The Monty Python troupe starred in the popular sketch comedy show Monty Pythons Flying Circus as well as a number of films, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The six members of Monty Python are Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin.
Pre-Python
Four of the members of the Python troupe met in college: Michael Palin and Terry Jones at Oxford and Cleese and Chapman at Cambridge. They met Gilliam and Idle while working with the amateur theatrical club Footlights.
The group honed their skills working in a variety of radio and TV comedy programs in the mid-to-late '60s, including The Frost Report, At Last the 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Set, for which Gilliam provided some of his trademark animations.
Flying Circus
Heavily influenced by Frost Report and the comedy of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the six-member group decided to make a TV sketch comedy show in a similar style. They were inspired by comedian Spike Milligan to give up on the notion of "capping" sketches with a punchline, and instead would simply write sketches that flowed into one another, sometimes separated by Terry Gilliam's surreal cartoons.
Flying Circus aired on BBC One from 1969 to 1974. 45 total episodes were produced. Cleese left the show after the third season, and does not appear (save for a brief voice over) in the final 6 episodes.
Movies
The Pythons produced four feature-length theatrical films. And Now For Something Completely Different, released in 1971 while Flying Circus was on the air, featured reshoots of favorite sketches from the first two seasons of the series. The group's first original, narrative film was 1975's Monty Python and the Holy Grail, directed by Jones and Gilliam and written largely during the break between the show's third and final seasons (before Cleese's departure).
Two more fictional films followed - the Biblical satire Life of Brian in 1979 and the anthology Monty Python's The Meaning of Life in 1983. There is also a concert film recording a live Python performance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California.
Featured Video
Monty Python Films
Sony Pictures: Monty Python and the Holy Grail official site
Wikipedia: Category: Monty Python Films
Rotten Tomatoes: Monty Python and the Holy Grail reviews
Rotten Tomatoes: Monty Python's The Meaning of Life reviews
The Numbers: Monty Python box office history
Note: The majority of the links in this timeline are to IMDb, which has pop-ups.
1979: Life of Brian
1983: The Meaning of Life
References
Fast Facts
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Fact:
Show ran from 1969-1974
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Fact:
Terry Gilliam is the group's lone American
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Fact:
Chapman died in 1989 from cancer of the spine
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Theme music
Liberty Bell March by John Philip Sousa
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Fact:
The group insists there is no significance to the name "Monty Python"
