User Reviews

Following 'The Golden Age Of Ballooning' and 'Michael Ellis', it was back to the sketch format for 'Monty Python'. 'The Light Entertainment War' opens with 'Up Your Pavement', a spoof of 'Steptoe & Son', before moving onto a WW2 sketch in which various R.A.F. officers baffle one another with terms like "Dicky Birdy" and "Wizard Prang!". We then get a court-martial in which Idle's character is charged with ''trivialising the war'. Chapman and Idle play a strange married couple - he loves 'woody' words while she prefers 'tinny' words. There's a very good Terry Gilliam animation in which a man sleeps while strange machines work throughout the night to create the following day's good weather. The sketch in the B.B.C. programme planning department ( "how about Dad's Navy?" ) anticipates Kenny Everett's mocking of the B.B.C. Board of Governors by about a decade. Neil Innes closes the show with the song 'Where Does A Dream Begin?'. He contributed numbers to 'Rutland Weekend Television' and later landed his own series - 'The Innes Book Of Records'.

Funniest moment - the spoof war movie trailer which, boasts among other attractions, 'Algy, the bisexual navigator!".

Good stuff. Season 4 was not particularly well received at the time. Some blamed Cleese's departure for the perceived 'drop in quality'. The B.B.C. gave the impression they could not wait to be rid of this troublesome show - Graham Chapman said later they got worse offices with each new series, and for the last, they were placed in a shed near the main gate!

The Rule of Thumb is that Python was never as good in the P.C. (post-Cleese) era. John Cleese himself has intimated as much in an interview (curiously, to justify his leaving--but Cleese, brilliant as he was, also was always a self-righteous, know-it-all blowhard).

But this Rule is only accurate in the shows with the longer sketches ("Mr. Neutron" and "Michael Ellis" and, to a far lesser extent, "The Golden Age of Ballooning.") In fact, "The Light Entertainment War" is one of the best Python episodes, though Americans won't get some of its subtleties.

The show starts with a spoof of the popular British show "Steptoe and Son" (basis of the American "Sanford and Son"), which segues successfully into a wickedly funny sketch of an RAF flier in the war (it's not clear which) who has lost his knack for banter.

Apparently Palin and Jones always wanted longer sketches and with Cleese's absence (and perhaps with Chapman's drinking and lackadaisical approach to work) they may have dominated the group. Fortunately, in "The Light Entertainment War" only one sketch, the trial sequence, tends to run on too long; but this may be more of the Pythons deliberately aggravating their audience.

Apart from the trial, which could be cut in half, every sketch in the show works. And "The Light Entertainment War" ends with the credits over a wonderful, original Neil Innes song, "When Does a Dream Begin?" The song is sung, on grainy film footage making it look like a legitimate World War II piece, by an RAF airman (Innes) to a less than interested female (a real female this time).

Overall, one of the top shows of the series, right up there with "Face the Press" and "The Spanish Inquisition." Well, a bit below.