Stuff from the revue Cambridge Circus was recycled for ISIRTA and Python - read Roger Wilmut's From Fringe to Flying Circus about the "Oxbridge mafia" - includes stuff on other pre-Rython programmes. And Brooke-Taylor guested in Do Not Adjust Your Set.
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Think I'm right in saying that TBT has claimed a hand in Yorkshiremen sketch's creation.
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Oh, I used to love Do Not Adjust Your Set - my one act of vandalism at school was tracing the start date of the second series on the dusty wall of the school canteen.
The DVD is worth getting but only contains a selection from the first series, not the second; gems like Armchair Theatre (literally a drama taking place on armchairs, even in the street), or a sendup of a well known antiques show retitled Going for a Burton, are missing. And it has to be admitted that the conventional sketch form, leading to a deliberately groanworthy punchline, is plentifully in evidence here; you can understand their glee at breaking the barriers in Python.
But it's well worth buying, especially as it currently seems to be obtainable for a song (if not a burton). Fascinating to see that Palin and Idle in particular already have in place the kind of characters they explored further in Python: when you see an announcement for a pantomime played by two policemen, you can guess how Michael Palin will play one of them, and there is a brace of wrongfooted TV announcers of the sort played by Idle in Python then in Rutland.
There's also a DVD of the show How to Irritate People with John Cleese as a Frost-type MC (it's a Frost production). This is just an excuse for lumping together a series of sketches but is notable for including the sketch which became the Dead Parrot sketch though but overall it doesn't have the verve of Do Not Adjust Your Set and Cleese is more comfortable in the sketches than as "straight" presenter. Still, it keeps cropping up incredibly cheaply and will occupy an hour of your life agreebly enough.
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Do Not Adjust... was broadcast by Thames in the late sixties ... indeed I ought to remember the precise date of the start of the second series (see earlier post) but it was a long time ago and the dining hall, and indeed the school, is now a private estate.
More info on the programme here:
www.screenonline.org...
and here:
en.wikipedia.org/wik...
In addition to the programmes on the DVD a compilation Do Not Adjust Your Stocking definitely survives as it was rebroadcast in the nineties.
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Looking over their collective autobiography, The Pythons, I see that the second series of DNAYS was more experimental, which makes it particularly unfortunate that episodes from that series are unavailable: they got a new director, Adrian Cooper, to replace Daphne Shadwell "Then," Michael Palin says, "the whole thing began to go much more towards ... a much more experimental off-the-wall kind of show."
Interestingly, Eric Idle doesn't split the Pythons into Oxford and Cambridge but into those who worked on DNAYS and had a "boys in a gang together" mentality and the others (ie Cleese and Chapman) whom he sees as part of an older tradition: "the older pipe-smoking members of the RAF."
And there also seems to have been a division in DNAYS between the writers and David Jason and Denise Coffey who were primarily performers. Palin says: "We were probably quite selfish, we were thinking about what we wanted the show to be, forgetting that they were this great strong popular centre of the show. So it seemed that it was something that had run its natural course. And if we did want to try something new and different, we had to go to a different group really." Cleese and Chapman had been watching DNAYS, liked the material, and rang Michael Palin so the rest is history - if not Complete and Utter History.
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To go back to the original question in this thread, I'm sure I've read somewhere - probably in Roger Wilmut's From Fringe to Flying Circus, which is heartily recommended if you can find it - that in ISIRTA there was a conscious wish to step away from topical material and political satire and simply be silly. So ISIRTA could perhaps be seen as a reaction to the satire boom of the early sixties.
For me, ISIRTA is an enjoyable listen but you can't really call it ambitious and to me it doesn't seem as "authored" as Python - ie the frequently changing writing credits when you listen to editions on BBC 7 don't seem to change the essential character of the programme.
With Python there's more sense of a specific compound created from those five writers (and Gilliam) which would not have been the same had anyone else such as TBT got a look-in. And having gone through a long apprenticeship on DNAYS, Frost et al there's a sense of the writers breaking barriers, most notably with the anti-punchline attitude and the attitude to TV conventions generally.
I'm not so sure, however, about "something nasty" in Python. I prefer to think of it as the writer/performers being let out of school and simply going wherever the mood takes them, which means potshots at the follies of everyone - yes, including members of the working class. But for me, it's not so much snobbishness as relishing their newfound Beeb-given freedom and refusing to talk down to their audience.
Watched these days with a more critical eye there may be a lot of dross in there but overall it's a far more complex project than ISIRTA, with correspondingly greater rewards.
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Apologies for appearing to monopolise this thread but there are another couple of pertinent points to be made now that I have found my copy of Roger Wilmut's From Fringe to Flying Circus.
Haven't checked myself but Wilmut suggests that over time the writing in ISIRTA largely devolved to Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden. (Listeners to recent 7 repeats will have noted that Eric Idle contributed but that doesn't necessarily disprove the general rule.) It's also worth noting that despite John Cleese's strong association with ISIRTA he was primarily a performer rather than a writer on the show so, given these two factors, it's perhaps not surprising that the writing doesn't reflect the character of Python.
Another pointer to the difference in the Python style may lie in Cleese's increasing irritation at the cosiness of the ISIRTA recordings - the audience's whoops and cheers - which may help to explain the comparative "coldness" of Python and the fact that the performers make no attempt to ingratiate themselves with the audience by playing versions of themselves, as you could argue happens in ISIRTA. And when you listen to the first, BBC-issued, Python album it becomes apparent that the laughs are few and far between in the sketches from early shows: the story is that some members of the early audiences, misled by the title, were expecting a real-life circus.
The opposite was the case when Python took to the stage after the television success. Cleese's timing was thrown by the rock gig-type reaction: big applause at recognition of the sketch; muted all through; rapturous applause at the end.
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And almost no Beatles *with* Elvis, even though a whole book and numerous articles have been spun out of that brief and unsatisfactory meeting.
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