Episode 41 - Michael Ellis

"Look on my feelers, termites, and despair!" -  Terry Gilliam as Percy Bysshe Shelley

Yes, John Cleese had left the building, and was no longer involved with Monty Python. Or had he?

Although Monty Python's Flying Circus has often been compared to rock bands such as the Beatles, they sure didn't break up like a rock band. No bitter acrimony, no press wars, no single albums... and no break up, Earlier in the year 1974, when the fourth "series" (aka "season") taped and aired, Monty Python (including John Cleese) had performed on London's West End to great acclaim and box office. The lads were also hard at work on an original feature, their first, written exclusively for the big screen. Cleese's separation from the troupe was limited to television. In all other respects, he was still a part of the Limited Partnership known as Python (Monty) Pictures. It's to the credit of the lads that they were foresighted enough to think in terms beyond the television show.

From this delightful murkiness which forbids the total exclusion of John Cleese from anything Monty Python does emerges this episode, much of it written by Cleese and Chapman for an earlier draft of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". In that draft, King Arthur's search leads him to a modern mall in London, the Holy Grail Mall. (I suppose now he'd just order it up on Amazon.) This was before Palin came up with the coconuts gag, which clarified for everyone that the movie should be set primarily in medieval England. Once the coconuts were in, much of Cleese's mall material was out, and was recycled for this show. Thus, Cleese gets a writing credit, the only one he got for this "series".

The result is an odd hybrid, like when the Beatles did "Free as a Bird", a Lennon song sung by Julian after John's death and arranged and performed by the surviving three. Glimpses of greatness can be seen through the awkward performance. But don't take my word for it-- let's check it out. As always, if you haven't purchased the box set yet, please do it here! Ancient comedy writers need money, too-- those marriages to big-breasted acolytes aren't cheap.

We start with brand new opening credits courtesy of Gilliam! More on these later-- And having started the show-- the show ends. Closing credits and applause play us out. Well, that was fun, but frankly, I feel a little gypped. Still, we'll see you next week for Episode 42...

Wait a minute! We cut to film footage of a London department store, ala Harrod's, and the music sounds vaguely like Monty Python incidental music. Could it be they have fooled us again?! Yes! The footman at the door is Michael Palin in a long coat and thick mustache. He holds the door for a blonde man who looks like he's just gone to the rhinoplasty department. The bandaged man walks off down the street, making room for a chauffeured limo. Jones, as a matriarchal dowager (seriously-- who would fuck her?) gives Palin a proper and decorous knee in the groin. (I guess the real question is, with foreplay like that, who could fuck her?) It's fun watching the bystanders behind them trying not to smile or in any way register the comedy in

their midst. Palin gives Jones a small casual salute-- "Well done, Madame."-- before Idle, with his innocent straight man face on, rides up on a bicycle. Palin takes the bike from Idle, ostensibly to park it-- but parking it means tossing it into the street. Yes, my friends, this is the show, and we've already established what I imagine will be two or three running gags.

As Idle enters the store, a bevy of pepperpots come out, most with bandages on their noses. One old lady, played, I think, by Gilliam, has no bandage, but she slams into the glass door. I guess that bandage is in her future. A tiny man leads Gilliam away. Could the bandages be Gilliam's addition to the scene? I'm getting a whiff, through my own bandages, of Brazil.

Idle, slack-faced in true straight man fashion, examines the department store directory, with listings such as "Other Things" and "Ill Health Foods"(Check out what's available in the basement!) and a number of departments for complaints. This takes us to the first true gag of the show, as Carol Cleveland purchases a flame thrower, and successfully test drives it. Semi-successfully, anyway, as she apologizes to a man whose ass flames as Idle passes. (I bet Idle gets that a lot.) (I don't know what that remark means.) This is actually one of the hallmarks of this particular show-- danger. That's a real flame thrower Cleveland teases to eruption,and those are real flames on the man's ass. There's a man on fire in this sketch comedy show! But there will be more to come...

Idle rings the bell at the counter, and a green-masked figure emerges from beneath it, screeching in a strangled and oh-so-Chapmanesque way. Finally, Chapman takes off the mask-- "I'm terribly sorry, I thought you were someone else." After a bit of back and forth, Chapman reluctantly reveals that the "someone else" is Michael Ellis, the man for whom this show is named. Idle gets insulted when Chapman suggests that Michael Ellis is not from Idle's circle, but indeed, Idle doesn't know him, despite how he pretends to. Finally, a perturbed Idle demands another sales assistant. Not mollified by Chapman putting on a fake mustache and glotteral voice, another assistant arrives-- rising up behind the desk with the green mask. "It isn't

him'" whispers Chapman. The new assistant, Palin, is just as silly as Chapman, pretending to be the manager in an equally glotteral voice. Idle calls loudly for the (real) manager, and when Jones finally arrives with a blue "manager" button on his lapel, the two assistants hide behind the desk and scurry away through a purported tunnel, Idle assumes to "soft toys." Jones finally makes sense of it all by claiming that it's "rag week".

