We’ve messed it up again. Honestly, Britain, sometimes it feels as if we can’t do anything right. If it wasn’t enough that we have made an almighty pig’s ear out of Brexit, now we can’t even sufficiently appreciate Monty Python.
Just ask John Cleese. He has used an interview with the Radio Times, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to rail against how ungrateful we Britons are when it comes to enjoying sketch shows from the middle of the last century. “I find that there’s a lot more enthusiasm for Python in America, Canada and Australia than there is in the UK,” he said. “For reasons that I’m not very clear about, the BBC haven’t put us out on terrestrial television for the best part of 20 years”. For God’s sake, nobody tell him that they forgot to erect that statue of him in Torquay, too. He will be livid.
At least Cleese – who has recently been best known for the iffy tweets about immigration he sends from his home in the Caribbean – has his own in-house dissenter. Terry Gilliam used the same issue to declare: “I love John enormously but I just disagree with the way he perceives the world”. But don’t forget, Gilliam faced an enormous backlash last year for comparing #MeToo to “mob rule”, so maybe he is not the white knight he would like to be.
As time goes on, it gets a little harder to be a Python fan. But then again, maybe expecting considered opinions about the world from a bunch of wealthy men whose most relevant days are several decades behind them is a fool’s errand.
The other members of Monty Python are much better at reflecting on their time in the sun. Michael Palin remembers that the original Monty Python run had relatively poor viewing figures, while Eric Idle chafes at the idea of Monty Python becoming lovable. “The disappointment to me now is that people like it and think it’s rather cuddly and lovely, whereas it used to annoy people and upset them,” he said. “I liked it better when we did that.”
So maybe – maybe – that is what John Cleese is doing. By haranguing the British public about their relative lack of affection for his early work, by maintaining the most disappointing worldview of any celebrity this side of Morrissey, by being genuinely intolerable on Twitter, perhaps John Cleese is kicking back against the notion that Monty Python is a charming and respectable institution. Or perhaps he is just old and out of touch and terrified of a world that has long since moved on without him. It is definitely one of those two things.
