Monty Python Speaks

by David Morgan

  Censorship on American network television had been thrown in flux in the early- to mid-seventies, as groundbreaking sitcoms like All in the Family and Maude stretched the boundaries of language and subject matter that a network would be willing to broadcast. But as the Pythons learned, such leniency was not assured even to a hit group being presented long after children had gone to bed.

  The length of deleted passages ranged from a few seconds to entire scenes. Even taking into account breaks in the shows for advertising, the cuts severely disrupted the flow of the material and created odd continuity problems. Punchlines would be cut out, thus making the jokes themselves pointless—and the editing process sometimes allowed the original audience laughter to remain. In a most bizarre instance, deleting the shots in which Chapman becomes aroused over “woody-sounding” words only to be doused with a bucket of water meant that viewers would suddenly see a bone-dry actor get up from his chair drenched to the skin.

  While some of the cuts were understandable (it’s hard to imagine a commercial network at that time running “He used to ram things up their—”), the cuts were pretty scathing and in many cases ludicrous. Some of the excisions mandated for the ABC special included:

  • “Entrance of man in wheelchair with sword in head, deleted to eliminate offensive references to handicapped individuals.”

  • “Remove two damns from Croquet hoops look damn pretty and Croquet hoops look frightfully damn pretty.”

  • “Animated sequence of grumpy man trying to sleep. 9 seconds deleted to remove lines God! and two hells from What in hell’s going on?”

  • “Removed navy officer dressed as woman and naked man playing piano.”

  • “Cartoon sequence of boy flying balloon; shot of naked woman eliminated, plus exploding woman.”

  • “In ant-buying sequence, :02 deleted to eliminate word bitch from King George bitch.”

  • “In first scene between Michael Ellis and his mother, :14 cut to eliminate reference to tiger: He used to go through four Jehovah’s Witnesses a day.”

  • “Delete mother’s line His droppings are enormous in reference to polar bear invading neighbor’s garden.”

  The winner for most ludicrous deletion was in an animated segment of “The Golden Age of Ballooning,” showing the Montgolfier brothers engaged in a boxing match while taking a bath. The original narration went: “Starting on his face and arms, Joseph Michael Montgolfier went on to scrub his torso, his legs and his naughty bits.” ABC severed the words “naughty bits.”

  LEWIS: In those days I was a friend of Bob Shanks at ABC. Bob had approached me about the group doing some specials for late night, with their usual response.

  ABC bought the last series for Wide World of Entertainment. Time-Life had sold them the rights; they just said, “Go ahead, here’s ninety minutes, do with it what you want.” And I talked to Bob about it; he said, “Maybe the Pythons would like to be involved in editing.” And we said, “Yeah!” Suddenly he went quiet, and then [some time later] said, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ve already put it together.”

  I got very nervous because I thought, you know, ninety minutes of programming really means how much cut out per hour, how much are you going to lose? It couldn’t be as-is. And it was announced, it was a done deal. I had not seen this last TV series; I taped the first special that aired and quickly sent this show over to England and said, “What’s wrong with this, why isn’t it funny?” And they were all horrified. Because ABC’d just gone through it with a hatchet, literally.

  They gave us a list of cuts ABC had made, and John and Graham just rolled on the floor when they read it; the list of cuts was the funniest document written. One of the things they did was bleep the words “Naughty bits”; that was a classic! So we immediately tried to get an injunction to stop them airing the second one, and that’s where the court case came about.

  GILLIAM: What was absurd, what I loved, was they could not understand us, because [they thought] they were doing it for our benefit, they were providing us with a larger audience. This guy, Bob Shanks, couldn’t understand why we didn’t want this larger audience. They thought they were doing the best for us and we were just these ungrateful children. It was really, really bizarre, that blindness.

  The BBC sold it, and we had this clause in our contract that Terry Jones was really responsible for, that they couldn’t cut the stuff without our approval—it had to go out as we made it. Now nobody would ever allow a clause in a contract like that these days, and I don’t know how we managed to get that in there, but I remember Terry was the one that really pressured for that. And it just sort of sat quietly down there, and the years went past and nobody noticed. So when they came to sell it, that was basically the thing we were dealing with: The BBC was selling rights they didn’t have.

  JONES: It was something I’d thought up, actually. I said, “Well, we’re working so hard on these things and I hate it when they muck around with our stuff, let’s put in a line saying that they can’t reedit the shows once they’d been broadcast.” That went into the first contract and then we all forgot about it! So five years later when we had this court case with ABC, our New York lawyer, very smart chap, went through our original contracts and found it. It must have been such a wonderful moment, suddenly to find this clause which had just been repeated and totally forgotten about. I don’t know how it got in in the first place, it’s just when we negotiated the contract in the first place, we said, “Oh, we wanted that clause in,” and I think the BBC didn’t really mind.

  In those days the BBC charter was to make programs for Britain. I remember when I was on a course there, this was in 1968, ‘69, I said, “Well, why don’t we go into cofunding, do coproductions?” And the answer was, “No, we can’t do that because then we’d start making shows for American audiences. We’re funded by the British taxpayer and our charter is to make shows for the British audience.” And so in 1969 it wouldn’t mean anything to have a clause like that—they never expected to sell the shows to the States at all!

