monty python travel

Travel Agent

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Travel Agent is a sketch that appears in " The All-England Summarize Proust Competition ," the thirty-first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus . It is also performed in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl .

Synopsis [ ]

A man enters a travel agency and greets the secretary ( Carol Cleveland ). After a short confusion about what he's really here for, she directs him to the travel agent, Mr Bounder ( Michael Palin ), to talk about an adventure holiday in India.

The man introduces himself as Mr Smoke-Too-Much . Bounder points out his name means "smoke too much", but Smoke-Too-Much had never really thought about it that way. Moving soon, it becomes clear he can't pronounce the letter 'C' (or as he says it, 'B'). Bounder suggests he says the letter 'K' instead of the letter 'C'. Smoke-Too-Much realises he never thought about doing that.

He then goes on a long rant about the troubles of being a tourist, with Mr Bounder's attempts to turn the focus back on the package holiday fruitless. Finally, he screams "Shut your bloody gob!" and Smoke-Too-Much pauses, then continues. Bounder decides to ring the police, who take it off the hook. He tells the operator his shoe size, which is 9 and a half. The secretary comes into the frame and asks the camera to follow her. She leads the camera down a hallway to the side and into an interviewing room, with Smoke-Too-Much's rambling still heard from the other room. In the room sit an interviewer and a woman .

