I was very saddened this morning to read that we lost the great Terry Jones after a long illness. From all of his television work, including Do Not Adjust Your Set and Ripping Yarns, to the films he wrote or directed, I’ve always been a fan. His Monty Python partner John Cleese tweeted out “Two down, four to go,” which seems appropriately irreverent. Our condolences to his family and friends.
Tonight we broke from our schedule and routine in a big silly way to watch some really funny old programs from the UK. In case you hadn’t heard, last month, the BFI released two sets comprising all of the surviving episodes of At Last the 1948 Show (first shown in 1967) and Do Not Adjust Your Set (first shown in 1967-69). 10 of the 13 1948s exist, and 14 of the 29 Sets. These have been given a clean-up, although not as comprehensive a restoration as would have been ideal, and released along with audio excerpts of some of the missing material, script pages, several documentaries and features.
These are shows that I first read about when I was in college, when even fewer of the episodes existed. I went through a long period of Monty Python fandom then, so I really wanted to see these back then, but they remained stubbornly unavailable. Some pretty ropey copies of some of the material came out in 2005, rush-released and without any TLC. I’m very glad to have made the upgrade.
If you’ve never seen them, At Last the 1948 Show featured Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Marty Feldman. We watched the first episode, which is mostly dominated by Cleese’s performances, until Feldman stole the show from everyone in a painfully funny sketch in which three alleged experts in art debate the authenticity of various pieces. This was the highlight of the whole evening. It’s always good when you miss some of the show from laughing so hard.
(Incidentally, I once had a few sketches from a compilation of Feldman’s 1968-69 series Marty, which also featured Tim Brooke-Taylor along with John Junkin. The three of them are in a sketch about the Edinburgh Festival which is one of the funniest things ever written. I’d love to see more of Marty, and the 1971-72 Marty Feldman Comedy Machine one day.)
Next up, we looked at the Boxing Day “pilot” of Do Not Adjust Your Set, which starred Denise Coffey, Eric Idle, David Jason, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Each episode features a tune or two by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, one of those oddball acts I find interesting but not particularly compelling or funny. Musical dada, basically. In fact, I was much more interested in spending an hour watching the documentary about them on disk three a few days ago than I am spending three minutes listening to their tunes.
Our son is familiar with Set already, because he’s watched the nine episodes that came out on that 2005 DVD, sighing ostentatiously when the Bonzos play and giggling uncontrollably when Jason and Coffey take over for the weekly serialized adventure of Captain Fantastic, where an oddball hero confronts the surreal machinations of the evil Mrs. Black. The pilot only has a little of the Captain – Idle introduces a preview of the serial while eating a bowl of cereal. Set was ostensibly a children’s show, with the humor coming more from slapstick, sight gags, and wordplay and free from references to either high or popular culture or skewering bureaucracy like you’d see in 1948 or Python. The standout for me was a TV game show in which Idle spends so long explaining the sound effects and rules that they run out of time to play it.
We then dipped back into the 1948 set to watch the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, which I’ve unfortunately seen too many times, but our kid never had, and then looked at one of the surviving fragments of Dudley Moore and Peter Cook’s Not Only… But Also which I’d been saving for a rainy day to show our son. I first saw the sketch “Superthunderstingcar” around 1996 and had to pause the tape because I’d quit breathing from laughing. Our son echoed almost everybody to whom I’ve ever shown this by giggling here and there and summing it up with a shake of the head and announcing that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever seen.
(Bizarrely, that’s been the case whenever I’ve shown Not Only… But Also to anybody. The Pete ‘n Dud double-acts would get a small chuckle, especially when Moore almost loses it and falls down laughing, and so would any of the Arthur Streeb-Greebling interviews, also especially when Moore almost loses it and falls down laughing, but that’s about it. I once showed a room Ladies and Gentlemen, Ludwig van Beethoven!, which reimagines Ludwig as the host of an early ’70s Englebert Humperdinck-type variety show. We got to the bit where William Wordsworth was reciting poetry while girls dressed as daffodils danced around him, which is side-splittingly funny, and while I was pounding the floor laughing, a dozen people sat in stone-faced silence wondering what on earth they were looking at.)
Well, anyway, “Superthunderstingcar,” in which Dad, Brains, and Johnny Jupiter singularly fail to save Engerlund’s tourist attractions from the menace of Masterbraun and Klaut, remains godlike in its inspiration and execution. It’s a little mean to the original voice actors – I’m pretty sure Peter Dyneley knew how to pronounce “Parliament” – but it’s a parody so perfect that we are incredibly lucky that this episode survived when so much of the show was wiped, even if our favorite eight year-old critic was largely unimpressed!
