"We took up the offer with the BBC, and that was Monty Python's Flying Circus. I didn't have to submit my ideas to the group. I used to turn up on the days we recorded with a can of film under my arm, and in it went"
About this Quote
There is a quiet flex in Gilliam's breezy logistics: a "can of film under my arm" as a delivery system for creative autonomy. Monty Python is remembered as a collective brain trust, a six-headed comedy hydra. Gilliam punctures that mythology with a production detail that doubles as a power detail: he didn't pitch, didn't workshop, didn't negotiate. He simply arrived with finished work and it "went" straight into the show. The line reads like backstage trivia, but it's really a manifesto about how certain kinds of weird only survive when they're protected from committees.
The context matters. Flying Circus was being made inside the BBC, an institution built on standards, schedules, and a particular idea of good taste. Animation, especially Gilliam's cut-out surrealism, functioned like a smuggler's compartment: it could leap across time, logic, and budget in ways live sketches couldn't. By bypassing group approval, Gilliam also bypassed the gravitational pull of consensus comedy, where the sharpest edges get sanded down because everyone has to sign off.
Subtextually, he's describing a division of labor that kept the show's anarchic rhythm intact. The writers could bicker and refine; Gilliam could ambush. His animations weren't just transitions, they were hostile takeovers of the frame - abrupt, wordless eruptions that reset the rules. That "and in it went" is the sound of a door closing on interference, and a reminder that institutional freedom often comes from someone being trusted enough to not ask permission.
The context matters. Flying Circus was being made inside the BBC, an institution built on standards, schedules, and a particular idea of good taste. Animation, especially Gilliam's cut-out surrealism, functioned like a smuggler's compartment: it could leap across time, logic, and budget in ways live sketches couldn't. By bypassing group approval, Gilliam also bypassed the gravitational pull of consensus comedy, where the sharpest edges get sanded down because everyone has to sign off.
Subtextually, he's describing a division of labor that kept the show's anarchic rhythm intact. The writers could bicker and refine; Gilliam could ambush. His animations weren't just transitions, they were hostile takeovers of the frame - abrupt, wordless eruptions that reset the rules. That "and in it went" is the sound of a door closing on interference, and a reminder that institutional freedom often comes from someone being trusted enough to not ask permission.
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