• 1 Biggus Dickus
• 2 Tim the Enchanter

Monty Python's Travel Agent Sketch

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Monty Python's Flying Circus! presents From Episode 31: "The All-England Summerize Proust Competition" The Travel Agent Sketch (Fade up on close up of picture of Everest. Pull back to reveal travel agent's office.) Bounder: (MICHAEL) Mount Everest, forbidding, aloof, terrifying. The highest place on earth. No I'm sorry we don't go there. No. (By the time Bounder is saying his last sentence the camera has revealed the office and Bounder himself sitting at a desk. Bounder now replaces the telephone into which he has been speaking. After a pause the tourist -- Mr Smoke-Too-Much -- enters the office and approaches Mr Bounder's secretary.) Tourist: (ERIC) Good morning. Secretary: (CAROL) Oh good morning. (sexily) Do you want to go upstairs? Tourist: What? Secretary: (sexily) Do you want to go upstairs? (brightly) Or have you come to arrange a holiday? Tourist: Er ... to arrange a holiday. Secretary: Oh, sorry. Tourist: What's all this about coming upstairs? Secretary: Oh, nothing, nothing. Now, where were you thinking of going? Tourist: India. Secretary: Ah one of our adventure holidays! Tourist: Yes! Secretary: Well you'd better speak to Mr Bounder about that. Mr Bounder, this gentleman is interested in the India Overland. (Tourist walks over to Bounder's desk where he is greeted by Bounder.) Bounder: Ah. Good morning. I'm Bounder of Adventure. Tourist: My name is Smoke-Too-Much. Bounder: What? Tourist: My name is Smoke-Too-Much. Mr Smoke-Too-Much. Bounder: Well, you'd better cut down a bit then. Tourist: What? Bounder: You'd better cut down a bit then. Tourist: Oh I see! Cut down a bit, for Smoke-Too-Much. Bounder: Yes, ha ha ... I expect you get people making jokes about your name all the time, eh? Tourist: No, no actually. Actually, it never struck me before. Smoke ...Too...Much! Bounder: Anyway, you're interested in one of our adventure holidays, eh? Tourist: Yes. I saw your advert in the bolour supplement. Bounder: The what? Tourist: The bolour supplement. Bounder: The colour supplement? Tourist: Yes. I'm sorry I can't say the letter 'B'. Bounder: 'C'? Tourist: Yes, that's right. It's all due to a trauma I suffered when I was a spoolboy. I was attacked by a bat. Bounder: A cat? Tourist: No a bat. Bounder: Can you say the letter 'K'? Tourist: Oh yes. Khaki, king, kettle, Kuwait, Keble Bollege Oxford. Bounder: Why don't you use the letter 'K' instead of the letter 'C'? Tourist: What you mean ... spell bolour with a 'K'? Bounder: Yes. Tourist: Kolour. Oh, that's very good, I never thought of that. Bounder: Anyway, about the holiday. Tourist: Well I saw your adverts in the paper and I've been on package tours several times, you see, and I decided that this was for me. Bounder: Ah good. Tourist: Yes I quite agree with you, I mean what's the point of being treated like a sheep, I mean I'm fed up going abroad and being treated like a sheep, what's the point of being carted around in busses, surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Boventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their 'Sunday Mirrors', complaining about the tea, 'Oh they don't make it properly here do they not like at home' stopping at Majorcan bodegas, selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in cotton sun frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh cos they 'overdid it on the first day'! Bounder: (agreeing patiently) Yes. Absolutely, yes, I quite agree... Tourist: And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellevueses and Bontinentals with their international luxury modern roomettes and their Watney's Red Barrel and their swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending to be acrobats and forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging in to the queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss your bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night there's bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some big fat bloated tart with her hair Brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners. Bounder: (beginning to get fed up) Yes, yes, now... Tourist: And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with diarrhoea and flabby white legs and hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel, and then, once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman ruins where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleedin' Watney's Red Barrel, and then one night they take you to a local restaurant with local color and coloring and they show you there and you sit next to a party of people from Rhyl who keeps singing 'Torremolinos, Torremolinos', and complaining about the food, 'Oh! It's so greasy isn't it?' and then you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic and Dr Scholl sandals and Tuesday's 'Daily Express' and he drones on and on about how Mr Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuban Libres. Bounder: Will you be quiet please. Tourist: And sending tinted postcards of places they don't know they haven't even visited, 'to all at number 22, weather wonderful our room is marked with an "X". Wish you were here.' Bounder: Shut up. Tourist: 'Food very greasy but we have managed to find this marvellous little place hidden away in the back streets.' Bounder: Shut up! Tourist: 'Where you can even get Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion...' Bounder: Shut up!!! Tourist: '...crisps and the accordionist plays "Maybe its because I'm a Londoner"' and spending four days on the tarmac at Lutton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried Watney's sandwiches... Bounder: Shut your bloody gob! I've had enough of this, I'm going to ring the police. (He dials and waits. Cut to a corner of a police station. One policeman is knitting, another is making a palm tree out of old newspapers. The phone rings.) Knitting Policeman: Oh...take it off the hook. (they do so) (Cut back to the travel agent's office. The man is still going on, the travel agent looks crossly at the phone and puts it down. Then picks it up and dials again.) Bounder: Hello, operator, operator...I'm trying to get the police... the police yes, what? (takes his shoe off and looks inside) nine and a half, nine and a half, yes, yes...I see...well can you keep trying please... (Through all this the tourist is going on:) Tourist: ...and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are vomiting and throwing up on the plastic flowers and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland waiting to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can pick you up on the tarmac at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac until six because of 'unforeseen difficulties', i.e. the permanent strike of the Air Traffic Control in Paris, and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at eight, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing Enterovioform tablets and queuing for the toilets and when you finally get to the hotel there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet, and half the rooms are double-booked and you can't sleep anyway... (The secretary comes in and looks into the camera.) Secretary: Oh! Sorry to keep you waiting...will you come this way please... (The camera follows her as she leads us out of the office, with agent and client still rabbiting on, down a short passage to a documentary interview set where the two participants are sitting waiting. We follow her into the set.) Secretary: Here they are. (she turns to the camera again, which moves a little towards her, as if waiting to be summoned) Just here will do fine! Goodbye. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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(CNN) -- No matter where you look, even in some of the remotest parts of the planet, you can't avoid Monty Python.

Just ask Michael Palin.

The Monty Python member was recently in the Himalayas making the latest in his series of travel programs. As he climbed a peak in the Annapurna group, making a steep ascent of one of the highest mountains in the world, he stopped to catch his breath.

At that moment a pair of mountain climbers came by. They saw Palin and a thousand Python references must have hit: "The Lumberjack Song." "It's the Mind." "The Cheese Shop." "Sam Peckinpah's 'Salad Days.' " "The Parrot Sketch." "Nudge-nudge, wink-wink." "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" "And now for something completely different."

"And one of them turned to me," recalls Palin in an interview from his home in London, "and said, 'Oh my God! Eric Idle!' "

OK, so maybe there are limits to fame.

