And now for something completely familiar. Reruns.
You say you'd rather eat a pound of Spam than watch more reruns this summer? Ah, but these are the original episodes of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," possibly the most inventive series in the history of TV.Coming up to 30 years ago -- Oct. 5, 1969 -- five very silly Englishmen and one Yank debuted on Auntie Beeb, as the Brits called their once-staid BBC. Over four seasons, they produced 45 half-hour shows filled with cheese shops that didn't sell cheese, cross-dressing lumberjacks, silly walks, dead parrots, twisted animation segues, drunken philosophers, naughty bits, exploding candy and tattooed bishops. They were surreal, they were rude, they were sometimes so far out they just sailed right off the edge of the comedy map.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of "Python," A&E is airing the shows, in order, two to an hour. It's the first time in years they've been shown nationally, although they've popped up from time to time on local PBS stations, including Salt Lake PBS affiliate, KUED-Ch. 7.
And for those who just want to wallow in way too much of a good thing, there are two new books: the oral history "Monty Python Speaks!" (Spike Books, $13.50) and Robert Ross' "The Monty Python Encyclopedia" (TV Books, $22).
First, let's settle all the nonsense about the name, which is just that -- nonsense. There is no one named Monty Python; at an early stage, it was almost "Gwen Dibley's Flying Circus, or "The Toad Elevating Moment." The boys -- and they were little more than that, fresh out of college and frustrating comedy writing jobs, just wanted something completely different.
Writing and performing the skits were John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman. Even then, Cleese was first among equals, and he and Chapman (a troubled alcoholic who died in 1989) wrote many of the classic bits, usually about some poor beleaguered guy who goes into an office expecting one thing and getting something else entirely. Palin and Jones' skits usually were set in Iceland and involved Vikings or such, and Idle, who wrote by himself, was known for his character who just rattled on and on. The sixth Python was Terry Gilliam, an American who did the animated bits (and made occasional skit appearances), and then went on to a mixed but interesting career as a movie director ("The Fisher King," "Brazil").
In its own way, "Python" was as revolutionary as "The Prisoner," Patrick McGoohan's Kafka-esque secret-agent show that had debuted the year before. "Python" was huge among young people in Great Britain, and when it finally crossed over to the United States in 1974 it was just as huge over here, at least among young people who bought into the surreal anarchy.
What's surprising about "Python" is how little influence it had. It greatly influenced the first season of "Saturday Night Live," but then the American show mutated as it became popular and settled into a more predictable presentation.
But there is one "Python" legacy. The Pythons once did a skit about a husband and wife ordering food in a diner, and all the waitress has on the menu is "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam." Years later, pioneers of the Internet noticed the rise of junk e-mail and in one of those leaps of perfect illogic, the Pythons' old TV skit became permanently attached to the new technology of junk e-mail. How absurd. How random. How "Python."