Monty Python’s Flying Circus was one of the most influential and groundbreaking comedy television series in the history of television. It premiered on October the 5th 1969 on BBC1. The show was conceived, created, and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam, each of whom has gone on to become true icons of comedy and performing in their respective fields. They were born into a very counter-culture driven England eager to leave behind the prudish and uptight Great Britain of the 1940s and 1950s. All of them tended to push the boundaries of what was considered good taste on English television. Those who watch their first series might be surprised to see some of the things they got away with.
BBC Censor is the story of something they almost didn’t get away with.
The All-England Summarize Proust Competition
The idea for our short play BBC Censor came after multiple viewings of the documentary series Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer’s Cut). This quickly became a favorite show at the start of the Covid pandemic for co-writer Joel Frapart. The documentary series details how the six writers got their own show, mostly thanks to indifference and rather shocking neglect of the BBC about what they would put on the air. The Pythons described how the BBC executives didn’t actually bother to read any of the first series scripts. This allowed them to basically get away with whatever they wanted, at least for their first series. It wasn’t until Monty Python won two BAFTA TV awards in 1970 that BBC executives began to take notice of what they were putting on TV, and came to think that the show may need some censorship.
The documentary series tells the same story that is depicted in our short play, from a factual perspective. The BBC attempted to censor the Summarize Proust Competition script. We wondered – what might that meeting have been like? Our play is modeled on the style of a Monty Python sketch, as a tongue-in-check satire of their real-world experience navigating stuffy government bureacracy. It doesn’t get much more absurdly meta than that.
The inspirational story is a true one if the Pythons are to be believed, with a few liberties being taken to make it fit into that world. So far, this is one of the only instances of Joel Frapart and George Morris attempting to write a non-fiction story. Clearly, we should stick to fiction.