Reading the pre-transmission blurb, you might have formed the impression that Holy Flying Circus was going to offer new insights into the controversy that erupted around Monty Python's supposedly blasphemous Life of Brian movie when it was released in 1979. Instead, its 90 minutes were a thin gruel of flabby fantasy and caricature.
The individual Pythons were impersonated with slavish accuracy, notably Charles Edwards's Michael Palin, so much so that Life of Brian became merely an excuse for a limping parade of in-jokes and weak riffs on the Monty Python legacy. The incontinent zaniness rapidly palled, especially the way Michael Palin's wife was played by the bloke who also played Terry Jones (Rufus Jones, no relation) but in pantomime-drag, like the Pythons used to do in 1970. Jones's lisp was magnified to grotesque proportions ("this is weally weally wepugnant"), while for some reason Darren Boyd played John Cleese playing Basil Fawlty, restricting him to a narrow band of fascistic superciliousness and sarcasm. However, so knowing and postmodern was Tony Roche's script that he was able to step out of character to tell us that he was indeed playing John Cleese as Basil Fawlty. As an alibi, it didn't fly (Rufus Jones with Steve Punt as Eric Idle, pictured right).
But then, nor did anything else. You could quite literally see the writing on the wall from the start, when a long scroll of text in mock-epic block letters scrolled interminably up the screen, complete with its own built-in "joke" about how out of date and 1979-ish letters rolling up the screen were. Even worse were the cod-Python fantasy sequences which intermittently sprang up to remind you that there are few things in life more demoralising than people who do embarrassing Monty Python impersonations (I kept thinking of John Hannah in Sliding Doors). When Life of Brian's distributor, nervous about growing hostility to the film, urged that they shouldn't "start selling Life of Brian Christmas crackers", we jumped straight to a fake commercial in which John Cleese irascibly advertised Life of Brian Christmas crackers. A passing reference to censorship by the BBC's Head of Rude Words triggered an imaginary visit to the office of the BBC's Head of Rude Words, a fusty black-and-white place where the bow-tied Head formally dictated a list of prohibited obscenities to his prim and tweedy secretary ("cunt... motherfucker... cocksucker..." ). Funny? If only.
What's incredible about all this is that there must have been development meetings and script conferences during which somebody surely had an inkling that the project had a rotting cauliflower where its brain was supposed to be, yet they still went ahead and shot the thing. Odder still, alongside the attempts to stereotype people offended by Life of Brian as bearded, bed-wetting retards in cardigans, or in one case as a sufferer from Tourette's Syndrome, was the anti-BBC streak running through the piece. In another indulgent time-travel moment we visited the Head of BBC Four, to find that he was a coke-snorting yob who danced around his office to jungle music. It was here that I began to wonder if this programme marked the channel's symbolic suicide, in protest at the BBC cutbacks.
It climaxed, albeit anti-climactically, with the TV encounter between Cleese and Palin and their critics, set up by the "Head of BBC Talk", Alan Dick (he had a subordinate called Harry Balls. Hilarious!). Jason Thorpe played Dick as a straightforward clone of Rik Mayall's Lord Flashheart from Blackadder, ranting hyperbolically at the thought of obscenity and blasphemy befouling the airwaves to create "the greatest TV show ever made".
That wasn't what happened. The Holy Flying Circus version was followed by an airing of the real 1979 Friday Night, Saturday Morning chat show in which Cleese and Palin were assailed by Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark, the Pythons remaining commendably rational in the face of their accusers' oozing smugness and interminable verbosity. It was a reminder that Monty Python's success depended on intellectual toughness as much as comic flair or surreal experimentalism. Holy Flying Circus looked like the pop-video version, clever, hyperactive and entirely pointless.