Laugh lines

AT first it was going to be called A Horse, A Spoon and

A Basin. But that didn't seem quite right somehow. Then someone's tortured imagination came up with the title The Toad Elevating Moment - and it, too, got the thumbs down.

Better, but still not perfect, was Elsie Perfitt's Flying Circus (in honour of a lady who played the piano for Southwold Women's Guild). And finally they settled for Bun, Wackett, Stubble, and Boot.

Sorry, said the BBC, but it's too silly. And, in any case, we want the word ''circus'' in there. So someone sug-

gested using something slimy like a snake. Python? Yes, that'll do. And then someone else thought the name of a sleazy theatrical agent would be fun. Monty sounded just the job. And that, apparently, is how Monty Python's

Flying Circus got its name. Cue brass band playing (what was it again?) Sousa's Liberty Bell.

Ah, but how soon they forget. The other week one of the younger members of the Herald's reporting staff (age is a relative thing in our newsroom; by younger I mean he was in his late twenties) was writing a news story which involved a deceased parrot. Spotting a tenuous connection to a rather famous sketch in an old television comedy

programme, he approached one of his more mature colleagues and asked: ''Monty Python, is he dead?''

Showing a degree of patience which was above and beyond the call of duty, the older reporter (shortly before launching into a quite spontaneous rendition of the chorus from the Spam Song) explained that Monty Python had never actually been alive in the first place.

And now, this week, we learn that Monty, the show, isn't dead either. It's only been sleeping. And now it's woken up. The Python team - John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, and Terry Gilliam - were re-united on stage at the final night of the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, on Sunday. And it was, by all accounts, the full Monty. Even Graham Chapman, who died in 1989, was alleged to have made his presence felt. In the form of an urn containing what was claimed to be his ashes.

Chapman, who revelled in bad taste jokes, would have loved it. During the performance Michael Palin kept telling the urn to shut up. Then, when Terry Jones ''inadvertently'' knocked what was left of poor Graham to the ground, a stagehand appeared to hoover up the ashes.

So successful was the re-union that the Pythons are now planning to make a come-back tour of Britain and America next year, co-inciding with the thirtieth anniversary of the original series.

This is splendid news for those of us who, even now, affect a mock French accent and insult people with witty remarks like: ''Your mother was a 'amster and your father smells of elderberries . . . I fart in your general direction.''

Or for those of us who ring up total strangers of an evening and ask: ''Is Vic there?'' Or, indeed, for those who wear women's clothes, hang around in bars, and wish they'd been a girlie just like their old papa. (More observant readers will note that I have dropped the ''of us'' part to this last and most exotic of Python pastimes).

There are, it seems, a lot of us Python fans about. Even our esteemed leader, Tony Blair (though not, I suspect, a man who regularly pops into his local wearing suspenders and a bra) turns out to be a Monty man. In his speech at last weekend's Scottish Labour Party Conference, he did his own version of the old Romans sketch from The Life of Brian, asking the rhetorical question: ''What has New Labour ever done for you?''

I was 16 when Monty Python's

Flying Circus first appeared on BBC Television (curiously, in a late night slot previously reserved for religious programmes). And, like all my schoolmates, I was hooked from the start. Here was something, well, completely different. Bizarre, surreal comedy, the beauty of which was the fact that, no matter how cool they were, your mum and dad didn't get it. They said ''that's not funny'' in the same way as they said ''that's not music'' when you were watching Jimi Hendrix playing Purple Haze on Top of the Pops. It was a humour which belonged to our generation. It was silly.

And it's still going strong. The movies - Holy Grail, Life of Brian, Meaning of Life - continue to sell on VHS. The TV series retains its cultish appeal, particularly among students on both sides of the Atlantic. They've just released a CD-ROM computer game, Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time. And Eric Idle's song, Always Look On The Bright Side of Life, is ranked number six in the list of favourite tunes played at UK funerals.

Sad to think then that 30 years down the line, television is largely bereft of that kind of cutting-edge, experimental comedy. Why? Well, because in the late sixties the climate at the BBC was quite different from the sterile, no-laughing-matter atmosphere that exists today. In those days the programme producer was in the driving seat and those above him, the men in the suits, seldom interfered. This meant that the Monty Python team had, in effect, complete control over their product. Which is why they were able to scale those wondrous heights of absurdity.