The Flop Premiere That Changed Comedy Forever
On October 5, 1969, Monty Python's Flying Circus premiered on the BBC to tiny audiences and hostile executives — then rewrote the rules of comedy.
Late on the evening of Sunday, October 5, 1969, BBC1 broadcast something British television had never seen — and almost nobody watched. The first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus drew about 1.5 million viewers, roughly three percent of the UK population, and earned the lowest Appreciation Index of any BBC light-entertainment show. Inside the BBC, the verdict was brutal: internal documents dismissed the program as "disgusting and nihilistic." The corporation even had to reassure staff who feared the strange new show was replacing a late-night religious broadcast.
The show was the creation of six young men — Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and American animator Terry Gilliam — who wrote it and starred in it themselves. That first episode, titled "Whither Canada?," threw out the rulebook: sketches that ended without punchlines, surreal non sequiturs, and Gilliam's bizarre cut-out animations colliding with the live action. Even the troupe's immortal catchphrase, "And now for something completely different," was recycled — it had debuted a year earlier on a different series, At Last the 1948 Show.
By every conventional measure, it should have died that night. Word of mouth spread anyway, and reception improved through that first run (the BBC even had to re-edit early episodes to remove David Frost's real phone number, which the troupe had slipped into sketches). The corporation kept it on the air. Flying Circus ran for forty-five episodes across four series, ending in December 1974 — though Cleese himself decided he'd had enough after the third series and sat the fourth out. Then the show leapt to the cinema with films like Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, becoming one of the most influential comedies in television history.
In July 2014, the surviving members reunited for ten shows at London's O2 Arena — forty-five years after that disastrous first broadcast. Marking the show's fiftieth anniversary, BBC comedy chief Shane Allen said the Pythons had "tore up the rule book of comedy grammar, conventions and traditions."
They did it on a Sunday night in 1969, in front of almost nobody. Comedy has never been the same since.
Photo: Eduardo Unda-Sanzana, CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
