Monty Python's Brontë

A retrospective on Monty Python will be broadcast starting next Wednesday by the US PBS

Now, the Pythons return to their spiritual American home, the Public Broadcasting Service, where the "Flying Circus" first aired, beginning on Dallas' KERA in 1974. Beginning Wednesday and for the two Wednesdays after, PBS presents "Monty Python's Personal Best," a six-part series that accords an hour each to its six founding members — John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam and the now very late Graham Chapman, who died in 1989. The big news about these shows is that they contain new material — not exactly new Python material — since each of the five surviving members curates, directs and hosts his own "Personal Best" and contributes from a remote location to the Chapman episode, a straightforward memorial documentary interspersed with sketches.

This gives us the perfect excuse for quoting some Brontë-Monty Python connections that we hope will be included in this retrospective.

Do you remember the "Semaphore version of Wuthering Heights" ? (in the picture)

Or the "Housing project built by characters from nineteenth-century English literature" in which no less than Arthur Huntingdon himself played an important role:

Voice Over. Here Little Nell, from Dickens's 'Old Curiosity Shop' fits new nylon syphons into the asbestos-lined ceilings ... (shot of complicated electrical wiring in some impressive electrical installation) But it's the electrical system which has attracted the most attention. (cut to Arthur Huntingdon studying a plan; he has a builder's safety helmet on) Arthur Huntingdon, who Helen Graham married as a young girl, and whose shameless conduct eventually drove her back to her brother Lawrence, in Anne Brontë's 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' describes why it's unique.
Huntingdon Because sir, it is self-generating. Because we have harnessed here in this box the very forces of life itself. The very forces that will send Helen running back to beg forgiveness!

If you know of more Python-Brontë connections, please don't hesitate to share them with us.

Categories: Humour, Wuthering_Heights, The_Tenant_of_Wildfell_Hall