#WTW: Do Not Adjust Your Set

(Hoorah, it's an even #WhatThomWatched dozen . . .)

Do Not Adjust Your Set

(1967-1969, Daphne Shadwell; Tango Entertainment disc set)

Monty Python fanatics know the origin story well (not to mention the exact dialogue from 515 separate sketches in the canonical series): among several other writing and acting gigs on British television, the six young Pythons had almost-assembled into two predecessor shows in the years immediately before the Flying Circus — John Cleese and Graham Chapman were part of the ensemble on At Last the 1948 Show, while Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin (and Terry Gilliam as writer/animator) were on Do Not Adjust Your Set along with fellow comedians Denise Coffey and David Jason. As these series ended, networks offered slots for new shows to these two pre-Python groups separately, and the Cleese/Chapman BBC project called Palin away from the ITV project to join them, who in turn brought the other three Pythons along. From a rich set of 1960’s performers, all working under the influence of the stage show Beyond the Fringe, this single show and these six comedians became the representatives for the whole of innovative British comedy for Americans (and, even then, only the ones who watched public television in the early 1970’s. In fact, American public television is largely responsible for Americans’ exposure to 1970’s British television culture, including Python, Doctor Who, The Two Ronnies, Are You Being Served, and (later) All Creatures Great and Small.)

But few of those fanatics have actually seen these origin shows, and with good reason: as with so much of television history, the original videotapes and/or kinescopes of shows from that era were routinely wiped and reused or destroyed. In the case of Do Not Adjust Your Set, that meant that all the bits were wiped from two series of 13 episodes each, plus three specials — except for the nine episodes from series 1 which were subsequently found to have survived on kinescope (series 1; episodes 1 and 2, 5 and 6, and 9 through 13, to be precise). Their sound and picture quality is, of course, abysmal. But as historical artifacts for comedy archaeologists, they are significant. And not just for their connection to Python: Do Not Adjust was also the showcase for a very important musical comedy predecessor, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, also known as the Bonzo Dog Band. These young men had started as college friends doing a post-modern riff on traditional jazz, both reproducing comic music hall standards from the 1920’s and also creating musical riffs on modern art concepts; by 1967 they’d already made a splash with several recordings and appearances on other television shows (including the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour). They were asked to become a kind of house band for Do Not Adjust, generally performing a number for each episode as well as appearing as utility actors in the sketches. Members of the group, particularly singer/songwriter Neil Innes, continued to have a heavy influence on Monty Python; most notably, Innes appears as the Minstrel to Sir Robin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For people who remain fans of the Bonzos — and there are many — the true significance of the extant Do Not Adjust episodes is that they contain some of the only surviving performance footage of the band, in a very early pre-music-video kind of style.

But back to the sketch comedy: The show takes a traditional form of disconnected scenes with varied tempos ranging from very short, one-line “blackout sketches,” through longer two-person joke-punchline setups, to a couple of still longer multi-person sketches per episode. There’s also the aforementioned musical number in the form of a faux-live performance enhanced with silly business and costumes, and finally a single pre-filmed piece aping an old-fashioned silent serial about the adventures of a superhero (called “Captain Fantastic.”) The overall format is familiar from many other British and American “variety shows”; the only element missing is a host/live audience introductory piece (a staple of programs like The Carol Burnett Show but still extant today in a program like Comedy Central’s Key & Peele). As fun as any particular bit might be, the whole thing is completely standard — there’s barely a hint of the innovations then brewing in other shows which would culminate in Python’s free-association approach to linking sketches together into a whole. (There does seem to be a bit of this spirit in the very last sketch of the 13th show, which marks the end of series 1; the episode has a linking theme in which the entire cast plus the Bonzos is gathered in the television studio to bring the show to a close, devolving into an anarchic melee which ends with the studio being destroyed.) Along the way there are some quite good sketches and jokes, including one or two that seem like early drafts of Python material — but many are tedious and dated. David Jason is often the bright spot on the show; Denise Coffey is wonderful but is also often used as the stooge — the focus of mockery and abuse from the four men — which quickly sours for a modern viewer. She fares much better as the evil villainess in the “Captain Fantastic” pieces — and these were much-loved by the original audience, enough so that the BBC considered spinning it off as its own show — but these serial sketches now seem to be almost completely formless, as if they weren’t scripted but just improvised for the camera. Which is likely true — the other three pre-Pythons are the credited head writers for every episode, and the “Captain Fantastic” sequences were designed specifically to allow Coffey and Jason to produce a segment each week while the others had time to themselves in the writers’ room.

So in summary: The sketches are serviceable. A good example of a visual-pun sketch: A man is being carried in an old-timey carriage by four uniformed bearers; one man trips and hurts himself; the rider gets down out of the carriage, opens the carriage’s boot (trunk for us Yanks), takes out a fifth uniformed man, and “changes the flat” to swap the new bearer in. An example of a longer-form sketch is a secret-hideout meeting of five baddies planning a bank job, with one as a very obvious undercover policeman who can help but act like a policeman and arouse the suspicions of the others . . . . who in the punch line turn out to all be undercover policemen. Some of this is good; none of it is particularly surprising today. (That is in stark contrast to the 45 original Monty Python’s Flying Circus episodes from 1969-1974, which still shock and startle with their barely-followable logical leaps when viewed today.)