But when it comes to the impact of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," the troupe created by Palin, Idle, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam in 1969 for a groundbreaking BBC TV show and several movies, "limits" is the last word that comes to mind.

Python has been called "the Beatles of comedy," and its impact can be seen in everything from "Saturday Night Live" to "The Simpsons" to "South Park." The group's story is captured in a new coffee-table book, "The Pythons" (St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne Books), written by the group itself.

"[The comedy] was completely original -- fresh and anarchic," says Kim "Howard" Johnson, the author of several books on the group (and, most recently, an assistant to Cleese). "Python has the ability to transcend generations. They never had the widest audience, but they had the hippest audience."

'We were being different'

Cherie Kerr, a founder of the Los Angeles improv group the Groundlings (a major "SNL" stepping stone) who now runs an executive communications skills company, credits Python with influencing a generation of comedy writers and performers.

"The Python magic was they took everything to extremes," she says. "When we wrote sketches [with the Groundlings], there was a lot of beef to them, and there was a Python influence there -- they wrote very funny comedy."

For his part, Palin says the group was just doing what came naturally, particularly in the beginning.

"We didn't feel that we were blazing trails," he says, though he admits the group's unorthodox comedy -- the bizarre transitions from one sketch to another, the absurd premises, the merging of silliness with intellectual concepts -- "gave the BBC a lot of strife."

"There was no predecessor for what we were doing. We were being different," he recalls. "I knew it was a bit of a gamble."

"Monty Python's Flying Circus" was successful in Britain during its 1969-1974 run, but it was pretty much off the air by the time the group become popular in America.

"The American dimension to Python happened quite late," says Palin. "People said they weren't interested, and we'd practically given up hope."

What saved the group was a syndicator, Devillier-Donegan Enterprises. Suddenly, PBS stations were having all-night Python marathons, and a buzz built. The group decided to go forward with a film, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

"We were amazed at the enthusiasm of American audiences," Palin says, still in some disbelief.

Still, even "Holy Grail" wasn't a sure thing. Palin remembers a screening for investors, including representatives from Led Zeppelin and Genesis.

"It was just dreadful," he recalls of the deadly silences greeting the group's jokes. "It was one of the moments I thought we had blown it."

Entering the language

And even though the film was a cult hit, the group still had trouble getting its next film, "Life of Brian" -- a send-up of religion and the life of Jesus -- made. Fortunately, ex-Beatle George Harrison was a big Python fan (he had appeared in 1978's "The Rutles," a Beatles parody with Idle, Palin and Python adjunct Neil Innes), and he stepped in with the financing.

And thank goodness, says Palin. "If ever we thought something was good, we knew it about 'Brian.' "

Of course, ask a Python fan, and he or she can reel off whole lists of good stuff. Johnson is partial to the Spanish Inquisition sketch, the "Lumberjack Song," "The Attila the Hun Show" and the completely absurdist "Fish-Slapping Dance." Kerr remembers a piece where the group tried to outdo each other with tales of their destitute pasts.

One Python bit has even entered the language. The word "spam" has become associated with junk e-mail because of a sketch in which people in a restaurant consider dishes featuring the trademarked meat, such as "Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam" while a group of Vikings sings about "wonderful Spam." Python's endless repetition of the brand name is thought to have provided the impetus for the e-mail definition.

Another Python group project apparently isn't in the cards. The group took Chapman's death in 1989 hard. And though there was discussion of a movie or a stage show after the Pythons reunited at the 1998 Aspen Comedy Festival, nothing came of it, says Palin.

After awhile, he recalls, "everyone had embarked on other interests. It was hard to put together, so it took its natural course."

It's not like the Pythons have rested on their laurels. Palin has made several travel documentaries. Gilliam is a noted, and very inventive, director. Idle is touring a comedy act. Jones writes. Cleese has guest-starred on several American TV shows and runs a company devoted to corporate skills. Each has acted in movies with other Pythons.

The surviving members of the group have a firm bond, says Johnson. "They enjoy being together. John never laughs as much with any group of people as he does with the Pythons," he says. "All of them are certainly proud of their experience in Python, as long as they're not forced to look back on it too much."

