Nerddom of the ’70s and ’80s, and those nerds are now old enough to pay good money to go and see a Broadway show. Over here it’s different: it was great at the time, but we’ve moved on, as indeed have all the other Pythons apart from Eric Idle. It’s not going to work.
Still, it’s amusing to see a touch of bitterness creeping in:
Of the five remaining members of the Monty Python team, only Eric Idle stands to gain substantially from the show. He obtained permission from the others to use the name Monty Python but rewrote the script himself. The other surviving members of the team — Graham Chapman died in 1989 — all support the show, but some did not foresee its success.
Terry Jones, who co-directed the original film, said that he found Spamalot “utterly pointless and full of hot air”.
“It is Eric’s show,” he said. “He will make more out of Spamalot than anybody has ever made out of Python. Good luck. But if we [Jones and the other surviving members of the Python team, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and John Cleese] had known it was going to be such a success, we’d have gone for a better deal.”
Utterly pointless and full of hot air is how some of us might characterise the leaden sarcasm of Terry Jones’ recent political commentaries.
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