Episode 38 - A Book at Bedtime

The Einstein of Penguins!

"Would Albert Einstein ever have hit upon the theory of relativity, if he hadn't been clever?" - John Cleese as Presenter.

Welcome back to the Python blog, which will trudge tirelessly through the televised body of work that is Monty Python's Flying Circus, examining the peaks and the valleys with equal fervor, creating a portrait of the creative life of an ensemble of semi-geniuses. While it may suck the fun out of the show like marrow from a bone, while it may seem like a death march as we press forward to the end, still we do it, in the hopes that some of you will be inspired to buy the goddam box set! Seriously. I should have gotten a thank you note from one of them by now.

In last week's "Dennis Moore", we were treated to something new-- a framing device for the overall show that had its own narrative momentum and build, with the other, shorter, slighter bits giving us a brief break for the purposes of variety and time lapsing. Would the lads do it again, it having worked so well?

Nnnnnno. Monty Python don't play that. You think they're gonna do something again, just because it worked? Noooo! That would get in the way of trying new things. And even if those things aren't quite new, well, at least they're trying to try new things, right? They were locked into random, into silly. Even though the "Dennis Moore" paradigm is what the lads would turn to when they started to make their narrative movies, they were not ready or willing to saddle themselves to the yoke of predictable forward progression, no matter how malleable or wonderful that progression could be.

Like I said-- semi-geniuses.

A and E quality control department

Ironically, the "new" that the lads hew to isn't, really. New. The targets of this show-- penguins, loonies, Scotsman-- have been drawn on before. Still, we get some interesting twists and variations, and overall a pretty funny show. Yet, for some reason surpassing any understanding, this is the tragic "lost episode", wherein a good five minutes of the show have been removed. The missing sketches (there are two of them) don't seem particularly egregious-- in fact, one of them is just silly-- and certainly, edgier material can be seen in other intact episodes. Just one of those things, and I think somebody with resources and a love of artistic completeness should get on this and issue a DVD with the complete episode. Let's check out what's left! 

We start with an incredibly jarring opening-- the titles! No pre-titles bit, no Nude Organist, no Cleese-ian "And now..." and no "It's Man". "Let's get past all that nonsense and get to the meat," the lads seem to be saying. Only the lads never said it. They had a pre-titles bit, and it somehow didn't make it onto the reruns of the show, nor the A and E re-issue. What we don't see is Cleese, as a politician, addressing the television audience. In the middle, he starts to do a strange (silly) dance. He goes up on his lines, and the choreographer, Idle, steps in to enthusiastically walk him through the routine, lines and all. There's a great exchange where the bashful Cleese says "I can do it when you're here," and Idle fondly pats his cheek and reassures "I won't be far away." As Cleese finishes his routine, the rest of the lads do a pretty impressive kick line behind him, singing their party lines. We pan across to the rival party rehearsing their response, and animation of Edward Heath at the bar practicing plies. Then we get the Nude Organist, ostensibly accompanying a rehearsal, and then we get Cleese and Palin doing their thing. To see what I so poorly described, Click Here. 

"A Book at Bedtime" a title reads, and Palin sits in a dramatically dim yet somehow soothing room, a la Alastair Cook. Idle introduces him in voice over, and with all due (and more than due) respect, Palin greets the audience, and starts to read. Only, he can't. At all. He's tripped up first by the word "sunset". Cleese steps out from the wings, giving Palin a reproving glance; "How did you get this gig?" He takes the book, and reads perfectly-- until he gets to beyond where Palin read, and every word trips him up as well. The book in question, "Redgauntlet" by Sir Walter Scott, deals with Scottish pipers on the battlements of Edinburgh Castle, which only matters in the next sketch. (Shout out to my daughter, who took me walking through Edinburgh and around its castle when I visited her at nearby St. Andrew's U. If you've never had a pint with your daughter, it's one of the true glories of fatherhood.) Insofar as the sketch goes, the pattern has been established, and the lads play it out. Idle joins them, then Chapman as a technician, a make-up girl, all struggling with the simplest words. It's great to see Palin stammering, as his lower jaw begins to jut out, and we see a little Gumby peeking through. But mostly, it looks like the lads are having fun playing off each other. It's a nice little bit, and not so little actually, as we'll see.