And if there should be another Python project, Palin has the perfect new member.

"The Dalai Lama," he says. "I just met him. I've never been in the presence of a person with such joy and mirth. He loves being made to laugh." And the main feature of a Python, he adds, is "plenty of the laughter gene."

That's not so silly at all.

These Are The Castles In Monty Python's "Holy Grail"

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Update On Opening Times & Info About Monty Python.

Many people who have seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, may wonder where to visit the castles where it was filmed. It was mostly shot on location in Scotland and mostly in one castle (Doune Castle), although a number of other castles are shown throughout the iconic movie.

Originally more castles in Scotland were planned to be used in the filming but Monty Python was denied permission by the Scottish Department of the Environment out of fear that the structures could be damaged. For those who would like to see the filming location for The Life of Brian - it was filmed in the historic Monastir in Tunisia .

UPDATE: 2022/10/03 10:51 EST BY AARON SPRAY

Monty Python is considered one of the best British comedy groups of all time. This article has been updated to include more information about Monty Python and updates on the castle's opening times and admission prices following renovations and the pandemic.

Doune Castle In Scotland

The main castle where the movie was filmed is Doune Castle . Many of the scenes shown are of Doune Castle from different angles. Both Doune Castle's interior and exterior are shown.

The "Castle Anthrax" in the "Tale of Sir Galahad" was filmed in a part of Doune castle.

Doune Castle is was a medieval stronghold located in the Stirling district in central Scotland. It is 8 miles northwest of the town of Stirling and is on the fringe of the Scottish Highlands.

It was originally built during the Scottish Wars of Independence during the 13th century. But its present form likely dates from the late 14th century. Later on, it was used as a royal hunting lodge and a dower house (a dower house is normally a large house for the use of a window of a former British estate owner).

The castle saw military use in the mid-17th century and again during the Jacobite uprisings in the late 17th and 18th centuries. It was ruined by 1800 but was later restored towards the end of the century.

Today it is managed by Historic Environment Scotland.

Admission Fees:

• Adult: £9.50 ($11) (Aged 16 to 64 Years)
• Children: £5.50 ($7) (Aged 5 to 15 Years)

As of the time of updating writing (October 2022), Doune Castle has reopened after being temporarily closed for masonry work earlier in the year and due to the pandemic.

One can expect to see all external areas, the kitchen tower, the solar, the lord's hall, and the Gatehouse Tower.

• 1 April to 31 March: Daily, 9.30 am to 5.30 pm
• 1 October to 31 March: Daily, 10 am to 4 pm

Related: Cadbury Castle: The Site Of King Arthur's Legendary Court At Camelot

Castle Stalker - Scottish Keep

At the end of the movie, one sees an impressive but small castle out on a lake. That is Castle Stalker, which is a privately owned castle on a tidal islet on Loch Laich in Scotland. It is a four-story tower house or keep.

At low tide, it is possible (but difficult) to access the castle. It is one of the best-preserved medieval tower houses in this part of Scotland

• Name: From the Gaelic Word "Stalcaire" Meaning "Hunter" or "Falconer"

In 2021 tours were limited to one tour per day for social distancing and included a trip over to the castle with a guided tour of the keep. The guided tour is provided by a member of the Stewart Allward family (the owners of the Castle). Tours are now limited to 12 persons.

• Duration: Allow For 2 Hours Including the Boat Trips
• Price: £20 for Adults ($27), £10 ($13) For Children Under 16 (2021 Prices)

The castle is open seasonally and visitors need to check their calendar for opening dates. One can learn more about touring the castle and boat trips on the Castle Stalker Website .

Related: The Best Ways To Plan Your Visit To Bonnie Scotland (For The First Time)

Other Castles Seen in The Holy Grail

At least two other castles are seen in the movie. The scene "Bridge of Death" was filmed in a gorge in the stunning Glen Coe area of the Scottish Highlands. The Scottish Highlands are stunning and everyone should visit . The glen is noted for its scenic beauty and was filmed where the mountain waterfalls become the River Coe in Glen Coe.

