40 year on from the end of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, its unique contribution to comedy still lives on. Their perverse take on the beloved British tradition of “light entertainment” – rude, surreal, subversive, sweary, silly – still wields influence over later generations of comedians, sketch-writers, campaigners for free speech and the right to cause offence… The last wouldn’t be immediately obvious to many, but as 2011’s Holy Flying Circus recalls, comedy can be a remarkably subtle vehicle for profound argument.
The Life of Brian, Monty Python’s 3rd feature film, makes gentle mockery of the cult of the individual – in this case, the clueless Brian who is mistaken for Jesus despite his mother’s memorable disclaimer to the effect that “he’s not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.” Life of Brian – which will be screened, along with Holy Flying Circus as part of the ongoing 10th British Film Festival – is a merciless send up of literal thinking: The People’s Judean Front v the Judean People’s Front, the cult of the single sandal, and so on. Unfortunately, the joke was not taken in quite the same spirit by the organised Christian opposition of the day. Prosecution under England’s antiquated blasphemy laws was never a real possibility, but detractors of Life of Brian used a loophole in the cinema licensing regulations to pressure local authorities into “banning” the film. (As an aside, the main reason Salman Rushdie escaped prosecution for The Satanic Verses a decade later, was the odd realisation that the blasphemy laws only protected the Christian faith.)
Holy Flying Circus is a timely reminder that the culture wars – particularly the tensions between permitting free speech and prohibiting needless offence – are not a new construct. The film, directed by Owen Harris, makes quite clear on which side of the debate its sympathies lie. Shaped around a real-life television debate with Pythons Michael Palin and John Cleese defending their film, Holy Flying Circus hinges on a deceptively simple point: the inalienable right of every man to make their own mind up about whether to take offence, or not.
It’s a clever film, embracing the anarchic intent of the original Flying Circus to excellent effect. Casting and performances deliberately echo the Monty Python meta-narrative, down to actors playing their characters as their public personas – John Cleese as Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers, for instance, and Michael Palin as The Nicest Man on Television. Despite wilful breaches of the fourth wall – as well as of logical spatial and temporal boundaries – Holy Flying Circus comes across as clever, but not over intellectualised. An approach, I suppose, that captures the spirit of Life of Brian very well.
Graham Chapman’s simple-minded innocence is the anchor that the misunderstandings writ large of Life of Brian revolves around. In life though, he was certainly much more worldly. A working class lad from Leicester who did well at Cambridge, he was openly gay (“70% homosexual” in his estimation) in an inhospitable age, a pipe smoker, an occasional alcoholic and party animal, expressed very dubious tastes in multi-coloured bomber jackets and unwittingly prefigured the censorship row of Life of Brian, by financially supporting the Gay News periodical when charged with transgressing the English blasphemy rules in the early 1970s.
His was undoubtedly an interesting life, so it’s a pity that A Liar’s Autobiography really fails to do it justice. Based on his 1986 memoir (Chapman died of throat cancer in November 1989: clearly unwell, his last appearance as a Python was in a short clip for a BBC documentary celebrating 20 years of Monty Python, filmed shortly before his death.) The self-imposed limitation of using Chapman’s own readings from his memoir as voiceover stays the creative hand of filmmakers Jeff Simpson and Bill Jones (son of Python Terry Jones, incidentally) somewhat; the frenetic animation clash lends the film the sensibilities but not the sense of its emotional forbear, Terry Gilliam’s inimitable work with the original Monty Python.
Holy Flying Circus, Life of Brian and A Liar’s Autobiography were screened in the context of the British Film Festival. The festival films will be screened at cinematheques through February 10th, the full schedule and additional information may be found on the festival website.
