HOLLYWOOD — In 1969, five young British comedians and one young American animator came together to make a television show. Without much of an idea of what they were going to do, they were given a series by the BBC to do it in, and after hunting around for a name — “Owl-Stretching Time” and “A Horse, a Spoon, and a Basin” having been bruited and vetoed — they settled on “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
The 40th anniversary of this event is being marked by an excellent six-hour documentary series, “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut),” which began Sunday night on the Independent Film Channel, but will be rerun all week, beginning at 9 p.m., along with some of the films.
The group’s communal creative life span stretched from 1969 to 1983, but once a Python always a Python: Not only did the five surviving members — John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (Graham Chapman died from throat cancer in 1989) — consent to talk for the camera for the new film, but they also reunited onstage in New York for a public “conversation” at the premiere of a feature-length “theatrical cut.”
At its heart, “Almost the Truth” is the story of six men and their sometimes contentious, sometimes gleeful relationship to one another, their work and their culture, as told by themselves, the people they worked with and the people they influenced.
But it also makes room for silly walks, upper-class twits, a dead (not a resting) parrot, the Four Yorkshiremen, the Fish-Slapping dance, flying sheep, Arthur (King of the Britons), a taunting Frenchman, Brian (who is not the Messiah, whatever you may have heard), Mr. Creosote, the All-England Summarize Proust Competition, various pepper pots and policemen, a cross-dressing singing lumberjack and a naked man playing the organ.
From “Flying Circus” to “Holy Grail” and “Life of Brian” and beyond, their best work remains — after 26 to 40 years, depending — timelessly funny.
“It’s partly having the time, telling a story over six hours,” Jones said recently, on the phone from the U.K.”
“It’s cut very well, so it really moves. But it’s also just having the time to go into areas that other documentaries don’t. They did three-hour interviews and I thought, ‘My God, how on Earth can you talk about Python for three hours?’,” said Jones’ son Bill Jones who co-directed “Almost the Truth” with his producing partner Ben Timlett.
Born between 1939 (Cleese, who turns 70 this month) and 1943 (Idle and Palin), the Pythons are about the same age as the Beatles, with a similar involvement with their time. (If the Beatles were a rock band with the instincts of a comedy troupe, Python was a comedy troupe with the dynamics of a rock band.)
Although their paths were different, their experience of 1960s Britain was not: a shift from black-and-white to color, from sensibility to surrealism.
The group approached the documentary with varying degrees of caution.
“I wasn’t particularly keen,” said Palin, also by telephone from the U.K., “partly because I thought a 40th anniversary is too obvious for Python to do — we should have had our 39th or our 43rd but not the 40th.
“But there always seems to be more material that comes out every time one talks about Python, and things evolve over the years — we kind of mellow slightly. Maybe now we’re less defensive about talking about each other.” “I thought it was important to see them laughing, to see them enjoying themselves and enjoying their memories as well,” Bill Jones said.
“Is it a good thing to go over all this stuff?” Palin said. “I don’t know. Are we learning anything else? Probably. But will it change the way we look at Python? Absolutely not.”
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