• ‘Bridge of Death’: Located At a Gorge at The Meeting of Three Waters In Glen Coe in the Scottish Highlands

Kidwelly Castle:

Kidwelly Castle is a Norman (or early English) castle overlooking the River Gwendraeth in southern Wales. The present castle dates from the early 12th century and was built to defend against the Welsh that the English were trying to subdue. It was razed by Llywelyn the Great in 1231 and later rebuilt.

• Location: South Wales
• Scenes: The First Exterior Scene With a Castle

Bodiam Castle:

A large and impressive castle surrounded by a moat was built in 1385 by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge. It was ostensibly built to defend against a possible French invasion during the Hundred Year's War.

• Location: East Sussex, England
• Scenes: The Single Exterior Shot of the Swamp Castle (in the "Tale of Sir Lancelot:)

Who Was Monty Python Anyway?

Monty Python was a surreal British comedy troupe that was active in the late 1960s, the 1970s, and early 1980s. Their first TV show was Monty Python's Flying Circus with forty-five episodes over four series.

• Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1975)
• Life of Brian (1979)
• Meaning Of Life (1983)

They went on to produce stage shows, books, musicals, and films. Their two most famous movies were Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Life of Brian (1979). The third movie was The Meaning of Life 1983 which largely lacked a coherent storyline.

Monty Python Members:

• Graham Chapman
• John Cleese
• Terry Gilliam
• Terry Jones
• Michael Palin

John Cleese in particular became one of the most iconic British comedians. Monty Python has attained almost cultic popularity, especially within the intelligentsia of the English-speaking (and even German) worlds.

Next: You Can’t Leave Scotland Without Visiting These Dreamy Locations

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Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974)

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Monty Python's Flying Circus  (also known as simply  Monty Python ) is a 50- year old (as of 2024) British  surreal   sketch comedy  series created by and starring  Graham Chapman ,  John Cleese ,  Eric Idle ,  Terry Jones ,  Michael Palin , and  Terry Gilliam , who became known collectively as " Monty Python ", or the "Pythons". The first episode was recorded at the  BBC  on 7 September 1969 and premiered on 5 October on  BBC1 , with 45 episodes airing over four series from 1969 to 1974, plus two episodes for German TV. A feature film adaptation of several sketches,  And Now for Something Completely Different , was released in 1971.

The series stands out for its use of  absurd situations , mixed with risqué and innuendo-laden humour,  sight gags , and observational sketches without  punchlines . Live-action segments were broken up with animations by Gilliam, often merging with the live action to form  segues . The overall format used for the series followed and elaborated upon the style used by  Spike Milligan  in his groundbreaking series  Q... , rather than the traditional sketch show format. The Pythons play the majority of the series's characters themselves, along with supporting cast members including  Carol Cleveland  (referred to by the team as the unofficial "Seventh Python"),  Connie Booth  (Cleese's first wife), series producer  Ian MacNaughton ,  Ian Davidson , musician  Neil Innes , and  Fred Tomlinson  and the Fred Tomlinson Singers for musical numbers. [1] [2]

The programme came about as the six Pythons, having met each other through university and in various radio and television programmes in the 1960s, sought to make a new sketch comedy show unlike anything else on British television at the time. Much of the humour in the series' various episodes and sketches targets the idiosyncrasies of  British life , especially that of professionals, as well as aspects of politics. Their comedy is often pointedly  intellectual , with numerous erudite references to philosophers and literary figures and their works. The team intended their humour to be impossible to categorise, and succeeded so completely that the adjective " Pythonesque " was invented to define it and, later, similar material. However, their humour was not always seen as appropriate for television by the BBC, leading to some censorship during the third series. Cleese left the show following that series, and the remaining Pythons completed a final, shortened fourth series before ending the show.

The show became very popular in the United Kingdom, and after initially failing to draw an audience in the United States, gained American popularity after  PBS  member stations began airing it in 1974. The programme's success on both sides of the Atlantic led to the Pythons going on live tours and creating three additional films, while the individual Pythons flourished in solo careers.  Monty Python's Flying Circus  has become an influential work on comedy as well as in popular culture. The programming language  Python  was named by  Guido van Rossum  after the show, and the word  spam , for junk email, took its name from a word used in  a Monty Python sketch .

Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus  ( Monty Python's Flying Circus ) are a pair of 45-minute  Monty Python   German television comedy  specials produced by  WDR  for West German television. The two episodes were respectively first broadcast in January and December 1972 and were shot entirely on film and mostly on location in  Bavaria , with the first episode recorded in German and the second recorded in English and then dubbed into German.

The expression "Fliegender Zirkus"/"Flying Circus" is Originally German - it refers to the Air Squadron of German Ace  Manfred von Richthofen , which always had to move back and forth like a circus with trucks to compensate for the numerically superior Allied squadrons due to insufficient numbers of own aircraft.

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SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Monty Python tourism

• 1.1 Sketches
• 1.2 Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• 1.3 Monty Python and the Life of Brian

<a href=\"https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikivoyage/w/poi2gpx.php?print=gpx&amp;lang=en&amp;name=Monty_Python_tourism\" title=\"Download GPX file for this article\" data-parsoid=\"{}\"><img alt=\"Download GPX file for this article\" resource=\"./File:GPX_Document_rev3-20x20.png\" src=\"//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/GPX_Document_rev3-20x20.png\" decoding=\"async\" data-file-width=\"20\" data-file-height=\"20\" data-file-type=\"bitmap\" height=\"20\" width=\"20\" class=\"mw-file-element\" data-parsoid='{\"a\":{\"resource\":\"./File:GPX_Document_rev3-20x20.png\",\"height\":\"20\",\"width\":\"20\"},\"sa\":{\"resource\":\"File:GPX Document rev3-20x20.png\"}}'/></a></span>"}'/> Monty Python , also known as the Pythons , is a British comedy group made up by John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and the late Graham Chapman and Terry Jones.

Their breakthrough was the 1969-1974 sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus ; since then they have produced five feature films and several stage shows. The members have also had successful solo projects, including Michael Palin's re-enactment of Around the World in Eighty Days .

Destinations

Monty Python's Flying Circus , as well as the films And Now For Something Completely Different and The Meaning of Life are based on sketches; many of them set in more or less famous locations in the United Kingdom .

• Hurlingham Park, London: Setting of Upper-class twit of the Year
• Teddington Lock, London: Setting of Fish-slapping Dance
• Potter's Field Park, London: Has a 50-foot (15m) Dead Parrot .

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Holy Grail was the Pythons' first narrative film. Loosely based on the Arthurian Legend set in Medieval England , and recorded in the United Kingdom, especially in Scotland.

Monty Python and the Life of Brian

Life of Brian tells the story of Brian, who lives parallel to Jesus and is mistaken for him. It was mostly recorded in Tunisia .

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By Charles McGrath

• Sept. 30, 2009

ASTONISHINGLY, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” the groundbreaking BBC comedy series, is 40 years old this year, almost as ancient as the Beatles. As Terry Jones, one of the six-member troupe who created and acted in the show, said recently: “Time just seems to get quicker. You look in the mirror in the morning and you think, ‘I’m already shaving again!’ ”

The principals are all in late middle age now, jowly and graying, and have in some ways become the very sorts of people they used to poke fun at. Michael Palin makes travel documentaries. Mr. Jones makes documentaries and writes scholarly books about the Middle Ages, the period the Pythons so memorably sent up in their film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Terry Gilliam, animator turned filmmaker, is still quixotically obsessed with making a movie about Don Quixote. Eric Idle, who’s mostly responsible for the long-running Broadway production of “Spamalot,” writes musical shows, many of them recycling Python material. And John Cleese, who at 70 is the oldest of the group, in addition to appearing in movies and sitcoms and making golf-ball commercials, sometimes turns into a cranky old buffer complaining about cultural decline and Britain’s tabloids. He doesn’t watch much comedy anymore. “As you get older you laugh less,” he says, “because you’ve heard most of the jokes before."

The show, on the other hand, hasn’t aged a bit. In the United States, “Flying Circus” didn’t catch on until 1974, when it was pretty much off the air in Britain and the members had started to go their separate ways. Hugh Hefner was an early fan. Go figure.

