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Monty Python isn’t exactly known for creating the most festive content, with the possible exception of the first five minutes of Life of Brian, and the “Christmas in Heaven” musical number that wraps up The Meaning of Life.

But, oddly enough, one Python member secured their role in the troupe by finding a creative use for an old holiday tradition.

Back in 1968, Terry Gilliam was having trouble getting work. He had previously made photographic comic strips for a magazine called Help!, including one in which a horny John Cleese hits on his kid’s Barbie doll.

When Help! went under, Cleese told Gilliam to get in touch with the people making Do Not Adjust Your Set, a children’s comedy series featuring Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, which had become a surprise hit with adults. Gilliam later wrote that he was only hired because producer Humphrey Barclay “took pity on me,...

Monty Python is often referred to as “The Beatles of comedy,” but does that mean that they have their very own Pete Best?

Monty Python’s Flying Circus wouldn’t exist without two other shows that came before it: At Last the 1948 Show, which starred both Graham Chapman and John Cleese, and Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Michael Palin (and its second season incorporated animated sequences from a young American named Terry Gilliam).

Do Not Adjust Your Set was technically a children’s show, but the surreal sketches seemingly resonated more with adults, and as word spread, grown-ups began “rushing home from the office” in order to watch it.

In addition to the future Pythons, Do Not Adjust Your Set also featured two other performers Denise Coffey and David Jason. Jason is perhaps best known for later going on to star in...

On August 12, 2012, 750 million sets of eyes were entranced by the closing ceremony of the London Olympics, a spectacle celebrating the host city and nation. From under the stage emerged Eric Idle, surrounded by nuns on roller skates and Roman soldiers. Idle led the audience in a rendition of his hit comedy anthem “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”. The live crowd joined in on every word, even thirty years after the song’s initial release.

Since the 1960s, Eric Idle has reminded us to “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”. More than that, he has made doing so a lot easier with his unique brand of comedy and creativity. Idle rose to prominence with his fellow Pythons in the late 1960s and was a staple of screens big and small in the decades to follow. He has largely stepped away from the spotlight in recent years,...

London – Co-founding one of the most influential comedy troupes in history just wasn’t enough for Terry Jones, of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” He also had to become one of the foremost amateur medieval history scholars in the world, among his many achievements as author, director and comic sketch creator. Jones passed away in London on January 21st, 2020. He was 77.

Terrence Graham Parry “Terry” Jones was born in Colwyn Bay on the north coast of Wales in England. He graduated from St Edmund Hall, a constituent college of Oxford University, where he met future writing partner Michael Palin. He broke into British television in 1967 along with Palin in the show “Twice a Fortnight,’ worked with Eric Idle in “Do Not Adjust Your Set,” and wrote alongside Graham Chapman John Cleese, Idle and Palin (all soon-to-be Pythoners) on “The Frost Report.”

’She’s a Witch!’ Terry Jones and Connie Booth in...

Previous | Image 1 of 4 | NextEric Idle of ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.’

Chicago – When the “Say No More Squire” Guy meets “Better Call Saul,” you know a memorable night is ahead. Monty Python’s Flying Circus member Eric Idle has written a new memoir, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” and Bob Odenkirk (who portrays the title character in “Better Call Saul”) was the moderator for an event at North Central College in Naperville (Ill.), sponsored by Anderson’s Bookshop.

Eric Idle titled his book after one of his most famous songs, featured at the end of the Monty Python film, “Life of Brian.” He later added it into the musical stage version of the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,’ the Mike Nichols’ directed “Spamalot.” Idle was born in Northeast England, where his mother escaped to during the bombings of World War II. He attended Cambridge University,...

Over the past half-century, Terry Gilliam has lived several lifetimes — first as the mastermind behind the surrealistically satirical animations on Monty Python's Flying Circus and then as a filmmaker with an unparalleled, singular imagination. His oeuvre contains everything from literary flights of fancy (Jabberwocky) and kid-friendly fantasies (Time Bandits) to dystopian epics (Brazil and Twelve Monkeys), kaleidoscopic romps (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and the occasional slightly warped drama (The Fisher King, Tideland).