We cut to the battlements ("bat-tull-leh-ments!") in question, and sure enough, there is a lone piper--  who suddenly leaps off, screaming, and hitting the ground. The Pythons are throwing dummies off a building again, and dammit, it never gets old. Inside, Jones is herding a line of kilt-wearing, bagpipe playing Scotsman towards the open window, where they (as we see) get out on the ledge and leap off. Palin's voice over, spectacularly Scottish, explains that this is the "Queen's Own McKamikaze Highlanders", so successful that their numbers have dwindled from 10,000 to 1,000 in just under a month. When asked why they do it, recruits say "The water skiing's good."

We've all seen the armed service commercials, the ones that claim they will make you superhuman if you join up and let them have you killed. Back in the 60s/70s, when there was a vicious war going on in Southeast Asia, we marketed the army as a fun place where you would learn all these groovy skills, like music and flying your own plane. These commercials were designed to lure the stupid into letting the army kill you. This sketch spoofs this remarkably well, at the same time as it allows the Pythons to release some of their irrational contempt for the Scottish. (I hope some interviewer has the stones someday to ask one of the lads, otherwise extraordinarily liberal, what they had against Scotland and Australia.)

Now the sketch gets a little sick, as Cleese steps in with a job for the remaining regiment. (I'm sorry, not a job-- an adventure!) But even as he tries to explain the mission, the regiment survival rate keeps dropping (with the regiment) as the lined up Scotsman leap out of the window, one by one. "We've got a job for your five lads," Cleese says. A man screams to his death, and Jones barks out "Four, sir!", and to the next man in line, "Good luck, Taggart."  Cleese, alarmed, asks if maybe they shouldn't halt the training. "They have to be trained, sir," Jones responds, and sends another Scotsman to his death. Finally, there's only one left-- Chapman, who struggles rabidly to get to the window, locked in a state of "Itsubishi Kyoko McSayonara." With no clue as to how to snap him out of his frenzy, (the Kamikaze instructor Yakamoto never made it off the airport-- niiice! Jones has all these great lines, but you can hardly hear or make sense of them. He seems to be where great material goes to die. Still, in his defense, he's playing the beat and not the joke. That's what they call acting.)

As they wonder how to break Chapman out of the state, we get a nice little cut away of Palin walking into a strip mall kind of shop for the Kamikaze Advice Centre-- which is basically a door leading out of a tall building.

Now things get strange. With Chapman struggling beneath Jones, Cleese says that there's "no time to lose." The phrase completely flummoxes Jones, and he can get no sense of what it means or how to use it, in the vernacular of our times. The audience seems to be flummoxed as well, as the laughs die off rather precipitously. They hang in there, though, as Jones tries to fit in. "We'll be able to make time, eventually, without to lose, sir, no." As he's clearly not getting the hang of it, we cut to the tutorial.

Palin, in the same outfit as before when he sought advice on Kamikaze (and look how well that ended,) walks into an identical strip mall storefront, with one key difference. This time, the sign reads "No Time To Lose Advice Centre." (They still misspelled "center", though.) There is a strange looking cross between a dinosaur and a dough boy to the left of the door, soliciting donations whilst perched on a box. Anyone know what that is? See, these are the kinds of OCD paydays you get when you watch it and pause it ad nauseum. I do the obsessing so you don't have to.