What the hell is rag week? According to "Monty Python's Flying Circus All the Bits Complete and Annotated", Rag Week is a traditional fundraising week at colleges, where students dress up and pull stupid pranks, and then ask

for money for a good cause. However, Jones admits, this isn't for the university-- just for the store. He tries to foist Chapman off once again as a senior sales assistant, but Idle will only accept a reconstituted Palin. And at last we get on with the reason for his store visit.

Idle wants to buy an ant.

In keeping with Python utter acceptance and deepening of a silly notion, Palin has a whole system down. A tiny rubber ring on the desk serves as the ant arena, ready to go. How much did Idle want to spend, because ants can go from half a p (pence) to 3 1/2 p "for a champion." There is the length to consider, and the breed-- an

Ayeshire, or a King George bitch, "and that one killing the little flitbat is an Afghan." (What is a flitbat? I don't know, neither does this annotation book, and neither does friggin' Google! Maybe a gnat?) Idle, being a true philistine, goes middle of the road all the way, finally sampling the flitbat-killin' Afghan. "It likes you," Palin coos. "What does it live on?" Idle asks. "Blancmange," Palin replies, calling back the sci-fi sketch from season 1, but the real answer is, youdon't feed them. They die. It's cheaper to buy a new one then feed the old one. After all this, Idle drops the ant. "Never mind, here's another one." Palin then tries to sell Idle an ant house (a bird cage! "Won't it get out of there?" "Yes.") and a set of ant toys-- a wheel, a swing a ladder, and a full-sized two way radio, and an ant-squishing book on ants. All told, the 1.5 p ant comes to 184 pounds, 1.5 p. But he gets a big box labelled "Live Ant Handle With Care". A nice little bit here. This sketch feels very Cleese-ian, complete with Palin behind the desk, cruelty to animals, and a nice build in energy. Palin seems very at home on the edge as he is.

Fire in the Hole!

As Idle walks away, Palin calls him "Mr. Ellis". Cue paranoia! Chapman tries to warn Palin "It's not him," but the ant is out of the bag. Idle claims not to care-- but he does. As he leaves this wacky department store, he passes "The Paisley Counter", where people dress as Ian Paisley, an anti-Papist Irishman who led the Ulster Union, and speechify into a mirror. A woman walks by with her coat and shopping cart on fire. (Fire! Though this time, on film. Still...) The elevator indicator light goes all over like a pinball machine. And the PA calls for Michael Ellis-- than repeats it as "Nigel Mellish." Idle grimaces as he leaves.

So, we have a solid old school sketch, surrounded by random running gags, probably courtesy of Jones/Palin, with a vaguely unsettling paranoid theme, as disinterested Idle is teased by the many mentions of Michael Ellis. Let's see where this is going...

Idle gets home to Mom (Jones), who sloppily spoons out wads of dogfood into dogfood bowls marked "Gorilla" "Dromedary" and (heh) "Trout". (I can just imagine the look on that poor trout's face when supper is served.) Apparently, in an oft-seen moment, Idle is a pet enthisiast, constantly bringing home strange animals, and then moving on to the next pet, leaving Mom to care for the abandoned fancy. Now she  has to feed them,

 walk them, etc. Only, in true Python fashion, we're going further than most of these scenes tend to go. When Idle promises that he'll really look after this new ant of his, Mom replies "That's what you said about the sperm whale... now you're Papa's having to use it as a garage." This last hilarious line is rushed through, in typical Jones-ian fashion, and doesn't get much of a laugh, but I think it's hysterical-- a sperm whale as a garage. Makes the car smell like fish, etc. Great stuff. There's an earlier mention of a tiger included amongst the menagerie, and then we hear a growl, the shot widens, and holy shit! There's a tiger, in a straw floor cage off to the side. Jones says "Blimey. That's the tiger. He'll want his mandies." (Mandies are Quaaludes.) She heads

over with a big hypodermic syringe, talking about how awesome it is to have a tiger when the Jehova's Witnesses are about. Every one a Maserati! Finally, as Idle heads off to watch "one of the televisions", Jones mentions that Michael Ellis has been calling, and even visited, but was apparently chased off by the orange-rumped agouti. Another missed connection. This bit is Monty Python at its best, in my opinion-- taking a silly concept and exploring the crap out of it. Come on! Imagine driving your tiny British car into the mouth of a dead sperm whale. Now, that's comedy!