  Last-minute negotiations between the two parties did not get anywhere. Consequently, on December 19, 1975, at the United States Court House in Foley Square in New York, Judge Morris Lasker presided over the suit for injunctive relief brought by the Pythons against ABC Television on the basis of copyright infringement and unfair competition against their own work. Representing the group, Gilliam and Palin claimed that the edited programs did not constitute “Monty Python”; therefore, broadcasting them would damage the group in the eyes of its audience and potentially alienate a larger audience presently unfamiliar with their work, thus jeopardizing the future sale of Python books, records, and films.

  Because the broadcast of the second Python compilation was scheduled for the following Friday evening, ABC argued that to have the injunction granted would damage the network in the eyes of the public and its affiliates. They also asserted that it would cost upwards of half a million dollars to substitute a program at the last minute. Besides their forebodings of damage to their reputation by canceling the broadcast, the network still stood by the cuts, saying they did not distort the original material.

  Eventually the judge and all parties sat in the jury box and watched a screening of two versions of the “Light Entertainment War”: first as originally run on the BBC, and then as it would appear on ABC as part of the special. Nearly eight minutes had been cut from the half-hour.

  GILLIAM: I loved it because they were in the same courtroom that John Mitchell had been arraigned in! And then their lawyer was so bad because he thought we were doing this all to publicize the stage show, which had nothing to do with that.

  I think their biggest mistake was letting us show our version [at the trial] before they showed their version. That’s so stupid; ours comes out, we get all the laughs. Then they show their version and there’s no laughs. Not only has it been chopped up badly, but it’s old material, it’s not as funny as it was the first time. That’s just dumb! If they’d shown the
irs first, maybe they would have got the laughs so when they showed our stuff maybe ours would have looked long-winded. [The feeling could have been,] maybe ABC did the right thing—they weren’t trying to ruin it, the stuff deserved trimming.

  LEWIS: I had to testify. I was terrified. I was so annoyed, I take things too personally—I was ready to punch the ABC people out! And then at the end it was ruled that the show would air the way ABC had edited it, but it had to have a disclaimer on it, and [so] the ABC people came over and said, “Would you guys like to do a humorous disclaimer for us?” I can’t believe it: they don’t get it, do they? They don’t get that people really care about what they’ve created and having it chopped this way. It was astonishing. So they put a disclaimer of some sort, but the shows were not very good. I imagine for some people it could have been their first introduction [to Python], it would have been pretty disappointing.

  And although the judge ruled against the Pythons in that initial court thing because he said it was too late—it would cause damage to ABC to change it—the judge worded it so that it really allowed a turnaround, and it gave the Pythons ownership of the series in the end. Amazing. It turned out to be a landmark case, really an important one, because it gives people some control over their material.

  Judge Lasker favored ABC in his decision partly because of the network’s claims of damages which would be incurred, and partly because of questions about copyright: the Pythons held copyright over their scripts, but the BBC owned the copyright of the tapes of those same scripts(?). There was also an unresolved question about Time-Life’s responsibility in their sale of the shows. Allowing for a disclaimer which would in some way indicate the Pythons’ disassociation from the program, the judge turned down the Pythons’ request for a preliminary injunction, but did leave open their lawsuit (which demanded $1,000,000 in damages).

  By the time the case reached the U.S. Court of Appeals in the spring—long after the second compilation had aired—ABC could no longer argue that an injunction would be financially crippling to them. Therefore, the appeal judges concentrated on matters of copyright, finding that the Pythons could conceivably win a full hearing as creators of the (now-mutilated) work. The suggestion that ABC’s naming of their show “Monty Python” was a mislabeling of inferior goods, illegal under the Lanham Act, was also given credence.

  Cognizant of the rising court costs, Python decided to make a deal with Time-Life and the BBC (who might have been responsible for ABC’s legal fees if the network lost) to settle the case. For dropping their suit, the Pythons received full rights to all forty-five episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

  In a small way, Monty Python v. ABC Television proved to be a landmark case on the subject of moral rights, a part of copyright law not as fully appreciated in the United States as it is in some other countries. Because U.S. law recognizes the rights of owners of material and not necessarily its creators, this case demonstrated how writers and artists could further protect their work from unacceptable changes.

  Having won ownership of all their programs, the Pythons ultimately sold the six episodes of the fourth series to PBS, and have made them part of the regularly syndicated package which has also aired on cable. The tapes preserve the material that had been deleted by ABC—including the dreaded reference to “naughty bits”—but curiously (and with no explanation for it by Terry Jones), the shows are actually missing some material that did air on ABC. Most of it is inconsequential—extended exchanges which are condensed, or repeated gags not repeated—but the “Mr. Neutron” episode did contain this charming aside with Idle as the prime minister talking to his secretary on the intercom, with shades of Rose Mary Woods and Watergate:

  VOICE ON INTERCOM (CAROL):

  The Secretary of State to see you, Prime Minister.

  PRIME MINISTER (ERIC):

  Very well, show him in.

