PASADENA, Calif. — Ask Monty Python fans which are the group's best sketches and you're likely to get as many answers as there are fans: the fish-slap dance, the cheese shop, the silly Olympics, the expedition to Mount Everest, the dead parrot, the exploding version of the Blue Danube, killer cars, dancing teeth, Spam, Ministry of Silly Walks, the Spanish Inquisition — take your pick.
The same is true of the six members of the group, each of whom came up with different sketches for the six installments of "Monty Python's Personal Best," a six-part PBS series that begins airing tonight at 8 and 9 p.m. on KUED-Ch. 7 and continues March 1 and 8. It's Eric Idle's choices, followed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Terry Jones.
And if fans don't agree with the choices made by the members of the Python troupe, "Then they have to get their own personal best," Idle said. "It's called my personal best.
"It's such a strange ragbag that nobody can ever agree what the best bits are because everybody has their personal view of it. Some people hate that sketch and other people love that sketch. And I think what you don't notice is that although it's the same cast, every four or five minutes there's a different writer on. So there's a different sensibility and the comedy isn't all the same at all."
The six members of Python were guys in their mid-20s who were thrown together and given the chance to create a sketch comedy show for the BBC that nobody expected would amount to much.
"The BBC just said, 'Well, here's 13 (episodes) and come back in September. Just don't bother us.' So it was wonderful," Idle said. 'We didn't have people looking over what we were doing. We just had this kind of amazing creative freedom."
But not creative harmony.
"There were two writing partnerships," Idle said. "Graham Chapman and John Cleese wrote together. And Michael Palin and Terry Jones wrote together. And then there were, like, two floating radicals, me and Terry Gilliam. You could say that John Cleese and Terry Jones were very much opposites. And there was often antagonism and chair throwing and stamping of feet, which is kind of a healthy thing to do when you're arguing about what's funny. So I think that healthy tension was something that held the group together."
And made them all better.
"I think the special thing about Python is that it's a writers' commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is. And only afterward did we divvy it up to say who would act what. . . . And because we could criticize each other's writing, we actually got the best out of each other as writers."
Not that they ever learned to agree. Even more than three decades after the 1969-74 show produced its last episode. "I found it interesting in the end to think back — oh, what did you select? Everybody chose different things."
Well, not everybody.
"There were one or two things that everybody wanted. And we sort of agreed to let some people have them," Idle said.
Which made the series sort of "complicated," according to producer John Goldstone. "I mean, Terry Jones, by the time we got to him, he wanted a whole lot of sketches that everybody had already chosen. So we had to negotiate."
Fortunately, Jones had "a very long list."
"But in one case, I think everybody chose 'Fish Latin.' And it's in everybody's program," Goldstone said.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com