First watched : 1976
My first encounter with the comedy legends came via Thursday evening repeats on BBC 1 of the truncated , little-loved , Cleese-less final series from 1974, for which the "Flying Circus" part of the title had been dropped. There's an exhaustive literature on the show so it seems superfluous to repeat the historical detail about the six guys who made up the team.
I enjoyed the show and the fact that my mother found it silly and incomprehensible ( and parts of it were to me too ) increased my loyalty to the show. The only sketch I clearly remember is the Queen Victoria Handicap ( pictured above ). Once that run was over of course we had to make do with the films ( I first saw Holy Grail in 1979, Now For Something Completely Different in 1983 and The Meaning of Life in 1984; my Catholicism has prevented me from watching Life of Brian in full ).
The principals all went on to other things and we'll be meeting most of them again. Of the survivors , following Graham Chapman's death from cancer in 1989, it's always seemed to me that despite The Rutles and a no doubt lucrative career in ( usually dire ) Hollywood comedies, Eric Idle is the one who's never really escaped the show. Of course John Cleese is also still primarily a comic actor but it's not Python that comes first to mind when his name comes up. Idle has no Basil Fawlty on his c.v. nor is he a historian, travel presenter or film director and it was noticeable that when Always Look On The Bright Side of Life was a fluke hit in 1990 , Idle was the only Python who came into the Top of the Pops studio to perform it.
The surviving Pythons reunited on stage last year for 10 shows largely down to losing a legal case brought by the producer of the Holy Grail film. Cleese also had a hefty divorce settlement to pay. The reviews were mixed but it did pull in the punters. I suspect it will be the final Python project but you never know.
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