Now 74, Gilliam looks back on his life achievements, as well as...

Every big name movie director has slowly, but surely, made the exodus to television. And next to fall in line is acclaimed filmmaker Terry Gilliam. He's not going to come quietly when he does, though. And he has some mighty big plans for the small screen. One of those plans is to turn his 80s cult hit Time Bandits into a TV show. He also has plans for a series that is likened to The Fisher King.

Time Bandits may be one of the most interesting and unique time travel movies of all time, and it certainly has no identifiable comparison. For years, diehard fans have wanted a sequel to the 1981 adventure, which follows a young boy who accidentally joins a band of dwarves as they jump from time-period to time-period looking for treasure to steal. For a while, it sounded like a remake might happen, but the original movie is so crazy,...

Do not adjust your set: P!nk is making a big entrance to daytime TV this year. Kind of. The Grammy-award-winning singer has been tapped by Ellen Degeneres to record a new theme song for The Ellen Degeneres Show, which is now entering it’s 13th season on air. In a new teaser video clip, we can hear part of the song, and watch Pink bring her adorable 4-year-old daughter Willow along with her to record in the studio—“Hey Wills, this is where mommy goes to actually record her songs,” she explains to her daughter. Then we see clips of guests like Oprah and Will Smith appearing on the show while the song plays... Read the complete post on Radio.com.

Chatting about writing, The Muppets, DreamWorks, Clockwise and Charles Crichton, all with Mr John Cleese...

Now out in hardback is John Cleese's autobiography, So Anyway. It's a genuinely interesting read, very much written in his own voice, and he spared us some time to have a chat about it, and his career.

Here's how it went...

Can we start with the predictable stuff first, but I always wonder this when anyone writes an autobiography: why do it? Why put your life down in a book, who is it for, and did you enjoy it?

Well let's go backwards on that. Yes I enjoyed it very much. Who is it for me? In a funny kind of way it was for me, because some people seem to think that I've had a very interesting life, which compared with people who have fought in wars, and been spies, and discovered rivers in Africa,...

Happy birthday, Terry Gilliam! Today the director, writer, animator and erstwhile-American turns 74 years old. It’s certainly cause for celebration. Even as a septuagenarian he’s still working. The Zero Theorem only recently opened in the United States, his twelfth feature film as director. There are plenty of ways to pay tribute to the artist and his work with your Saturday, though I’d imagine it’s hard to make the time to watch each of his dozen movies in a row. Instead, if you can carve out just under ten minutes, here’s a more practical option. It’s got more laughs per minute than most of his feature work as well. Storytime is cobbled together from two separate cartoons that Gilliam made for two different TV shows. The first, the diptych of “Don the Cockroach” and “The Albert Einstein Story,” aired on The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine in 1971. Gilliam also did the opening titles for...

20th Century Fox

Few directors working today have such a unique and distinct aesthetic style as Terry Gilliam. With his use of wide angle lenses – cameras tilted to distort the perspective towards abstraction – and detail-ridden production design in which each frame is filled with organized clutter, his movies have visual language all of their own. Equally, few filmmakers have so divided audiences and critics alike – revered and reviled in equal measure, responses to Gilliam’s movies can almost be used as a litmus test for a person’s taste in cinema as a whole.

Terry Gilliam began his career in America working in advertising before moving to the UK and taking up animation, initially on the children’s cartoon Do Not Adjust Your Set and then, where he first achieved fame, with the Monty Python team on the television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It was here that his distinct animation style truly emerged,...

News Ryan Lambie 13 Mar 2014 - 15:03

A stop-motion film by Terry Gilliam? The director's exclusively revealed that the makers of Coraline have approached about making one...

"The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea," director Terry Gilliam once said on the 1974 TV programme, Bob Godfrey's Do -It-Yourself Animation Show. "Whatever works is the thing to use."

