sense of unease around these very figures that had spread among the younger audience that would eventually make it a cult show. Speaking to the We Are Cult website, Palin however noted that “I wasn’t particularly looking for targets. I think John and Graham, again, perhaps had agendas – I think the Merchant Bank sketch in particular is brilliant.  I don’t think I’d start off with who do I want to send up here, who do I want to demolish here? I didn’t really start from that point of view.  Neither did Terry, I don’t think, particularly.”

Palin might not have been looking for targets but en masse the team found them and taken as a whole, the four series managed to hit more of them than it missed. It was never full-on satire like the early 60s shows that that members of the team had been part of but amid the rampant silliness there were plenty of barbs aimed at all the right people. The Pythons played with the conventions of television itself, mixed slapstick with references to Kierkegaard, Hegel and Kant, threw in odd bits of stock footage and frequently moved from one sketch to another through Gilliam’s remarkable cut-out animations.  What it also had in abundance was fantasy – a lengthy piece titled Science Fiction Sketch, sheep that think that they’re birds, bizarre time loops resulting from a bad case of déjà vu, a giant hedgehog named Spiny Norman who stalks terrified London gangster Dinsdale Piranha, superhero Bicycle Repair Man and all those marvellous animations among so many other examples.

As audiences grew accustomed to this wholly new way of doing things, the show’s popularity continued to grow, viewers perhaps tuning it to see just how crazy it was all likely to get. In 1970, it won BAFTA Special Awards for “the production, writing and performances” and for Gilliam’s graphics and would win the Best Light Entertainment Programme award in 1973. More importantly, it started finding a home overseas – a special episode was recorded for showing at the prestigious Silver Rose of Montreux and the team performed in German for Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus (1972), the first of two special episodes made for German television. In 1974, with the show in its final series in the UK, it made its debut on American television, first seen on KERA-TV in Dallas, Texas and suddenly this series that regularly poked fun at the most British of social conventions was finding a willing and eager audience across the Atlantic.

That audience, and audiences elsewhere in the world, were bolstered by a series of books and records and particularly by a series of feature films. And Now for Something Completely Different (1971) was a reworking of some of their finest sketches made between series one and two, but their real triumphs were Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), the truly brilliant Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) and the rather disappointing Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983). Along with shows made by the various team members after Python went off the air (Idle’s Rutland Weekend Television (1975-1976), Cleese’s Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), Palin and Jones’ Ripping Yarns (1976-1979) et al), they helped to keep the Python name alive and such was the high regard in which they were still held by the British public that in 2013 the team (without Chapman, who had died in 1989) reconvened for a string of sold-out stage shows at London’s O2 arena.

And that affection endures, and with good reason. At their very best, the Pythons were just about the funniest group of people Britain ever produced, inspired madmen whose best sketches are still riotously funny. And still quoted, endlessly, even by generations who weren’t there at time but who caught up with them in repeats, on video or on streaming (at the time of writing, in summer 2022, the series and most of the films are available on Netflix). Even those strange souls who haven’t seen the original programmes will recognise lines from the Parrot Sketch, or from the Spanish Inquisition sketch, or have a particular view of that processed, tinned meat Spam (the unwanted email is named after a famous Python sketch). They might be able to sing along with The Lumberjack Song, say “nudge nudge” at the drop of an innuendo or do passable impressions of the man from the Ministry of Silly Walks or the Gumbys, those dim-witted idiots in the knotted handkerchiefs.

The Pythons themselves would go on to stellar careers of their own, though sadly the passing of Terry Jones in January 2020 has likely signalled the end of the road for them as a team. But what a legacy they’ve left behind. They created some of the funniest television and film ever made (Life of Brian is nothing short of a comic masterpiece) though as George Perry points out in his 1999 book Life of Python “the five surviving members had with the passing years begun to occupy an institutional position in the edifice of British social culture that they had once had so much fun trying to demolish.” They were to comedy what The Beatles were to music, young, vibrant, here to sweep away much of what had gone before and throw down a challenge to the generations that would follow and the term “Pythonesque” soon came to denote a particular kind of comedy made by devotees of those late-night screenings.

Five decades on and Monty Python’s Flying Circus is still screamingly funny, clever, absurd, inspiring and endlessly repeatable. Ignore the various attempts to repackage the episodes into “best ofs” of similar and to a degree don’t worry too much about stage spin-offs either – just dive straight into the original episodes and the feature films, revelling in the exhilarating idiocy, the marvellous performances and the quite brilliant writing. And then annoy all your friends by repeatedly quoting from it. Over and over again. We’ve all done it, and with any luck, future generations will continue to stumble across the Flying Circus and be doing it too.