Monty Python's Flying Circus
Monty Python’s Flying Circus (known during the final series as just Monty Python) is a British surreal sketch comedy series created by and starring the comedy group Monty Python. The first episode was recorded at the BBC on 7 September and premiered on 5 October 1969 on BBC One, with 45 episodes airing over four series from 1969 to 1974, plus two episodes for German TV.
Monty Python
Having considered the possibility at the end of the second season, Cleese left the "Flying Circus" at the end of the third. He later explained that he felt he no longer had anything fresh to offer the show, and claimed that only two Cleese- and Chapman-penned sketches in the third series ("Dennis Moore" and the "Cheese Shop") were truly original, and that the others were bits and pieces from previous work cobbled together in slightly different contexts. He was also finding Chapman, who was at that point in the full throes of alcoholism, difficult to work with. According to an interview with Idle, "It was on an Air Canada flight on the way to Toronto, when John (Cleese) turned to all of us and said 'I want out.' Why? I don't know. He gets bored more easily than the rest of us. He's a difficult man, not easy to be friendly with. He's so funny because he never wanted to be liked. That gives him a certain fascinating, arrogant freedom." Jones noted his reticence in 2012, "He was good at it, when he did it he was professional, but he’d rather not have done it. The others all loved it, but he got more and more pissed off about having to come out and do filming, and the one that really swung it, in my view, was when we had to do the day on the Newhaven lifeboat."