Word: palin
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...cult. From Oct. 1969 to Dec. 1974, when the four seasons of Monty Python's Flying Circus were running on BBC, you couldn't see the show in the U.S. The Pythons - composed of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin - had made a film of their best early skits, called And Now for Something Completely Different, but they were barely known in these parts when the Holy Grail film opened here. The movie was essentially a calling card for the show's airing on U.S. public television stations. That made the Pythons famous...
...songs in Flying Circus ("Eric the Half-a-Bee," "The Lumberjack Song," "Dennis Moore") and their films. Idle's blithely idiotic ditty, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," helped make Life of Brian that rare Crucifixion movie you could hum your way out of. And the Jones-Palin anthem from The Meaning of Life ("Every sperm is sacred / Every sperm is great / If a sperm is wasted / God gets quite irate") could be choraled today by half the U.S. Senate. These musical interludes set the Monty-men firmly in the tradition of the English variety show, as well...
...Elvis, who is said to have watched MP&HG at least five times.) Harrison's company, Handmade Films, produced Life of Brian and Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, then subsidized many of the projects starring or written by members of the splintered troupe: Gilliam's Time Bandits, Palin's The Missionary and A Private Function, Cleese's Privates on Parade, Idle's Nuns...
...versions of the American college jocks who reached their apex of glory and achievement as young men, then went into real estate, coasting on their lingering allure. It's true, anyway, if we see the TV show and Holy Grail as an extension of the glamorous days Jones and Palin spent at Oxford, and Cleese, Chapman and Idle at Cambridge...
...were lower-middle-class oiks," Idle says of himself and most of the other Pythons, noting that only Cleese and Palin had gone to posh public (private) schools. Yet however scraped his circumstances or mean his surroundings, young Eric was not a pouter; he always looked on the bright side of life. And he developed an early facility with language. "I think I was always interested in words because in such a sterile environment you have to create your own entertainment, and explore your own brain.... I was more well read than most teenagers because at boarding school there...