Monty Python’s Season Four: The Epic Finale of a Comedy Legend

When Monty Python is remembered these days, it’s generally for its two seminal films, Holy Grail and Life of Brian, or Spamalot, the musical inspired by the former. When aficionados of the British act’s inimitable brand of surreal sketch comedy are reminded about the television series that launched the troupe into fame, however, they usually light up and start rhapsodizing about their favorite sketches, whether it’s the obvious (dead parrots, silly walks, and cross-dressing lumberjacks) or the slyer, more literate ones subverting well-worn tropes. I especially adore the first series’s “Working Class Playwright,” in which Eric Idle’s cheery aspirant coal miner upsets his parents by refusing to take on the family business of playwriting. The sketch climaxes with his outraged Northern writer father announcing, “There’s nowt wrong wi’ gala luncheons, lad! I’ve had more gala luncheons than you’ve had hot dinners!”

Yet amid the fondness with which Python is regarded by its millions of fans — admittedly, many of these admirers now being men of a certain age — there exists a curious lacuna, and that is the fourth series of the television show, broadcast 50 years ago this year. Sandwiched between John Cleese’s (temporary) departure from the group in 1973 and the release of Holy Grail in April 1975, it represented a bold shift away from the sketch-based comedy of the earlier seasons into something more uncompromisingly surreal, consisting of six self-contained half-hour episodes that are all loosely themed around a central storyline. Had it worked, it might now be regarded as the point when British mainstream comedy embraced the ideas of Beckett and Ionesco. Unfortunately, it did not. Today, the fourth season is regarded, even by many fully paid-up Python admirers, as an anomalous misstep.

In his diary of Sept. 10, 1973, Michael Palin wrote, “I spent nearly an hour on the phone with J Cleese. We talked over everything — but I feel John wants to get completely out of all Python involvement. What a long way we’ve come since John’s phone calls four and a half years ago when he was trying to set up Python.” Cleese saw himself as the guiding creative spirit behind Python, with some justification, but felt that, by the third season, the show was becoming stale and repetitive. He was also weary of his writing partner Graham Chapman’s alcoholism, which stymied both creative and practical progress on the show. With his own idea for a show, which would later become Fawlty Towers, Cleese bowed out of the group’s television work, although he continued to work with them on their films and occasional live specials.

He may have departed at the right moment. In his absence, the group embraced a more democratic style of working and decided that what they wanted to do was to film six new shows, which were, in Palin’s words, “unified, organic half hours, and not just bric-a-brac, loosely slung together.” To this end, it would simply be called Monty Python, dropping the “Flying Circus” from its title. The BBC responded to this with lukewarm enthusiasm and, despite most of the group wanting to wait until early 1975 to film the new series, insisted that it be broadcast in the autumn of 1974. It did not help that Palin and his writing partner Terry Jones were largely responsible for most of the new material, as Idle had insisted on taking a lengthy summer break in France, and Chapman’s drinking was steadily heading out of control. On July 15, 1974, Palin recounted that “Graham [looked] ravaged and with a hangover you could almost touch … he was fragile for most of the morning and only a large amount of gin revived him at lunchtime.”

The writing sessions proved to be fraught and fruitless despite the previously unaccustomed novelty of guest contributors, which included Neil Innes from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Chapman’s friend Douglas Adams. The latter would go on to fame and fortune with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 1978 but was now content to offer a few jokes and fleeting appearances in sketches. Palin wrote of his “deep feeling of frustration” on Aug. 1 after a script meeting that was nothing more than a “pointless waste of time” and expressed his anger. “I began to feel what was the point? Here was a series that only Graham was keen to do, and yet only Terry and I were writing.” He concluded, bitterly, “We didn’t need to do it for the money — why the hell were we doing it?”

Worse was to come. After location filming concluded, Idle, who Palin acknowledged “can so often be the life and soul,” was silent and miserable, leading to “the unprecedently dolorous mood.” Idle, whose holiday meant that he barely contributed to the scripts, also suggested that he was unhappy with the decision to create self-contained narratives. Palin observed that “he didn’t like writing stories, he liked writing revue.” Idle may have been right. The first episode of the fourth series, a particularly tortuous and largely unfunny account of the ballooning pioneers, the Montgolfier brothers, not only missed Cleese but failed to grab even the studio audience, which tittered politely rather than heartily. Palin was later told by the producer that the viewing figures of 5.8 million were “the best on BBC2, apart from Call My Bluff!,” which the actor observed “doesn’t strike me as all that wonderful.”

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The season does improve. The “Michael Ellis” second episode, in which Idle, attempting to buy an ant in a department store, is caught up in increasingly strange situations, has the courage of its convictions, and the “Mr. Neutron” storyline in the fourth episode, featuring Chapman as a supervillain hiding out in suburbia, feels uncannily prescient, anticipating the likes of The Incredibles and The Boys by decades. Yet, compared to Python’s finest hours before and since, it feels strained and half-baked. Idle commented to the group after the broadcast, “Does anyone feel like me that the TV series has been a failure?” and Adams remarked to Palin that he believed the scripts had lost a great deal in performance. Despite initial interest from the BBC, there was to be no fifth season.

The Python hardcore have tried to rehabilitate the largely unloved fourth series, and in its structurally daring fashion, it at least breaks new ground. Certainly, the least successful of the group’s films, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, owes a great deal to the jolting, near-elliptical aspects of the season, although, ironically, that picture returned to the sketch format of the earlier incarnations of the TV show. Yet, although Python’s final televisual bow is big and, to an extent, clever, it sorely fails at being funny. However, better things would soon await, and even a lengthy lawsuit with ABC over the network’s right to edit the series as it saw fit could not dampen the cinematic brilliance that would follow. View this season less as comedy and more as a creative, Mr. Creosote-esque purge, and it suddenly makes far more sense — although not, alas, any more enjoyable to watch.

Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, Power and Glory and is an editor at the Spectator World.