Monty Python’s Flying Circus: You’re No Fun Any More

I have commented before that a Monty Python episode, or even just a sketch, will tend to enter my head for a time and rather preoccupy me before leaving and being replaced with another. Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion Go to See Jean-Paul Sartre has finally left my head and the Science Fiction Sketch has entered it instead. I have also commented that the reason Monty Python doesn’t appear very much here is because I find I can’t write about it. The Monty Python humour rather evaporates when analysed in my opinion: the best you can do is describe it as if you are sharing it at school or work the day after the broadcast. That is rather what I did with the Monty Python advertisement for Birdseye Peas. I felt it worked well with that little-known piece, but my ambition with this blog has always been to avoid description if possible.

In fact I was thinking I would be at a disadvantage with this one because science fiction films really aren’t my strong point, and I knew there would be endless references to famous films which I wouldn’t recognise and would end up making a fool of myself. I have therefore been heavily dependent on Darl Larsen’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus: An Utterly Complete, Thoroughly Unillustrated, Absolutely Unauthorised Guide to Possibly All the References, which is certainly exhaustive. Of course Mr Larsen is a foreigner so sometimes misses some meanings, although the only absolute howler I’ve spotted while reading about this episode was where he calls Scots language Scots accent, which it certainly isn’t.

One of the things he has made me realise about this episode is that there are far more sexual references than I had realised. This does make me feel a bit silly, because the ‘you’re no fun any more’ is an explicitly sexual reference, even as portrayed in the episode. Larsen takes it further to point out that the reference to Scotland being so full that there are three men to a caber is also a positively filthy innuendo which I’m ashamed to say I’d missed completely. The reference to whipping is of course directly kinky. Larsen suggests that the preceding snatch of the vampire not biting the woman also has a directly sexual reference in terms of a vampire being, as it were, engorged with blood but I could leave that one myself.

I am once again struck by the different pace of television at this time. Specifically what makes me think of this is the little detail that the camel spotter is called Mr Sopwith. While not an obsessive fan I consider myself fairly familiar with the Flying Circus but had never spotted this momentary reference. How would anyone, seeing it just once in their family living room, have a chance to spot all these details? It’s quite something that so many TV programmes at the time put in tiny details many of which were probably missed by viewers over 50 years ago.

However of course the main attraction for me is the blancmange which invades the planet to turn Englishmen into Scotsmen.

I knew of course that there would be references galore to science fiction films here. I was thinking of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), because it is one I like and is actually on my laptop. It is also very close to the plot of the spoof science fiction film, in terms of people being changed. Of course The Blob has a distinctly blancmange-like alien, which has many similarities. Larsen also suggests references to The Invisible Man (1933), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), Forbidden Planet (1956), Angry Red Planet (1960), and Them! (1954).

The Pythons have a swipe at pretty much everyone here, all in the name of parodying the ridiculous conventions of the science fiction genre. Most obviously Scotsmen, who are depicted as primitive, stupid, foreign, and generally othered. However the woman in the research lab also embodies the dumb bimbo of science fiction. He gives a lengthy list of the tropes from science fiction the episode uses, and there is a shorter, slightly differently-named list on Tekevision Tropes is you want to look.

Larsen makes the excellent point which I really hadn;t noticed that the woman in the lab doesn’t have a name and is only referred to by pronouns. The fact that she is just calle She or You puts her on the same footing as the invaders here just referred to as Them, so that she is made the Other in common with the invading blancmange.

There is also the strange effect that incidental music can be heard inside the lab, while rhetorical statements are taken literally by Graham Chapman, and the other way round. This episode genuinely takes every convention of science fiction at once and stuffs them into a relatively short sketch.

I don’t have any criticisms of this episode, and particularly like the way it ends with Scottish music instead of the normal Monty Python music. Highly recommended, although other people will certainly get more science fiction references than me.

Finally a short video, and in case you are reading this abroad and don’t know who this man is, it’s Sir Edward Davey, leader of the ultra-sensible and serious Liberal Democrat Party, and he’s endorsing Count Binface for Clacton.

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