The five Englishmen were John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle, who first became performers in Cambridge University's Footlights Club; and Michael Palin and Terry Jones, who had met at Oxford University. All had worked as writers and performers on a variety of 1960s television shows, such as Do Not Adjust Your Set in 1968, where Palin, Jones and Idle met the American animator, Terry Gilliam.

The team came together in 1969 when the BBC offered Cleese and Chapman their own sketch show. Cleese had happy memories of working with Michael Palin on The Frost Report, and invited him to contribute. Palin agreed and brought in his writing partner, Terry Jones, along with Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam.

Breaking the rules of comedy

The writers agreed that it was time to get rid of the "punchlines", the final pay-offs which ended every early 1960s comedy sketch. Graham Chapman recalled, "For years people had been doing a punchline, and we had to do it too as writers. The producer would look quite blank if there wasn't a punchline because how can he end if he can't cue the audience to applaud.... Well, we don't worry about the audience particularly, let them get on with it."

In March 1969, while the Pythons were still planning, the BBC broadcast Spike Milligan's revolutionary series Q5, which was filled with sketches without beginnings or ends. Milligan would leave a sketch by cutting to an announcer, saying, "We interrupt this programme to inform you that this is an official BBC interruption!" Milligan also broke the "fourth wall" - the imaginary barrier between the characters in a sketch and the television audience. A character might abandon a sketch halfway through, and speak directly to the camera.

Terry Jones remembers watching Q5 and thinking, "How can we do that, how can we use that breakthrough that Milligan's got there?" Then he recalled a stream-of-consciousness animation by Terry Gilliam called "Elephants", which struck him as the perfect way to create a new visual style for the show. It was Jones who convinced the others to adopt a loose stream-of consciousness structure, with its fluid movement from one sketch to another, which became a trademark of early Python.

Milligan's example encouraged the Pythons to go even further in breaking the accepted rules of television. They pioneered the "cold open", in which the programme would begin before the title sequence, and also played tricks on the audience, such as running end-titles half-way through the show. In the Milligan manner, a sketch might be stopped by Graham Chapman entering as a Colonel and announcing that things had got "too silly".

Pythons as writers

The Pythons had different strengths as writers. Cleese and Chapman wrote rich verbal comedy, often based on lists of words, such as cheese varieties or different ways of describing a dead parrot. Jones and Palin brought in visual comedy, with sketches filmed on location in the English countryside, and also wrote the much-loved Spam sketch and The Lumberjack Song. Idle specialised in one-liners  ("Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more!") and long, complex speeches.

A scene from "Monty Python's Flying Circus"
© TopFoto.co.uk

Pythons as performers

Cleese's severe middle-class manner made him ideal to play bowler-hatted authority figures. Palin was a versatile actor, who could play an unflappable shopkeeper or a manic Spanish inquisitor. Chapman played insane colonels and working-class fathers. All the Pythons played middle-aged ladies in headscarves speaking in falsetto, though Jones and Idle were most memorable in this role. Idle also played oily salesmen and cockney spivs.

Later history

The first series went out on Sundays at 11.10pm, winning excellent reviews and a good audience, which grew with each succeeding series. However, by the third series, Cleese felt that they were beginning to repeat themselves and following his departure, a fourth and final series was broacast in 1974.

This was not the last of Monty Python. The team reunited with Cleese for a live performance at Drury Lane in 1974, and went on to make three feature films: the 1974 Arthurian spoof, Monty Python And The Holy Grail; the controversial 1979 religious epic, Monty Python's Life Of Brian and Monty Python's Meaning of Life in 1983, which returned to the sketch format of the television series. There were also more live performances, records and books.

Meaning Of Life was the last project that all the Pythons worked on together. In later years, there was talk of a further reunion, though Graham Chapman's death in 1989, on the eve of the Pythons' 20th anniversary, made this a distant possibility.