Inside, in an office identical to the previous office, Palin meets Idle, who greets him with "Good morning. No time to lose." The sketch is basically a bunch of silly ways for Idle to display the phrase, my favorite being a pop-up paper sign that he bursts through like a football team. (Although the back of his jacket is pretty good, and Idle is very limber. I'm sorry, limbre.) Still, Palin can't get it. Jones and Palin are the poor thespians once again, unable to get their lines right. Idle finally resorts to line readings, evoking "To lose-- like Toulouse in France."

That brings us to a short but classic animated bit-- "No-Time Toulouse" about "the wild and lawless days of the post-Impressionists." I'll say this-- it's a gag about being short. But it's very funny and beautifully done.

Back to the bat-tull-leh-ments-- Chapman still tries to kill himself, grabbing a saw and going at his own neck. Cleese finally manages to assign the mission, Jones finally gets the phrase right (to Idle's admiration,) and we finally get to the action. The mission is extraordinarily dangerous-- but only for the suicidal Chapman, who keeps trying to kill himself as he's transported to the mission site.

In a great bit, he leaps off the back of the truck, runs in front of it and lays down, only to be missed by the tires. Chapman actually did this, according to Kim "Howard" Johnson's book, and he did it while drunk and shaking, which makes it all the more harrowing. In the context of the sketch, though, it's hysterical. Finally, Cleese debriefs on the mission goals in a very silly speech. The debrief-ee turns out to be his mother, knitting and disinterested.

Back to "A Book at Bedtime"- yes, it's a framing device!-- Palin still stutters and stammers through the book, surrounded by a vast and ever growing mob of equally illiterate techies, one who carries a stuffed flamingo. This takes us to a Gilliamination, a classic bit-- we blaze a trail across a map of Europe in an Indiana Jones-ish route line. The map cracks down the middle like an egg. The route line falls down through the darkness, through the subterranean bowels of the earth, stopping, at last, in a craggy, dry landscape. A hairy ape-like figure who walks on two legs approaches the route line, which looks now like a black pole, and touches it, seeing a bright light high above it. A celestial chorus sings.

Yes! It is the Dawn of Man! For the second time, Gilliam is taking a whack at 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this great slow burn spoof, Gilliam plays out the scene, already iconic only three years after it was first seen. The Ape, frightened by the light, races away from the black pole to a pile of bones. It gets an idea, complete with the proverbial light bulb, and starts to smash the bones with the club like femur bone, in slow motion. Finally, in close-up, it tosses the femur up into the air-- and it transforms magically into a space ship, shaped like a femur. A classical waltz plays as we slowly pan out-- but the waltz warbles, the space ship wobbles, and drops abruptly out of orbit-- landing on the ape! Ah, well done, Mr. Gilliam!

Next we get a nice little bit about penguins, and Australians. Cleese starts us off with a breathless but very funny monologue about science, then segues us over to the main story-- there's a new study being done about penguins. Chapman, the Australian head of the study, explains his theory that penguins are smarter than humans. The fact that human brains are larger doesn't stop him. He just makes the penguins the same size as humans, and as a result-- the penguin's brain is still smaller. "But," Chapman insists, "it's larger than it was before!" Woven with all of this is the theme of tennis. The doctors are speaking from tennis courts, locker rooms, the showers. And of course, they're all Australian. Finally, in a ground-breaking experiment, penguins are asked simple math questions. They get no answers correct (as determined by a tennis judge.) But when the scientits ask the same question to non-English speakers, in the same conditions (a penguin habitat at the zoo), the results are equally non-right. This proves that Penguins are as smart as non-English speakers, and smarter than BBC program planners (aka "programme planners"). Soon, there is a rush on filling the less intellectually taxing jobs (such as royal consort and President of the United States) with penguins, who will work for fish. Although this lacks the overall brilliance of Doug and Bob Dinsdale or the Mice Problem, it's still pretty good, and the tennis is woven in pretty well.

