I'd listened to the best-of album, seen the "film" and loved what I didn't realise were reappropriated sketches in other contexts, but it took me much too long to check out this primordial Python programme (Cleese–Chapman lineage; Idle–Jones–Palin–Gilliam's Do Not Adjust Your Set is proving a disappointment so far, especially the racist singalongs for children).
My laziness is excused, since most of the episodes didn't exist until they were recovered/restored fairly recently. It is quite good.
Key:
Series 1 (1967)
Series 2 (Also 1967)
Episode 1 ***
You shouldn't meddle with time, but I'd risk exchanging a lesser Python member or two for Marty Feldman. He gets the biggest laughs from his wordless and unexplained antique smashing, even setting Cleese off. I hope I stop wishing Tim Brooke-Taylor were Michael Palin before too long. The ladies are relegated to introducing the men, never mind. They should have written some sketches then. The Cleese & Chapman sketch style is comfortingly familiar from early Flying Circus, and just as good, before they stopped bothering with proper endings.
This episode is still largely missing in visual form, which is a shame, especially since the extended court farce that takes up the whole second side of the ad break keeps getting funnier ("Why is your alias the same as your real name?" "Because it's easier to remember"). Though they should've left the songs to Neil Innes & co on the other programme.
Almost a perfect episode that would stand up to the best of Python, if not for that rubbish proto-Goodies sketch in the middle. The world gets its first glimpse of Basil Fawlty as John's bookseller gets ticked off by Marty's difficult customer ("Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying," et al.) and Graham's shepherd is just as quotable ("very cruel indeed. I'm surprised it's allowed!")
Episode 4 ***
What would have been a forgettable sketch about policemen going undercover as ladies of the night (crossdressing LOL!) is made a lot more fun by Graham's unprofessional decision to trip Tim up by going off-script, which the others gleefully pile on to. In another funny sketch, Marty demonstrates a memory technique based around imagining spying on a nude lady. In the interest of balance, Aimi and the hostesses are given a box of props to make their five-second links slightly more worthwhile.Episode 5 **
This isn't always the most sophisticated programme (though it took me five episodes to realise what's going on with the hostesses), but I expect better of them than back to back sketches based around those hilariously incomprehensible rural folk and Orientals and another where John mainly makes stupid noises. Then there's the send-up of colonialism that manages to be unironically racist at the same time. You didn't have to find all the episodes.
Another sketch about foreigners not being able to talk properly, the Chinese restaurant skit is at least funny. The beekeeping sketch is a favourite, but the truncated Chapman–Feldman version's nowhere near as good as the definitive Atkinson–Cleese. It's strange to see a Terry Gilliam style animation in live action form, where it doesn't work so well, and we end the series on a traditional English ballad about a nasal ferret.
Opening and closing with boring dances and sub-par sketches alternately based around silly voices and being quiet don't make for the strongest return. The Lovely Aimi Macdonald gets a more prominent role in the links this series, but they're not any funnier. The most interesting thing is a violent joke shop sketch that's exactly the same as the League of Gentlemen's one thirty years later.
Bit of a darker one this week, with emotionally manipulative tailors, an abusive quiz show host, extorting strippers, nationalist ballet hooligans and a terminally clumsy man seeking life insurance. Some of which doubtless would have gone down as classics if they'd had the good fortune to be on a series that was more widely exported and not taped over and lost for half a century.
I can't contrive an overarching theme this time. Several people are very poorly suited to their chosen professions, an insecure scientist plots his revenge on literate bullies, a lot of old men die, Marty Feldman gets covered in food and Aimi Macdonald's barely ironic attention-seeking is starting to get on my nerves.
Episode 10 ****
Another solid Pythonesque instalment with more surreal live-action "animation" and collapsing in an interlocking meta climax. John's dominion is finally challenged as Graham gets the most memorable characters in his amateur copper and undertaker trying his luck, though Marty once again gets the biggest laughs with a silent role ("Just the two of us... and an Arab").
The model cathedral poisoning murder investigation is the only real cracker in this one, which otherwise feels a bit half-arsed, to the point that there's more corpsing and fluffs than usual. The extended chat show water tank pile-on denouement might have been fun for them to film, but it drags on.
I first saw 'The Four Yorkshiremen' in its loosely ad-libbed Amnesty all-stars version, so each step closer to the source has been less rewarding, classic though it is. A somewhat more bizarre sketch where an amorous dentist blows up troublesome teeth wasn't similarly resurrected for Python, though it would've been more at home there.
Episode 13 ***
It's the final show of the series, so let's celebrate with a glut of tasteful female nudity. The extended send-up of rubbish news has shades of The Day Today, but the closing number is a disappointment after the last series, not only because the video's missing. Marty Feldman's irritating train passenger wins this show, but across the series it's the tall, shouty one who keeps trying to hide his amusement who viewers would remember most.