  VOICE:

  I beg your pardon?

  PRIME MINISTER:

  Show him in!

  VOICE:

  Ah, that’s what I thought you said.

  PRIME MINISTER:

  Good.

  VOICE:

  Sorry, I didn’t quite catch the last bit.

  PRIME MINISTER:

  Show him in!

  VOICE:

  No, no, the bit after that.

  PRIME MINISTER:

  I didn’t say anything after that.

  VOICE:

  I’m sure you did.

  PRIME MINISTER:

  No, I didn’t!

  VOICE:

  You did! It was just one word.

  PRIME MINISTER:

  Well, it doesn’t matter anyway.

  VOICE:

  Oh, it does! You told me to write everything down.

  PRIME MINISTER:

  All right, I’ll have a listen. (He shuts off a tape recorder and rewinds it.)

  VOICE:

  What?

  PRIME MINISTER:

  I’m just going to listen to what I said.

  He turns on the tape and it plays back the previous conversation.

  VOICE: (on tape)

  “The Secretary of State to see you, Prime Minister.”

  PRIME MINISTER: (on tape)

  “Very well, show him in.”

  VOICE: (on tape)

  “I beg your pardon?”

  PRIME MINISTER: (on tape)

  “Show him in!”

  VOICE:

  I’m sorry?

  PRIME MINISTER:

  I’m, I’m just listening to what I said.

  VOICE:

  Oh, sorry.

  PRIME MINISTER:

  Oh, damn, now I’ve missed it! (He shuts off machine and rewinds it again, but a bit too far.)

  PRIME MINISTER: (on tape)

  “I am the Prime Minister. I am the Prime Minister. I am the Prime Minister…” (He embarrassedly turns off the machine.)

  CAUGHT IN PYTHON’S ORBIT

  A veteran of Cambridge University’s Footlights, a story editor for Doctor Who, and author of the classic radio serial and books comprising The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams has sometimes walked parallel to the Pythons, and for a time walked in step with Graham Chapman, with whom he collaborated on a number of projects when the Pythons’ TV series ended in 1974. While his actual Pythonic output is tiny, he was (and is) a friend, colleague, and fan of the group, and he recently invited both Terry Jones and John Cleese to participate in his multimedia game venture Starship Titanic.

  ADAMS: It’s astonishing, actually, particularly in perspective now in that there’s so much comedy, everybody is a comedian, every weathercaster, and you just wish somebody could say something that wasn’t tongue-in-cheek; I hate that dreadful expression! I wish somebody could be straight and not try to be a comedian. Going back, thirty years to the beginnings of Python, it was very, very different.

  The interesting thing about when it happened was, in those days comedy was not thought of as being something that somebody terribly intelligent or highly educated would necessarily go and do. So the idea of seeing comedy being done by such incredibly clever people was really quite astonishing. The real freshness and originality of it still shines through as being something that was unique then and remains unique. Some of it now is terrible, some of it’s absolutely dreadful, but the best of it is just incandescent.

  Cambridge and Oxford seemed to be producing a lot of comedy writers and performers in the sixties.

  ADAMS: Yes, it suddenly became a new way of expressing yourself, presumably. That’s going to sound terribly pretentious, but it was.

  If you look at Python, its roots very, very clearly came from two different directions: one would be Peter Cook’s stuff and the other is Spike Milligan. Everybody develops from what their predecessors did, and absolutely Hitchhiker took many cues from Python.

  I felt what happens in Python is you have some aspect of the world [that’s] twisted and you follow the logic of that twist and see where it leads; ei
ther it leads somewhere very funny, or gives you a few good laughs and then you veer off into something else. Which is the license that Python always gave itself: to spend just exactly as much time on a sketch as it’s worth, and then if you haven’t got to a resolution you can jump onto something else, which was great.

  Growing up in the sixties two things had a huge impact on my imagination: one was the Beatles and the other was Python. Python started when I was seventeen. Right from the word “go” it had just a huge impact on me. I was at boarding school, so those of us who wanted to watch Python would congregate in the television room, just to make sure everybody agreed that we were going to watch Python. And I remember one day there was a football match or something like that, and it gradually became clear that the rest of the room was not going to watch Python, it was going to watch the football, and there was a bunch of about four of us who suddenly went into a full panic at that point because we were going to miss Python! It so happened my grandmother lived in the same town, about two miles away, so we just leapt out of school, broke out and ran, covered the distance to my grandmother’s house in record-breaking time, burst in upon the poor frightened grandmother, and said, “Excuse me, we’re going to watch Python.” And I can remember what happened was, we turned on what I thought was the right channel and it was a pirate movie, so I go, “Shit, which one is it? It isn’t that channel, it isn’t that channel, it must be on, but it’s a pirate movie!” So we went around again, and the fourth time we came back to the pirate movie there was John sitting at his desk!

  It’s funny how the things that were on television in those days were fantastically important to you. I don’t know if it’s the fact that television has changed or one’s just gotten older, but I can remember the enormous lengths we’d go to watch something on television. I can’t imagine anything that would remotely command that kind of [passion].