Once he started directing live-action feature films with Monty Python And The Holy Grail (which he co-directed with Terry Jones) in 1975, Gilliam put aside the wonderfully creative cut-out animations that appeared in shorts like Storytime (1968) and Miracle Of Flight (1974), not to mention the surreal moments he brought to the TV series Do Not Adjust Your Set and Monty Python's Flying Circus.

For Gilliam, live-action became "the thing to use" for much of his feature directing career. But wouldn't it be great if he one day returned to animation,...

At some point, I.d love to be able to report on a story involving Viggo Mortensen joining a screwball comedy in which he plays the funniest man on Earth, but his career has just featured a string of characters that are either caught up in the aftermath of some devastating event, or they.re actually going through said devastating event. To be expected, the Oscar-nominated actor won.t be changing things up with Captain Fantastic, the Electric City Entertainment drama in which Mortensen is in talks to take the lead. If only this were a superhero film, or a big screen version of the interstitial character from Do Not Adjust Your Set. Oh well. The film.s description, via Deadline, doesn.t go into much detail, but it paints a somewhat solemn picture of adaptation in the modern world. Mortensen will play a man whose idealism led him to...

Superheroes show their mettle as our new columnist Guy Lodge looks at the latest DVDs and downloads

If video killed the radio star, DVD killed the video store… and then things get a bit messy. DVD is far from dead, of course, but it's the most analogue of home entertainment options in an on-demand society. Whether you're downloading a film from iTunes, streaming a Netflix original TV series or browsing the free-to-view libraries of the BBC or Channel 4 – and whether you're watching on your telly or your tablet – the notion of buying or borrowing a physical disc is getting awfully 20th century.

It's time, then, to widen the scope of this column beyond films on DVD or Blu-ray, taking in more of the outlets available to us for our home viewing pleasure. Don't panic, we'll take it slow. Do not adjust your set. Or your smartphone, for that matter.

The artist's late-night broadcast – in which a woman speaks to viewers in 1987 from 2013 – explores a temporal mystery and may have given some viewers uneasy dreams

The future has sent a message. A woman appears on a city street, speaking directly on camera to the people of the past. She outlines the political and economic problems of her time as objectively as she can, but then the image breaks up and deep rhythmic music starts up. As a circular light like a Dalek's eye glows and pulses, the woman's voice becomes a single repeated word: "history".

Do not adjust your set – the future the woman speaks from is our time. She is speaking to 1987, from 2013.

This is artist Haroon Mirza's film, titled "This content was transmitted to this date in 1987", in the Channel 4 series Random Acts. It showed in the early hours of 19 March 2013 and, says the artist, simultaneously...

Terry Gilliam went on to direct such great films as “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” “Brazil” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (to name just a few), but he began his career primarily as an animator. Before moving to England he was a strip cartoonist on Help! magazine, and then after making his trip across the pond one of his first gigs was as an animator for sequences on the children’s TV show “Do Not Adjust Your Set” which starred future Pythons Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones, as well as other future comedy icons like David Jason. It was during the same period that Gilliam directed the first of his two pre-'Holy Grail' animated shorts, “Storytime.” The film contains three loosely connected animated segments – “Don the Cockroach,” “The Albert Einstein Story” and “The Christmas Card” – with the latter actually originally created specially for the "Do...

Tube Talk Gold has looked back at many classic sitcoms, but there aren't many shows that can truly hold the mantle of 'Gold', and this month's edition focuses on a truly British institution, featuring some of the UK's most favourite characters, catchphrases and moments for over 20 years.

After a near-miss Us remake starring John 'Luigi from Super Mario Bros' Leguizamo, the legacy of Only Fools and Horses can carry on untarnished.

Only Fools and Horses - Originally broadcast from September 8, 1981 to February 3, 1991 and Christmas specials from 1991 to 2003.

John Sullivan had already created the successful sitcom Citizen Smith for the BBC when he was commissioned to write a new series. Influenced by the popularity of ITV's Minder, he came up with an idea of a cockney market trader in modern-day London. Using a strange old American saying for its title, he wrote a series that would go on to become possibly the UK's best-loved comedy.

