The crew of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Photograph: BBC/PA
Monty Python's Flying Circus has been voted by UK Gold viewers the most influential comedy series ever - not just the best, but the most influential. It seems an unexceptional statement, in a way. Python has entered the bloodstream; its influence is almost part of the cultural unconscious. There is a generation coming up who don't know why unwanted emails are called "spam", or how the sheer depressing ubiquity of that horrible tinned food in post-war Britain could have become a repetition joke in a TV sketch show.
Plenty of contemporary comedies, such as Little Britain or The Mighty Boosh or Peep Show or Spaced, all have some residual traces of Monty Python in their DNA - and the same obviously goes for sketch shows such as Absolutely, Big Train, The Fast Show or Chris Morris's Jam. Yet I can't help thinking how deeply uninfluential Python is, in its way. The Python brand has become islanded in its own iconic uniqueness.
Thinking about what comedies have come to dominate the landscape now ... Ricky Gervais's The Office has been massive, and so is Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It, but they are very un-Python in their brutal, hyper-acute sense of ordinary reality, and the painful human drama of embarrassment and humiliation. Standup comic and phenomenal bestselling author Peter Kay reaches back to traditions that have nothing to do with Python and which predate its student revue-group origin. Of course, all of these have an intensely cultivated, and intensely English, sense of the ridiculous that owes something to Python, and the mockumentary tradition, though clearly derived from the American greats, can claim an ancestor in Eric Idle's Rutles.
But perhaps because of a self-conscious Anxiety of Influence, a fear of resembling something so instantly identifiable, so vulnerable to nerdy imitators and admirers - like Charlie Higson's office bore in The Fast Show or indeed David Brent himself - nothing immediately shouts "Python!"
Python itself was influenced by Spike Milligan and the Goon Show; Milligan's own surreal television adventure, the Q series, began a few months before Python in 1969 and carried on gamely until 1983. It was an analogue to the Python phenomenon but very much upstaged by it. It is still the programme with the closest blood relation to Monty Python. But it was not "influenced" by Python; one anxiety from which Milligan was spared was the anxiety of influence.
The first thing John Cleese did after Python was the equally feted Fawlty Towers, and one of the first things the (remarkably hostile) press reviewers noted at the time was how mind-bogglingly unlike Python it was. It was as if this extraordinary creation, in which Cleese was at the forefront, never existed: Basil Fawlty was like something from a Whitehall farce, or at any rate from the English stage tradition of the well-made play.
Basil Fawlty has a place in the character comedy tradition and my own theory is that the traditions of character comedy are uniquely powerful - that love of finding a character with a compelling voice, manner, style, catchphrases and back story, which perhaps has its origins in stand-up or a dramatic script, but can be developed and extrapolated almost indefinitely. It's a tradition that encompasses Captain Mainwaring, Fawlty, Ali G, Borat, Mrs Merton, David Brent etc, and this tradition exists independently of the Python revolution. Character comedy is not a part of the surreal kaleidoscope that Python created, although it certainly had some recurring characters.
As for the Python films, their influence might be found in straight movie practitioners, such as Jarman or the Quay Brothers, but big-screen British comedies don't look anything like as wacky. When I think of the extraordinary opening to Holy Grail, with its fantastically risky, extended "wrong reel" showing of another film entirely, the black and white Dentist on the Job - well, would anyone chance it today? It's a cliche to invoke a movie classic and then moan that modern moneymen wouldn't allow it nowadays, but I really can't imagine anyone getting away with it in 2007. But then I couldn't imagine anyone getting away with it when I saw it the first time, in 1975.
