And now for something entirely similar

Andy Pemberton

• Last Updated: October 20. 2009 4:36PM UAE / October 20. 2009 12:36PM GMT

The surviving Pythons: Michael Palin, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle at the premiere of Monty Python: Almost the Truth – the Lawyer's Cut in New York last week. Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Monty Python reconvened on a stage in New York last week to receive a Bafta award and for the premiere of the new documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth – The Lawyer’s Cut.

The six-hour documentary, which marks the 40th anniversary of the celebrated comedy troupe, features favourite sketches as well as interviews with the surviving members – John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. (Graham Chapman, the sixth member, died in 1989.) It will be broadcast this week on America’s Independent Film Channel before an eight-hour version is released on DVD on Friday.

It’s yet another celebration of all things Python: their new documentary joins a YouTube video channel of best sketches (including the Ministry of Silly Walks), the Python-inspired hit musical Spam-A-Lot, The Pythons: Autobiography By The Pythons, a 2005 PBS documentary called Monty Python’s Personal Best, and a DVD entitled The Life of Python, made by the BBC.

Some observers, the ones who cannot recite the Dead Parrot sketch by heart, could be forgiven for thinking this is rather a lot of Python. Especially considering the comic troupe are no more. They have ceased to be. Perhaps that’s why some ex-Pythons have doubts.

“They [the directors] did three-hour interviews [with Pythons for the documentary] and I thought, ‘My God, how on earth can you talk about Python for three hours?’” said Jones.

“I wasn’t particularly keen,” agreed Palin, “partly because I thought a 40th anniversary is too obvious for Python to do – we should have had our 39th or our 43rd, but not the 40th.”

So why did they bother? Perhaps because recent years have not been so kind to the Pythons. Cleese, 70, who walked out halfway through the fourth series of The Flying Circus in 1974, effectively ending the television series, has been the most successful solo Python, co-writing and starring in Fawlty Towers, the British sitcom that regularly places higher than any Monty Python episode in comedy polls. He also co-wrote and starred in the cinema hits A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures and has made appearances in other successful films including Shrek 3.

But while he shrugged off his two other divorces, his third, finalised in August this year, was spectacularly costly. Cleese owes his latest ex-wife, Alyce Faye Eichelberger, £12 million (Dh72m) in cash and assets, and is planning to tour a one-man show entitled Alimony Tour Year One in order to pay for his divorce. And he’s not happy.

“In my 70th year I will still be spending two months a year doing work that is of no interest to me and which is probably slightly spiritually depleting in order to feed the beast,” he said.

Cleese’s divorce sees him exchange roles with Idle as the most financially needy ex-Python.

After post-Python hits including the Beatles-style “mockumentary” All You Need Is Cash, Idle experienced a series of debilitating film flops. When, in 1990, he suggested a follow-up to the Pythons 1975 hit Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he was rebuffed by the other Pythons led by Cleese.

“The funny thing about John is he doesn’t mind if people don’t like him,” said Idle around this time. But since then, Spam-A-Lot, his 2005 spin-off Broadway musical, has won two Tony awards and made Idle the most financially successful Python.

Gilliam, who was the Pythons’ inspired illustrator and the wildly inventive director responsible for Brazil, The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys, has been unable to shake off his reputation for making costly films beset by production problems.

His 1999 film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was famously shut down after just a week, while his most recent work, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, which has yet to be released, suffered the death of its star Heath Ledger.

Jones, meanwhile, who has written books about history and directed the modestly successful British film Personal Services, has not experienced a substantial mainstream hit since Monty Python. But the 67-year-old Jones did make news when he became a father again after leaving his wife of more than 30 years for Anna Söderström, a Swedish graduate 41 years his junior. Their baby, Siri, was born this month.