40th Anniversary of Monty Python

Even though I wasn't even born when Monty Python first aired, I think it transcends generations, the celebration of the absurd. Simply wonderful.

In praise of… Monty Python's Flying Circus

"I'll give you 13 shows, but that's all," said the BBC's head of light entertainment in 1969, and Monty Python's Flying Circus aired to a perplexed, but eventually grateful, British audience on Monday 5 October that same year. Over the subsequent 45 shows, the rules of television comedy were rewritten as John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam created lunatic characters and sketches, as funny today as they were 40 years ago. A new generation now memorises the Lumberjack Song, the Spanish Inquisition and the Dead Parrot sketch (famously employed by Margaret Thatcher shortly before she politically "ceased to be") – although the Fish Slapping Dance is harder to pull off, culminating as it does in a 3m plunge into Teddington Lock.