The real treasures here are the Bonzo Dog Band performances. These songs have the funny themes, crazy logic and random-seeming staging that would go on to inspire Python. But here there’s a different problem, and one that’s difficult to get past today: In the second episode, performing their album cut “Look Out, There’s a Monster Coming,” the Bonzos decided that the song’s comedy would be enhanced by blackface. The whole nine yards — white lips, wide eyes, fright wigs . . . . it’s almost impossible to watch (or at least not without being reminded of more recent tone-deaf incidents, such as “blackface parties” at fraternities). The bad taste and judgement on display ruin a great song. There’s a potentially mitigating factor specifically for Neil Innes; alone among the band, he is the only performer not in blackface, and he wears a look throughout the number that could be interpreted as disapproval. Further (possible) evidence: a few episodes later, during “Hunting Tigers (Out in India),” the Bonzos are dressed as English game-hunter types, except for one member who rides a tricycle through the number with a cardboard sign on his back reading “I Refuse To Dress Up This Week” — a possible internal band dig at Innes. But apart from the one terrible choice, the songs are wonderful and by far the loosest part of the show. They also most clearly belie the supposed “kids show” setup; adults certainly tuned in from the beginning, and the Bonzos seem to represent both the most puerile and most intellectual sides of the show.

Reminds me of:

I’m a long-time fan of the Bonzo Dog Band, discovering them through the post-Python Eric Idle and Neil Innes Beatles parody band The Rutles and the Lorne Michaels-produced 1978 fake Rutles documentary All You Need is Cash. After finding a Rhino Records CD re-release of The Rutles and then their Best of the Bonzo Dog Band, both in 1990, I became well-nigh obsessed with the 24 Bonzo tracks on that disc. (The 3-disc set Cornology came later, containing every Bonzo and Bonzo-side-project track recorded to that point, but it’s the 24 Best of tracks that I know backwards and forwards). It’s an amazing experience to see them semi-live and in action. I know this awe is not going to translate to most viewers, and especially folks who expect some polish in their musical production; I have a perverse love of the polar opposite: unpolished music, not to mention a thing for “modern art” analogue approaches to rock music, a la The Flying Lizards or Andy Warhol-sponsored Velvet Underground. The Bonzo’s “The Bride Stripped Bare (By ‘Bachelors’)” (from their 1969 album Keynsham), a musical analog to the similarly-titled Marcel Duchamp artwork (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), is, to me, an amazing thing. The Bonzos seem so careless and yet so self-assured in everything they do, which is something that I find very appealing in any art. (I really must note here that while I feel about 1% qualified to be writing about movies and television, I feel even less so about music. Moving on . . . .)

I just recently watched the hour-plus “work print” of Orson Welles’s abandoned film-theater-combo project from 1938, Too Much Johnson (it’s curated online by the National Film Preservation Foundation, but here’s a version that includes a live recorded backing soundtrack from an October 2014 film festival in Istanbul). From Welles’s few pre-cinema years as the Great White Hope of Broadway, this project was intended to be a mash-up stage performance of William Gillette’s 1890’s farce with each act bookended by projections of filmed scenes in the style of silent slapstick comedy. (The actual performance never happened; when the old footage was discovered in 2008, it was restored and turned into both a 30-minute short and a 65-minute full print, which started a festival run in 2013.) Where’s the Reminds me of connection? The Welles footage stars esteemed film actor Joseph Cotten, and it’s certainly interesting to see him as a young man simulating a then-relatively-recent style of film comedy. But in both Cotten’s case and in the case of David Jason as “Captain Fantastic,” the actors are clearly just imitating the slapstick stars from the 1920’s, most notably Buster Keaton; they cannot match the athleticism or technique of the real thing. This is most obvious in extended “Captain Fantastic”/Too Much Johnson sequences where our heroes totter around on rooftops; in each case, as the actor pretends to come close to falling, it really feels like an amateur (and slowly paced) version of Keaton and his cohorts. Actual silent comedies are some of the tightest-scripted films to be found; Keaton controls every second of his gags, a far cry from the meandering imitations. (As a long-time owner of Kino’s Art of Buster Keaton box set, with all of the 30 Keaton films from that decade, I’ll be getting back to him in detail at some point here at #WTW.)

But then — the guilt!

I’ve also got the other Python antecedent released by Tango Entertainment, the surviving episodes of At Last the 1948 Show, and I’ll watch it at some point soon. But that’s nothing, nothing, a drop in the bucket, a grain of sand on the beach, a teensy cliché in a much bigger cliché of great British television comedy, the vast majority of which I’ll never get to watch. I won’t turn this into a big slush list of titles because that’s easy enough to find somewhere online, but most of these great predecessor shows only exist in the memories of a few aging Brits. Not Only But Also. That Was the Week That Was. To the degree these things turn up, I’ll try to grab them.

That said, my watch ratio picks up starting in the early 1980’s. I’m about due to re-watch my complete set of The Young Ones, for instance. (And in honor of the recently deceased Rik Mayall, I should do that soon. Oi, now I’m feeling guilty again.)

Pitch:

I’m not sure these discs will be of interest to any but the most determined fans, but of the skits and songs here I’m most fond of the Bonzo’s music-hall-throwback “Hello Mabel.” (“Look Out, There’s a Monster Coming” might have bested it if not for the horrid get-ups. Boo!)

*Note: In an effort to goad The Internet into finally commenting on my blog, I have carefully made at least two factual errors about British television in the article above.

If you can spot one or more of them — and comment in detail on the whatthomwatched.blogspot.com page — you will win absolutely nothing but my love and respect.

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