Forty years ago, an unheralded new BBC comedy show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, slipped into a Sunday night slot previously reserved for televised prayer services on British television.
The revised scheduling alone should have alerted audiences to the fact that some serious social changes might be underway. Presented with a line-up of sketches that featured the Spanish inquisition, a dead parrot and the Upper Class Twit of the Year Competition, the viewers, or most of them, fell about laughing while generally avoiding the troublesome question of what it all meant.
When first-generation Python fans gather now, greying, and, perhaps, less convinced of life's unfailing ability to amuse, the talk is of how the programme "stood comedy on its head" or "changed the rules".
In the sense that no show before it would have thought to send Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion, two pinafore-wearing provincial housewives, to Paris to ask Jean-Paul Sartre to settle an argument they had started in a launderette about the nature of existence, this was probably true. "Ooooh, don't ask him," Mme Sartre warns the ladies on arrival: "He's in one of his bleeding moods; the bourgeoisie this, the bourgeoisie that."
The five surviving Pythons tend to see their legacy differently. Not just differently from the fans, but differently from each other. Today, they have reached an age and position in life where they have become not unlike the people they used to make fun of.
John Cleese is 70, and currently touring European concert halls to pay for his latest divorce; Michael Palin, 66, is the president of Britain's Royal Geographical Society; Terry Jones, 67, writes scholarly books about the Middle Ages; Eric Idle, 66, produces musicals while Terry Gilliam, 68, is still trying to make a Hollywood movie about his literary hero, Don Quixote. The sixth Python, Graham Chapman, died in 1989.
They were middle-class boys, brought up in places like Weston-super-Mare and Melton Mowbray, the rigorously-educated sons of Rotarians, and mothers who went to coffee mornings and who never imagined that the social petrifaction of post-war England, with its reassuring conceits and certainties, would ultimately provide their children with a weapons-grade source of satire.
"The culture at that time was stuffy," says Cleese. "It was like wrestling with a sponge. I remember going to see Beyond the Fringe in 1962, and hearing screams of laughter. They were screams of liberation."
Hard-core Python fans are prone to give the impression that the show came out of nowhere - an act of miraculous deliverance from the cosy sitcoms, Whitehall farces and "put-your-teeth-in-granny" radio comedies of the early 1960s. As though, one day, you were watching Thora Hird and Freddie Frinton in Meet the Wife, and the next you had Pablo Picasso completing an oil painting while riding a bicycle along the B2127 between Ewhurst and Dorking
It wasn't quite like that. Monty Python's ebullient anarchism grew out of the fissures in the social landscape that were already allowing a new kind of comedy. It was radical, unfettered by notions of deference, and political in allusion if not content.
The touchpaper was arguably lit a decade earlier by the playwright John Osborne, with the opening of Look Back in Anger, but comedy was quick to recognise the new opportunities, and Beyond the Fringe, a razor-sharp, authority-mocking stage revue mostly written by Peter Cook, took up the challenge, as did That Was The Week That Was, a groundbreaking TV satire programme starring David Frost. Both were immensely influential on the future Pythons.
The coming together had begun at university. Cleese, Chapman and Idle were Cambridge men; Palin and Jones had been at Oxford. Only Gilliam, a laid-back American who had moved to Britain to work as an animator, hailed from outside the class mould.
Some years later, in A Fish Called Wanda, Cleese's character was given to plead: "Do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, so stifled by this dread of doing the wrong thing. We are all terrified of embarrassment. That's why we are all - dead!" It was exactly this sense of repression that gave the Flying Circus its lift-off.
The individual Pythons had written and performed for their university drama groups. Intoxicated by the whiff of escape from the professions their parents had mapped out for them, they had moved to London, and found work on the burgeoning new radio and television comedy programmes that were already pushing at the limits of the possible.
The Frost Report, on which they all worked together, was an instant success. But Frost was a man of boundless vanity whose name, in enormous letters, would dominate the show's credits while those of the writers flashed past. It was time to launch the next stage of the revolution.
The BBC agreed, at the urging of star producer Barry Took, to give the proto-Pythons a show of their own. Terry Jones recalls: "When we went in all the executives asked: 'Well, what's the show going to be about?', and we said, 'Well, we don't know'. 'Well, who's it going to be aimed at?' 'Well, we don't really know'. 'Is it going to have music in it?' 'Well, we don't really know.' 'Well, what's it going to be called?' 'We don't really know,' and then they said: 'Well, we can only give you a budget for 13 shows'."
The first episode was screened late on a Sunday night, and opened with a long-distance shot of a ragged, wild-haired man staggering from the sea. Collapsing on the shore he gasped one word: "It's-", followed by the voice-over "Monty Python's Flying Circus". For the next half hour a previously-unimaginable torrent of surrealist absurdity poured forth - Mozart presenting a television documentary about famous people's deaths, the funniest joke in the world that no one can hear and live, an interview with composer Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson.