But the show has had a surprisingly durable afterlife in this country, giving rise to second and third generations of fans who watch it on DVD and on YouTube, where it’s so popular it now has its own dedicated channel . Mr. Cleese said recently that in England he is far better known these days as Basil Fawlty, the title character in his post-Python series “Fawlty Towers,” than for his role in “Flying Circus.” But even in American middle schools now, there’s often a smart aleck or two who can do Mr. Cleese’s Silly Walk and know the Dead Parrot sketch by heart. When they get to high school in a few years they will also have mastered the sketch about the man with three buttocks and know all the words to the gay lumberjack song.

On Oct. 15 all five surviving Pythons are appearing in a rare reunion at the Ziegfeld Theater. (Graham Chapman, the sixth member of the troupe, died of throat cancer in 1989.) And starting on Oct. 18 the Independent Film Channel is devoting a whole week to Pythoniana and will broadcast one episode a day of “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut),” a new six-hour documentary about the troupe, along with some of the “Python” films and episodes from the first season of “Flying Circus.”

There will almost certainly be squabbling at the reunion. “They love getting angry and shouting at each other,” Ben Timlett, a director and producer of the documentary, said recently. There were (and are) genuine differences among the Pythons, which they sometimes exaggerate for comic effect now, and there have been so many books, articles and previous documentaries that there is no truly reliable account of practically anything associated with the group. Partly for this reason, a number of the Pythons were initially reluctant to take part in the documentary.

“I was very dubious about it,” Mr. Cleese said. “I thought we had flogged this horse to death — way past death, in fact.”

Referring to the fact that Mr. Jones is separated from his wife and is now expecting a baby with his much younger girlfriend, he added, laughing: “We did it because Jones needed money. He’s about to have a baby, and we felt for the guy. Anyone entering on fatherhood at age 67 needs all the help he can get.”

What really helped win the group over was that another of the director-producers is Mr. Jones’s son Bill, who practically grew up with the Pythons. He remembers answering the phone as a child and hearing Mr. Cleese ask to speak with Little Plum. “That’s what John called my father, Little Plum,” he said. “It used to really annoy him.”

And to the surprise of even Mr. Jones, the documentary managed to turn up a lot of new insights and information about the group, especially in the first hour, where with the help of newsreels, family photos and interviews with classmates it chronicles the early lives of the members. With the exception of Mr. Gilliam, the sole American, the Pythons all grew up in middle-class families in provincial towns and were very much a product of postwar British culture: cautious, decorous, respectable, nice. They wanted to blow it up.

“That culture wasn’t hard enough to be rigid,” Mr. Cleese recalled in a telephone interview from California, where he lives now. “It was more stuffy — it was like wrestling with a sponge. I remember going to see ‘Beyond the Fringe’ in 1962 and hearing screams of laughter. They were screams of liberation.”

“Beyond the Fringe” — a stage revue starring Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller that frequently made fun of the royal family, the Church of England, even Shakespeare — was a huge influence on all the British Pythons, it turns out, and so was the earlier “Goon Show” on radio, one of the first to satirize government figures. But the Pythons’ comedy was in its way more subversive than those models, lampooning the very idea of authority, even as it was more absurdist.

Oddly, for a show so popular in America, a lot of Python humor takes on the British class system, poking fun at upper-class twits and handbag-toting matrons, invariably played by Pythons in drag and speaking falsetto. (The show, so revolutionary in other respects, clung resolutely to the old British tradition of cross-dressing comedy.) Another frequent target is the BBC itself, which comes to stand for all that is stiff, stuffy and pretentious.

The third hour of the documentary, called “And Now the Sordid Personal Bits,” explores some of the rifts and fissures within the group. Mr. Idle says now, “We didn’t have the slightest interest in each other as people,” and it does seem that their relationships were more professional than personal.

There was, to begin with, the Oxford-Cambridge split, with Mr. Jones, Mr. Palin and Mr. Gilliam (whom they made a sort of honorary Oxford man) on one side and Mr. Cleese, Mr. Chapman and Mr. Idle, all of whom belonged to the Cambridge Footlights troupe, on the other. And then there were the subgroups: Mr. Palin and Mr. Jones were a writing pair, as were Mr. Cleese and Mr. Chapman, even as Mr. Cleese (and everyone else) grew increasingly exasperated with Mr. Chapman’s unreliability. Somehow it escaped their notice that he had become a ruinous alcoholic who had to use a double in the rope-bridge sequence of “Holy Grail” because he was suffering from the shakes that day. And yet he was the natural leading man of the group, the only one who might have gone on to become a genuine movie actor. Mr. Cleese, who spoke affectingly of Mr. Chapman at his memorial service, says in the documentary: “Graham should have been sent back to the factory and fixed. He was not an efficient creature.”