This week's Twitchvision chat was done from the home theatre where I've assembled a crack team of football watchers. Timed almost perfectly with a power outage at the Nola Superdome, I was on air talking about the Walken/Pacino/Arkin buddy pic Stand Up Guys, Warm Bodies, and Bullet To The Head.While the Skype setup at the broadcast end kind of made me look like something out of Ringu, you at least get to see a bit of the custom football-shaped cupcakes that were made for the gatheringClick image below to launch player Do not adjust your set......

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Frankie Go Boom has debuted a new poster ahead of its premiere at SXSW, and it’s fair to say it’s one of the more attention grabbing one-sheets we’ve seen in the past few years. Do not adjust your set, because that is indeed Ron Perlman in a wig, make-up and a frock, starring as probably the most incongruous man in drag since Divine did her “thing” in Pink Flamingos. As for the plot, a brief synopsis has been recovered by Movieline, and it sounds just as off-the-wall as the poster would suggest. “While...

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Frankie Go Boom has debuted a new poster ahead of its premiere at SXSW, and it’s fair to say it’s one of the more attention grabbing one-sheets we’ve seen in the past few years. Do not adjust your set, because that is indeed Ron Perlman in a wig, make-up and a frock, starring as probably the most incongruous man in drag since Divine did her “thing” in Pink Flamingos. As for the plot, a brief synopsis has been recovered by Movieline, and it sounds just as off-the-wall as the poster would suggest. “While...

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The recent success of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) has seen Brad Bird make the successful jump from animation to live-action filmmaking. Bird is best known for his work on Pixar productions The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007), and for his cult classic animation The Iron Giant (1999).

Alongside Bird, this year a number of prominent animators are set to follow the same course. The upcoming buddy cop comedy 21 Jump Street (2012) – based on the popular eighties TV show of the same name – is being directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the duo behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2011). March will also see Bird’s colleague from Pixar Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo (2003) and Wall-e (2008), enter the live-action arena with the big-budget blockbuster John Carter (2012).

Whereas it may seem a somewhat risky prospect to hire an animator to helm a major production, the likes of Bird and his cohorts are not the...

'My most unappealing habit? Farting in small, enclosed spaces'

Terry Gilliam, 71, was born in Minnesota. Having worked as an animator and strip cartoonist on Help! magazine in New York, he moved to the UK in 1967, where he began working on the children's TV show Do Not Adjust Your Set. In 1969 he launched the comedy TV series Monty Python's Flying Circus, with Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman and John Cleese. The series spawned four movies, including Monty Python And The Holy Grail, which Gilliam co-directed with Jones. To see an online screening of his new short film, The Wholly Family, and to join Gilliam in conversation, go to guardian.co.uk/thewhollyfamily.

When were you happiest?

Lost in a piece of music.

What is your greatest fear?

Any harm to my children.

What is your earliest memory?

Hallucinating with scarlet fever that the refrigerator in the next room blew up,...

This hilarious 1968 Monty Python-era Christmas Video by Terry Gilliam for the TV series "Do Not Adjust Your Set" holds up; it's roaming the web this season thanks to various postings. Gilliam comments on his Facebook page: Hope you are all managing to see my ancient animation that's currently rampaging around the web. It's on The Huffington Post site....It roams the free range of the web. Leaping from Xmas tree to Xmas tree. Do I get a penny from all the joy it brings? No! Do I care? No. If you need a last minute gift for a bike-obsessed friend there is a great app from a film director friend of mine, Richard Loncraine. It's absolutely beautiful. A kind of bike...

Check out this incredibly awesome animated Christmas card created by Terry Gilliam in 1968. This was created for a show called Do Not Adjust Your Set which is a series Gilliam worked on before Monty Python. Gilliam would basically cut up old creepy Christmas cards and turn them into crazy scenes of Christmas insanity. I hope you enjoy this video below! My favorite scene is where Santa Claus is laughing as he robs children. 

Source: PreSurfer (http://presurfer.blogspot.com/2011/12/terry-gilliam-christmas-card.html)...