The BBC was baffled. "Every now and then," recalls Palin, "they would take us off, and run The Horse of the Year Show instead. But it meant that we could plod away unnoticed. Plotting more outrageous things. After about two or three shows, it was clear there was a cult developing. There were people who liked it because so many other people didn't."
Looking back, it is possible to spot, beneath the patina of madness, some of the ways in which the Pythons changed comedy. They did away with the idea that a sketch needed a beginning or an ending. Often Python sketches didn't end at all, but were terminated by Chapman, dressed as an army colonel, declaring that things were getting "far too silly". Other ways of concluding sketches were to have a 16-tonne weight fall on one of the characters or for Cleese to interrupt proceedings with: "And now for something completely different."
They mixed animation with live action, put heterosexual male actors into women's clothes, established the idea that a troupe of performers rather than a single star can carry a comedy show, and, with sketches such as the "summarise Proust" competition, reconciled the infantile with the highbrow.
The question always asked of elderly comedy shows is: would it still be funny now? In the case of Monty Python a more pertinent one might be: Would it still be allowed?
There's no doubting the show's pre-political correctness era credentials. The rules at the University of Woolloomooloo, where the entire Department of Philosophy faculty is made up of brawny Australians called Bruce, run as follows: "Rule 1: No poofters. Rule 2: No member of the faculty is to mistreat the Abos in any way whatsoever (if there's anyone watching). Rule 3: No poofters." Then there's the Silly Olympics, where a core joke is the inability of the deaf competitors to hear the starting gun.
Less amusing is the real life story of the strained relations between the Pythons. Three years ago, Palin published his diaries of The Python Years, blowing apart, in the process, the fond notion that the show had been created by lovably like-minded pranksters. Around the team, it was revealed, swirled an often poisonous atmosphere of jealousy, resentment, egomania and intrigue - much of it centring on Cleese's dominant role - that in effect ended the collaboration.
While the 40th anniversary sees the surviving members joining up in New York to discuss the show's history, none of them is interested in working together again.
And that legacy? "The one thing we all agreed on," says Jones, "was to be totally unpredictable, and never repeat ourselves. We wanted to be unquantifiable. That we are now an adjective in the Oxford English Dictionary means that we failed utterly."
The%20specs%3A%202024%20Mercedes%20E200
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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Globalization and its Discontents Revisited
Joseph E. Stiglitz
W. W. Norton & Company
WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?
1. Black holes are objects whose gravity is so strong not even light can escape their pull
2. They can be created when massive stars collapse under their own weight
3. Large black holes can also be formed when smaller ones collide and merge
4. The biggest black holes lurk at the centre of many galaxies, including our own
5. Astronomers believe that when the universe was very young, black holes affected how galaxies formed
At a glance
Global events: Much of the UK’s economic woes were blamed on “increased global uncertainty”, which can be interpreted as the economic impact of the Ukraine war and the uncertainty over Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Growth forecasts: Cut for 2025 from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. The OBR watchdog also estimated inflation will average 3.2 per cent this year
Welfare: Universal credit health element cut by 50 per cent and frozen for new claimants, building on cuts to the disability and incapacity bill set out earlier this month
Spending cuts: Overall day-to day-spending across government cut by £6.1bn in 2029-30
Tax evasion: Steps to crack down on tax evasion to raise “£6.5bn per year” for the public purse
Defence: New high-tech weaponry, upgrading HM Naval Base in Portsmouth
Housing: Housebuilding to reach its highest in 40 years, with planning reforms helping generate an extra £3.4bn for public finances
The%20specs
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Formula Middle East Calendar (Formula Regional and Formula 4)
Round 1: January 17-19, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 2: January 22-23, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 3: February 7-9, Dubai Autodrome – Dubai
Round 4: February 14-16, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 5: February 25-27, Jeddah Corniche Circuit – Saudi Arabia
Ferrari
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Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
Q&A with Dash Berlin
Welcome back. What was it like to return to RAK and to play for fans out here again?
It’s an amazing feeling to be back in the passionate UAE again. Seeing the fans having a great time that is what it’s all about.
You're currently touring the globe as part of your Legends of the Feels Tour. How important is it to you to include the Middle East in the schedule?
The tour is doing really well and is extensive and intensive at the same time travelling all over the globe. My Middle Eastern fans are very dear to me, it’s good to be back.
You mix tracks that people know and love, but you also have a visually impressive set too (graphics etc). Is that the secret recipe to Dash Berlin's live gigs?
People enjoying the combination of the music and visuals are the key factor in the success of the Legends Of The Feel tour 2018.
Have you had some time to explore Ras al Khaimah too? If so, what have you been up to?
Coming fresh out of Las Vegas where I continue my 7th annual year DJ residency at Marquee, I decided it was a perfect moment to catch some sun rays and enjoy the warm hospitality of Bab Al Bahr.
NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
RESULTS
Time; race; prize; distance
4pm: Maiden; (D) Dh150,000; 1,200m
Winner: General Line, Xavier Ziani (jockey), Omar Daraj (trainer)
4.35pm: Maiden (T); Dh150,000; 1,600m
Winner: Travis County, Adrie de Vries, Ismail Mohammed
5.10pm: Handicap (D); Dh175,000; 1,200m
Winner: Scrutineer, Tadhg O’Shea, Ali Rashid Al Raihe
5.45pm: Maiden (D); Dh150,000; 1,600m
Winner: Yulong Warrior, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar
6.20pm: Maiden (D); Dh150,000; 1,600m
Winner: Ejaaby, Jim Crowley, Doug Watson
6.55pm: Handicap (D); Dh160,000; 1,600m
Winner: Storyboard, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar
7.30pm: Handicap (D); Dh150,000; 2,200m
Winner: Grand Dauphin, Gerald Mosse, Ahmed Al Shemaili
8.05pm: Handicap (T); Dh190,000; 1,800m
Winner: Good Trip, Tadhg O’Shea, Ali Rashid Al Raihe
Tips for taking the metro
- set out well ahead of time
- make sure you have at least Dh15 on you Nol card, as there could be big queues for top-up machines
- enter the right cabin. The train may be too busy to move between carriages once you're on
- don't carry too much luggage and tuck it under a seat to make room for fellow passengers
No.6 Collaborations Project
Ed Sheeran (Atlantic)
The%20specs
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Specs
Engine: Electric motor generating 54.2kWh (Cooper SE and Aceman SE), 64.6kW (Countryman All4 SE)
Power: 218hp (Cooper and Aceman), 313hp (Countryman)
Torque: 330Nm (Cooper and Aceman), 494Nm (Countryman)
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh158,000 (Cooper), Dh168,000 (Aceman), Dh190,000 (Countryman)
The specs
AT4 Ultimate, as tested
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
Power: 420hp
Torque: 623Nm
Transmission: 10-speed automatic
Price: From Dh330,800 (Elevation: Dh236,400; AT4: Dh286,800; Denali: Dh345,800)
On sale: Now
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Ms Yang's top tips for parents new to the UAE
- Join parent networks
- Look beyond school fees
- Keep an open mind
How to avoid crypto fraud
- Use unique usernames and passwords while enabling multi-factor authentication.
- Use an offline private key, a physical device that requires manual activation, whenever you access your wallet.
- Avoid suspicious social media ads promoting fraudulent schemes.
- Only invest in crypto projects that you fully understand.
- Critically assess whether a project’s promises or returns seem too good to be true.
- Only use reputable platforms that have a track record of strong regulatory compliance.
- Store funds in hardware wallets as opposed to online exchanges.
TCL INFO
Teams:
Punjabi Legends Owners: Inzamam-ul-Haq and Intizar-ul-Haq; Key player: Misbah-ul-Haq
Pakhtoons Owners: Habib Khan and Tajuddin Khan; Key player: Shahid Afridi
Maratha Arabians Owners: Sohail Khan, Ali Tumbi, Parvez Khan; Key player: Virender Sehwag
Bangla Tigers Owners: Shirajuddin Alam, Yasin Choudhary, Neelesh Bhatnager, Anis and Rizwan Sajan; Key player: TBC
Colombo Lions Owners: Sri Lanka Cricket; Key player: TBC
Kerala Kings Owners: Hussain Adam Ali and Shafi Ul Mulk; Key player: Eoin Morgan
Venue Sharjah Cricket Stadium
Format 10 overs per side, matches last for 90 minutes
Timeline October 25: Around 120 players to be entered into a draft, to be held in Dubai; December 21: Matches start; December 24: Finals
DUBAI%20BLING%3A%20EPISODE%201
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We Weren’t Supposed to Survive But We Did
We weren’t supposed to survive but we did.
We weren’t supposed to remember but we did.
We weren’t supposed to write but we did.
We weren’t supposed to fight but we did.
We weren’t supposed to organise but we did.
We weren’t supposed to rap but we did.
We weren’t supposed to find allies but we did.
We weren’t supposed to grow communities but we did.
We weren’t supposed to return but WE ARE.
Amira Sakalla
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Profile
Company: Libra Project
Based: Masdar City, ADGM, London and Delaware
Launch year: 2017
Size: A team of 12 with six employed full-time
Sector: Renewable energy
Funding: $500,000 in Series A funding from family and friends in 2018. A Series B round looking to raise $1.5m is now live.
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Qyubic
Started: October 2023
Founder: Namrata Raina
Based: Dubai
Sector: E-commerce
Current number of staff: 10
Investment stage: Pre-seed
Initial investment: Undisclosed