The two Terrys — Gilliam and Jones — were natural allies until the troupe started making movies, and then they squabbled because each wanted to direct. Mr. Idle always preferred to work alone. Mr. Palin seems to have been the group conciliator, while Mr. Cleese and Mr. Jones were chalk and cheese to each other, temperamental and artistic opposites. Mr. Cleese, who had by then achieved the most personal fame and success, left the group at the end of the third TV season, while Mr. Jones vainly tried to keep it together.

The movies — “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” an Arthurian parody; “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” a spoof of the Gospels, which in New York was picketed by both rabbis and nuns; and “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life,” a collection of sketches that deal with everything from contraception to death by overeating — gave the group a brief but very profitable second life until, with “The Meaning of Life,” the members reached a kind of creative impasse, spinning off in too many different directions.

Some enterprising graduate student someday will doubtless trace the various strains that went into Python comedy. The Chapman-Cleese sketches tended to originate in confrontation, as in the parrot piece, for example, while the Oxford stuff was sillier and more notional. It was Mr. Jones and Mr. Palin who dreamed up the idea of having the Spanish Inquisition turn up in a middle-class living room. And Mr. Gilliam’s instinct was, as he says, to “get rid of all the weak bits” and fill in the gaps with his surreal, sometimes Dada-like animation. Partly through his influence the troupe subverted the sketch form itself, dispensing with beginnings or endings, sometimes walking off the set (or being stomped by a giant foot) right in the middle of a scene.

“The one thing we all agreed on, our chief aim, was to be totally unpredictable and never to repeat ourselves,” Mr. Jones said. “We wanted to be unquantifiable. That ‘pythonesque’ is now an adjective in the O.E.D. means we failed utterly.”

Hardly. The documentary includes several interviews with younger comics like Steve Coogan, Jimmy Fallon and Russell Brand, talking about how much the Pythons meant to the them. And yet the Python example is so hard to imitate that the group’s influence on contemporary comedy is less than one might imagine. Traces of Pythonist absurdity manifest themselves on “The Simpsons” and “South Park,” whose creators are avowed “Flying Circus” fans, and Stephen Colbert’s posture of clueless authority may owe something to the Cleese and Chapman model, yet a show like “Saturday Night Live,” which owes its existence in part to the success of “Flying Circus,” is still locked into the traditional self-contained sketch. To find the equivalent of the Pythons’ kind of wordplay and punning (verbal and visual) you have to turn to written humor, which may be where some of the Pythons’ inspiration came from in the first place. You could make a case, for example, that “Tristram Shandy” is the most pythonesque book in all of English literature.

“A lot of contemporary comedy seems self-conscious,” Mr. Palin said. “It’s almost documentary, like ‘The Office.’ That’s a very funny show, but you’re looking at the human condition under stress. The Pythons made the human condition seem like fun.”

He added: “I’m proud to be a Python. It’s a badge of silliness, which is quite important. I was the gay lumberjack, I was the Spanish Inquisition, I was one-half of the fish-slapping dance. I look at myself and think that may be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

Mr. Cleese and Mr. Jones, in rare agreement, both suggested that one reason the Pythons have never been successfully imitated is that television executives nowadays would never let anyone get away with putting together a show like theirs. When they began, they didn’t have an idea what the show should be about or even a title for it. The BBC gave them some money, and then, Mr. Cleese joked, the executives hurried off to the bar.

“The great thing was that in the beginning we had such a low profile,” he said. “We went on at different times, and some weeks we didn’t go on at all, because there might be a show-jumping competition. But that was the key to our feeling of freedom. We didn’t know what the viewing figures were, and we didn’t care. What has happened now is the complete reverse. Even the BBC is obsessed with the numbers.”

So obsessed, Bill Jones pointed out, that in the case of “Monty Python: Almost the Truth” some people encouraged the documentarians to see if they couldn’t squeeze the six hours down to one.

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