Labyrinth‘s one of those movies that I’m reasonably certain everybody likes more than I do. I’ve seen chunks of it several times over the years, but today might be the first time I’ve watched the entire movie since it was released. It’s not a bad movie by any means, but it doesn’t spark my imagination very much. I kept paying attention to the technical tricks and the way that sheepdog dashes across the rocks in the Bog of Eternal Stench. That must have been the best trained dog to ever tread the boards at Elstree Studios.
This is a movie for kids and ours just adored it, as his mother predicted. We often try to take him into a new film a little blind, so he doesn’t know what to expect, and so the first appearance of all the goblins waiting for Jennifer Connelly to word her wish correctly surprised the heck out of him. He smiled and laughed all the way through the film, loving the wonderful battle between the goblin army and all the rocks that Ludo summons the best.
David Bowie never appeared on The Muppet Show, but his performance of “Magic Dance” is a pretty good imitation of how such an event might have appeared. Labyrinth was made during what I might charitably call Bowie’s Crap Period, with five new songs strung between the tentpoles of his two weakest LPs not really providing a lot of reason to go check these out. “As the World Falls Down” is the best of the five by miles, and I’m kind of annoyed that I’ll have “Underground” stuck in my head for the next month.
But while musically, it’s a weak set of songs, it’s impossible to dislike Bowie’s performance as the Goblin King, Jareth. He may not be one of the screen’s great villains, but he’s a fun, mischievous character who plays by rules and logic that our heroine doesn’t find fair. I wonder about all the goblins in his kingdom. Were these all children that Jareth has stolen from other worlds?
Apparently Terry Jones rewrote his script sixty-eleven times to please Bowie and Jim Henson, and he later expressed some frustration that the final draft didn’t have a lot of what he enjoyed creating left in it. But a lot of it works, especially Jennifer Connelly’s believably heroic-but-overwhelmed character. I like how her bedroom contains posters of musicals, Escher prints, and the Judge Dredd role-playing game. Speaking of Escher, we got to remind our son of “Castrovalva” before the climactic scene in the “Relativity” staircase room. It must be said that Henson pulled off that illusion rather better than Doctor Who did. There’s also a repeat of the classic riddle about the two guards, one truthful and one a liar, that Who had done in “Pyramids of Mars.”
Incidentally, I’ve actually seen more of Hoggle in real life than in this movie. He lives just about an hour from here. The Hoggle puppet was lost in transit when Henson was doing a lecture tour, and the insurance paid off. Many years later, Hoggle, badly decaying from water damage, was found in a trunk that had been purchased in a big job lot by Unclaimed Baggage in Scottsboro AL. The puppet was restored by an expert in Wisconsin, Gary Sowatzka, in 2006, and he now occupies a place of pride in the giant store’s front lobby.
This kind of reminded us that we should head back to Scottsboro to shop and eat sometime soon, and say hello to Hoggle. We just won’t take any peaches from him.
“I didn’t understand that at all,” our son grumbled. Who can blame him? This is a story about politics delivered by men talking very fast in outrageous accents. Usually while running very fast and getting stuck in doorways three at a time. It’s wonderful.
I’ve read that Terry Jones is in very poor health, and that did kind of hang over tonight’s story for me. Jones directed this lovable, ridiculous comedy escapade written by Gavin Scott. Indy gets sent to Spain to work with a trio of mostly competent spies, looking for some way to cause a breach in the neutral government’s favor one way or the other. For cover, Indy bumps into his old friend Pablo Picasso, played again by Danny Webb and who we met before in Paris, nine years earlier, who gets him a job at the Ballet Russe as a eunuch.
The spies are played by Jones, Timothy Spall, who you may know best as Wormtail in Harry Potter, and Charles McKeown, a frequent collaborator of the Pythons who appeared in Life of Brian, Fawlty Towers, four episodes of Ripping Yarns, Erik the Viking, and at least three of Terry Gilliam’s movies. They hit on a great scheme to make the Count of Toledo believe that the German cultural attache is making moves on the countess. But then a dancer at the Ballet Russe’s production of Scheherazade, played by Amanda Ooms, lets Indy know that she may be Russian, but she’s working for American intelligence, and putting these two men at odds is going to create an entirely different kind of international incident.
I love this episode. I think it’s completely ridiculous and hilarious. My wife and I chuckled and laughed all the way through the thing while our poor son scratched his head and asked what was so funny. Well, you can’t always please the entire audience!
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 