We cut to the Russo-Polish border, where a penguin works as a guard. Jones is driving suicidal Scotsman Chapman into Russia. (A nice gag shows a sign that is misspelled and corrected, in keeping with Palon's "Book at Bedtime" misreading of the same word.)  Cleese and Idle as two Russian generals, pore over some important documents-- when a bagpipe playing Scotsman appears in shadow at the skylight. A crash, and Chapman lies on the documents, ticking like a bomb and twitching like a drunk. They call the Unexploded Scotsman Disposal Squad, which is busy defusing another Scotsman in a field. In a series of tense close-ups, we see Jones and Palin sweating over the Scotsman, until they finally manage to defuse it-- by taking off his head and dumping it in a bucket of Vodka (which is subtitled "Whiskey".) The Scotsman doesn't seem to mind, gurgling musically in the fine fluid.

The final image links us to "Spot the Looney!", a very close cousin to last week's "Ideal Loon Exhibition", this time in the context of a game show. Contestants are tasked to press a buzzer when they "spot the loony" (or loonies.) As with "Blackmail" or last week's "Prejudice", the fun is the variations on the theme. My favorite is the big finish-- a production of "Ivanhoe" turns out to be five loonies in front of a hospital admission counter-- the looney is the writer, Sir Walter Scott. Scott blames it on Dickens, who cries out "You bastard!" (Shades of next week's Oscar Wilde sketch.)

If that sketch seemed a bit well worn for Python, the next is brilliant. Cleese plays a documentarian, holding a hand mic against a glorious wooded landscape. His subject, Sir Walter Scott (of "Redgauntlet" and "Ivanhoe" fame.) But no sooner do we get comfortable then Palin steps in and asks to borrow the mic. Befuddled, Cleese gives it to Palin-- and Palin walks off to do his own documentary, on the Forestry Commission. Cleese shamefacedly tries to get his mic back, but Alpha documentarian Palin won't budge, just walks off right, drawing the camera with him. Finally, Cleese grabs it,

continuing with Walter Scott. Palin grabs it back, Cleese tackles him, and now they wrestle each other, getting in a few lines before losing the mic. Cleese manages to affect a cutaway to a Walter Scott expert. There, before university walls, a goateed Chapman talks literature-- until Jones' pudgy hand sneaks in from behind a pillar and takes his mic, getting back to forestry. Cleese drives up, snatching the mic from Jones, but he's being chased by Palin's car. Thrilling music accompanies the car chase, anbd we get some Jackie Chan action from Palin, who stands on the sideboard of his car to grab the mic from Cleese, while the cars are in motion. The back and forth continues around a bend, and we hear a crash. The camera obediently wobbles. This is where competition for resources gets you. Let's socialize microphones!

Back to "A Book at Bedtime". An even larger crowd surrounds Palin in his chair, including a camera and an unexploded but ticking Scotsman. "The End", Palin finally works out. A "The Graduate" silence falls over the group-- "Was it worth it?" Over the closing credits, various loonies are spotted, including Edward Heath and the people that nominated him, supposedly. And past-credits, over the BBC globe logo, Idle promises us next week's book at bedtime will be "Black Buh.. Black Bad... "Black Bottom... Black buh-eeee-..." You get the idea.

Furthermore, at the end of the episode, there should have been Idle announcing other television offerings over the BBC globe. Shows promoted include "Dad's Doctors", "Dad's Pooves", "The Ratings Game" "Up the Palace" and "Limestone Dear Limestone". These shows are described with funny pictures, and can be read about HERE.  To be frank, we didn't miss much from this brief and overdone bit, but still-- if you buy the complete series, you want the complete series, A and E! (To be fair, I don't think that A and E is guilty of censorship-- just sloppiness.)

A fine episode, overall, and though it lacks the inspiration of some of the prior efforts, it still manages to land most of the time, and the Kamikaze Scotsman conceit, while comically uneven, still seems fresh and daring. And, of course, they end with the mic bit, one of the strongest sketches in weeks. Even without all the removed bits, the show succeeds very well. And oh, my God--

There's only one left of the season! No time to lose!

Next week; Grandstand!