A quick visual gag, as Idle walks into the next room to watch television, and must choose amongst the dozens in the room. With his new ant Marcus in his palm, Idle watches a TV show called "University of the Air", which is about how to communicate with an ant. "That's a stroke of luck, Marcus!" Idle exclaims.

We go into the show itself, where Jones walks into a restaurant. Chapman waits as a waiter. They start bowing to each other, making antennae motions with their hands, leaping, pacing, and grabbing each others' butts. Subtitles reveal this is all the most mundane conversation' "May I take your coat?" "I don't have a coat. I'm an ant." The daily special is filet of anteater. "That'll learn it," Jones says in antomime, putting his foot on the table for emphasis.

Back in the TV room, Jones staggers in, bloody from an ostensible mauling, and turns off the TV just as they say something about... Michael Ellis. By the time Idle gets the TV back on (irritating the tiger,) the show has moved on to a surgery show-- for ants. We get a rare Gilliamination now as we explore the anatomy of an ant. The narrator waxes rhapsodic about how incredibly tough the ant is-- and then starts chopping it up with a scalpel. "He's not such a toughy. And his legs can carry hundreds of times his own weight..." A hand comes in to pluck the legs off. Funny, cruel stuff. More like Gilliam of old. Idle realizes that his ant is defective, and goes to the store for an exchange, promising poor mauled Mom to get the polar bear out of the neighbor's yard on the way back. He walks out through a yard filled with televisions.

On the department store elevator, Idle waits as Palin, the female elevator operator with a plastic lower jaw and a left hand hook, announces the floors and gives Idle confusingingly exact directions to the complaint counter. Idle arrives to find Chapman very silly indeed with a fake chin and mouth. Jones, less so in a sack. They direct him to the toupee section, and when Idle asks directions, everyone screams toupee as loudly as they can, thereby mortifying the well-haired Idle. This gag feels like a throwback, something you might see on the Sid Ceaser show, but they elevate it like a toad when Palin tells him that the toupee section doesn't have a sign "to avoid embarrassing people, but you can smell 'em." Old women-- real old women, because Jones and Palin are exhausted-- comment on Idle's poor toupee-- "You can see the join."

Idle walks in on a Victorian-era salon, which calls itself the Victorian Poetry Reading Hall, and although I suspect there are a number of toupees in sight, none of them are on display for sale. Nothing is for sale in this room except insofar as it is filled with writers. (Yes, we're all for sale.) Rather, Idle seems to have wandered into a time/space loophole, and gone back in time to the old salon days. Chapman stands on a raised platform as an old (and incredibly tall, made more so by the platform and the midget standing next to her) dowager with that posh twit speech and a love of poetry rivaled only by her love of sherry. She announces the poets in the room-- Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelly, etc. getting their names wrong. Every time she mentions Shelly (played by Gilliam), she leaves off the "Shelly", and when he corrects her, - "Shelly."-- she gets a refill of sherry. That's a nice, reliable bit. She introduces "Wadsworth" so that he can read his new "pram", "I wandered lonely as a crab" (It's "I wandered lonely as a cloud," for those of you unfamiliar-- this is a Python blog, not a Victorian poetry blog.) "And it's all about ants", she winds up. Jones, as Wordsworth, reads the poem, making sure to correct Chapman on the first line. But the poem must have been an early draft, for it ends with "When all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden worker ants!" to great applause. It turns out the dowager was right about something. Gilliam is next, in a half-Gumby drone, reading "Ozymandius-- King of Ants" which sends the crowd into a delirium of excrement release, apparently. "I'd like to ask on or two of you in the back not to soil the carpet" Chapman slurs. Idle is next as "Dennis Keat" (John Keats) who reads a horrific poem about anteaters. Howls of protest drown him out, and he's shoved out of the gathering, screaming "It's true! It's happened!" "Tenniscourt" is next, who reads "Charge of the Ant Brigade". "Half an inch! Half an inch!" the non-Python actor orates...

