IT’S... MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS, 1969
BACK ROW (l-r): Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam FRONT ROW (l-r): Terry Jones, John Cleese, Michael Palin
GETTY IMAGES
In 1969, six up-and-coming comedic actors and writers - five British and one American - gathered in 1969 at the Light of Kashmir Tandoori restaurant in Hampstead, London, to talk about a television series they wanted to make. Nobody but them expected the result (or the Spanish Inquisition): Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which first aired on BBC One 50 years ago, on 5 October. Each episode was an unpredictable, nonsensical, surrealist stream of consciousness; a rule-breaking amalgamation of sketches and animations by Terry Gilliam (top right) - and it was just what audiences wanted. The Monty Python troupe became, and remains, such an influence on comedy that ‘pythonesque’ is now a byword for absurdist humour.