40 years ago yesterday a new programme took to the airwaves. It consumed our playtime talk and like many people across the country led to an astonishing amount of re-enacments of "the Parrot Sketch", "The Lumberjack Song", "The Ministry of Silly Walks" and others.
Monty Pythons Flying Circus was here.
I'd like to say I was there at the beginning but I wasn't. It took a couple of weeks of playground talk before I got to see it. And of course it wasn't simple even then. Those were the days when you didn't have a television in your bedroom. I had to negiotiate being allowed to have that programme on, and not just that but negotiate an extension to bedtime to see it all. I was 12. 12 years olds in 1969 didn't stay up half the night looking at the internet, they went to bed at a sensible time, particularly on school nights.
But I did see most of them first time round. My mum, grandma and auntie couldn't make head nor tail of it, which of course was only right, and thought it was a load of rubbish. Then one of Terry Gilliams animations came on, a pair of airmen I think it was with legs that whirled round and round as a song was being played, They laughed hysterically. They still thought the rest of it was rubbish but it did give me leverage to tune in every week and subject them to the rest of it.
No-one who was around then can possibly mention spam without either singing the spam song or listing the menu items from the sketch. You can imagine how confusing it's all become for us with junk e-mails then!
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