Before Palin steps in as Queen Victoria to great fanfare, the coffin of Sir Albert carried behind her. Although at first she sounds oh so regal, we soon hear a German accent creeping in, and soon it has taken over, like German things do, and she is decreeing that there be no more ants in Victorian poetry. (She also complains in German that he place smells like a "scheissehaus". I guess those poems were more bowel-loosening than we thought. Idle, as the ant-bearing straight man, decides he's had enough of all this, and walks out with Marcus.

It's an odd dynamic here-- the lads seem to insist that they can do anything, but at the same time they are more slavishly beholden to the framing devices than they have ever been. They will throw aside the logic of a department store and its attendant materialism, but they will not throw aside the device itself. This particular bit, while funny enough, seems to threaten to tear the fabric of their conceit, but they will not relinquish the conceit itself. Could this sketch not have appeared in another show? Did they really think it belonged in this one? Did they run out of materialistic material? It would have been nice to be an ant on the wall as they put this show together. This sketch feels inelegantly crammed in, connected by ants, but not by the department store or Michael Ellis.

Idle's next stop is the electric kettles department, but as he nears it, a hand snakes out and beckons him in, holding up a sign that says "toupees"-- it's the department store back alley. "Hey, bud-- wanna buy a wig?" Idle is practically pulled in, and soon surrounded by Jones, Chapman and Palin, who comfortingly reassure him that toupee is okay. "You don't know whether you'll believe this, sir, but one of us is actually wearing a toupee at this moment." Idle replies "Well, you all are, aren't you?" They rush to shaving mirrors on the desk and adjust their terrible toupees. They reassure one another that their toupees are perfect, then attack Idle on his toupee-- of course, he isn't wearing one-- and accuse him of getting it at Mac Fisheries, which was a chain fish store in the UK. Idle insists he's just looking for a manager to complain about his defective ant, but they try to pull his hair off. He knocks off their toupees and runs into the next room--

Extinguisher?

Which is the complaint desk. Palin sits behind the desk in a very crowded room. Cleveland is at the front of the line, complaining that her flame thrower doesn't have a safety switch. Palin assures her he'll speak to the manufacturers, and she leaves setting the toupee men on fire. Palin calls "Next." (There's a nice visual gag here-- a man sits next to a woman, and another man sits next to that woman, groping her and nuzzling her. The first man tries to wave Palin down-- "He's still molesting her. Not the least original way to deal with this sort of problem. Palin waves him off.)

Chapman is next, an ex-colonel with a complaint. "Please take a seat," Palin offers. "Sorry it's on fire." And it's true, the chair and the desk are on friggin' fire. Palin offers Chapman an extinguisher, since his suit keeps catching fire. "No, thank you, I think we'd better let it run its course." They have a series of silly small talk swaps, while all the time a woman sits placidly behind Chapman with a tennis racket stuck on her neck. The rambling conversation is interrupted by a PA announcement-- It's the end of Michael Ellis week-- the next week will be Chris Quinn week-- apparently the name of Idle's straight man character. The camera closes in on Idle, who breaks the fourth wall and complains "What a rotten ending!" (Can't say I disagree.)

We quick cut to the End of the Show Department, where Idle haggles for a better ending. Jones assures him that ending was their cheapest model, but he has a number of other options. There's the long Pull Out, where the camera slowly pulls out... No. There's the Chase. No sooner does Jones offer it when two men round the corner, point at Idle and shout "There he is!" A quick chase follows, that is aborted by Idle, back at the desk, saying "No..." The walk into the sunset is likewise refused. "It's all a bit off the point," Idle complains, and he's not wrong. Jones furtively suggests an ending where they wrap up the whole Michael Ellis thing, but then quickly moves on to a Happy Ending-- Cleveland embracing Idle passionately. "You wouldn't want that, would you?" Jones says, leaving Idle dissatisfied and alone. "Why wouldn't I want that?"

 Jones recommends a summing up from the panel, the panel being two pundits (three including a picture) that were apparently recognizable at the time, given the audience's reaction, but who have been mercilessly forgotten. A slow fade is slowly rejected, but the sudden end is, well and truly the end. A great sequence packed with meta humor that never falls so in love with its own irony that it forgets the underlying humanity of an unhappy customer and a clerk trying to please.

There it is-- a pretty nice show, especially at the start, with great bits in buying the ant and keeping a house full of strange pets. It falls apart a bit towards the end, but it finishes strong with the Victorian poetry and the ending schtick, none of which fits the central theme, but works anyway. This show has an enthusiasm that the previous show lacked, and we wind up with an oft overlooked and underplayed classic. Maybe Cleese is good for this group, even if he's only on the page.

Next week; Episode 42 - The Light Entertainment War