1. The answer to the ultimate question: Who is Monty Python?
Below is a rare moment with the Pythons, an on-location interview conducted by the BBC to promote a stage show tour they did in late 1969 as the first season had just begun airing. Python fans will recognise the setting being from the Hermit sketch in the episode with the Beeb-baiting title of Full Frontal Nudity.
Here you get John Cleese interviewed in character as a Brummie hermit, essentially an unseen extension of the actual sketch, and a smattering of Graham Chapman’s Colonel storming off set before things calm down and something more intriguing emerges.
When the interviewer gets Palin, Jones and Chapman away from the other Pythons, and the show’s cameras, there is an unusual and candid tone to the interview. The almost sixth-form humour gets a little odd at times (mainly from Jones, in love with the thought of falling away from an interview), Palin politely refuses to take it seriously at all and then there’s Graham Chapman. In sharp contrast to his well-known characters he is quiet and content, happy to watch the two Oxford Pythons muck about while he looks on like an older sibling.
When the interviewer asks him the question – Who is Monty Python? Chapman’s comedy brain spins into action and a very silly answer is given, but there’s more truth in this strange forgotten clip of the Pythons are their earliest moments, as the group was forming than in a dozen documentaries on why the Pythons were so influential.
