Abstract
Flanagan situates the television series The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969) into the context of Terry Jones and Michael Palin’s pre-Monty Python work. In addition to serving as an extension of Jones and Palin’s academic interests, the show connects their nascent experiences as revue comedians to their burgeoning careers as media personalities. “Playing With the Past” argues that The Complete and Utter History of Britain fascinates because it engages with and parodies the dominant modes of historical discourse on British television, in particular the televised lecture format and the docudrama re-creation of the distant past. Flanagan assesses the extant episodes from the series and further connects them to Jones and Palin’s post-Python fame as television documentarians.
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Notes
- 1.
Graham Chapman, John Cleese, et al., The Pythons Autobiography By The Pythons (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), 49, 68.
- 2.
Ibid., 70, 66.
- 3.
Ibid., 12, 10.
- 4.
Jonathan Sale, “My First Job: Former Python Michael Palin was a Pop-show Presenter,” The Independent, January 31, 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/student/career-planning/getting-job/my-first-job-former-python-michael-palin-was-a-popshow-presenter-775912.html, accessed May 14, 2016.
- 5.
Terry Jones quoted in The Pythons, 93, 98–99.
- 6.
Andrew Crisell, “Filth, Sedition and Blasphemy: The Rise and Fall of Satire,” in Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History, edited by John Corner (London: BFI Publishing, 1991), 155.
- 7.
Michele Hilmes, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (New York: Routledge, 2012), 51; see Kevin M. Flanagan, “Television, Contested Culture, and Social Control: Cultural Studies and Pop Goes the Easel,” in Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist, edited by Kevin M. Flanagan (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 65–84 for more about the cultural attitudes of the BBC.
- 8.
Tim O’Sullivan, “Post-War Television in Britain: BBC and ITV,” in Television History Book, edited by Michele Hilmes (London: BFI Publishing, 2003), 33.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Michael Tracey, The Decline and Fall of Public Service Broadcasting (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), 68.
- 11.
Jeremy Tunstall, Television Producers (London: Routledge, 1993), 8.
- 12.
For more on the genesis of the show, see the “Interview with producer Humphrey Barclay” extra on The New Incomplete Complete and Utter History of Britain Blu-Ray (London: Network, 2014).
- 13.
“London Weekend Start Work on Comedy Series,” The Stage and Television Today 4566 (October 17, 1968): 21.
- 14.
“Comedy Will Pep Up LW’s New Schedule,” The Stage and Television Today 4572 (November 28, 1968): 11.
- 15.
See Stephen Games, ed., Pevsner: The Complete Broadcast Talks: Architecture and Art on Radio and Television, 1945–1977 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).
- 16.
Robert Murphy, “War,” BFI Screenonline, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/446224/, accessed May 14, 2016.
- 17.
For a survey of Watkins’s early career, see Joseph A. Gomez, Peter Watkins (Boston: Twayne, 1979).
- 18.
In the United States, the CBS program You Are There ran from 1953 until 1957, over which time it offered a host (Walter Cronkite) and a reporter team’s assessment of historical events using the language of contemporary news journalism.
- 19.
See Arthur Dungate, “Elizabethan TV,” Direct Television from Alexandra Palace, http://www.bbctv-ap.co.uk/liztv.htm, accessed May 10, 2016. Thanks to John Wyver for alerting me to this unique experiment.
- 20.
Nicholas J. Cull, “Peter Watkins’ Culloden and the Alternative Form of Historical Filmmaking,” Film International 1.1 (2003): 50.
- 21.
For a discussion of how Russell’s biopic films of composers follow this trajectory, see the “‘Just an Innocent Bystander’: The Composer Films of Ken Russell” chapter in John C. Tibbetts, Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005): esp. 155–216.
- 22.
Andrew Pixley, The New (Incomplete) Complete and Utter History of Britain Viewing Notes (London: Network, 2014): esp. 12–21.
- 23.
Ibid., 19.
- 24.
Ibid., 39.
- 25.
Kathryn Westcott, “Is King Canute Misunderstood?” BBC New Magazine, May 26, 2011, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13524677, accessed May 17, 2016.
- 26.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP 2009), 84.
- 27.
Angela Moreton, “Some Ideas Fire in Patchy Show,” The Television and Stage Today 4582 (February 6, 1969): 12.
- 28.
Pixley, 36–37.
- 29.
For more on the medieval “feast of fools,” a carnival-space of inverted hierarchies and critical performance, see Stephen Butler and Wojciech Klepuszewski, “Monty Python and the Flying Feast of Fools,” in Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Cultural Contexts in Monty Python, edited by Tomasz Dobrogoszcz (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014): 53–54.
- 30.
Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives (London: BBC Books, 2004): 14.
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Tunstall, Jeremy. Television Producers. London: Routledge, 1993.
Westcott, Kathryn. “Is King Canute Misunderstood?” BBC New Magazine. May 26, 2011. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13524677. Accessed May 17, 2016.
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Flanagan, K.M. (2017). Playing with the Past: The Complete and Utter History of Britain in the Context of Sixties Television. In: Reinsch, P., Whitfield, B., Weiner, R. (eds) Python beyond Python. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51385-0_9
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