Today is the 150th anniversary of the death of one of my heroes: Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Obviously I never met him, though I have taken to wearing a stovepipe hat and growing mutton-chop whiskers. I draw the line at smoking cigars the size of Mother Teresa, however.
His work can still be seen today all over the south and west of England and his influence is tangible worldwide.
As a fellow son of Portsmouth I’m immensely proud of his achievements. Personally, I never quite mastered Meccano, so, as you can imagine, my admiration is boundless.
One date I missed, however – as it would seem did an awful lot of people – was the 40th anniversary of the first recording of the seminal Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which took place on September 7, 1969.
Maybe more will be made of the 40th anniversary of the first airing on October 5.
Python wasn’t of course universally popular when it launched. It seems bizarre now, but there were some in the BBC who were outraged by it.
And certainly there was no chance of me as a six-year-old being allowed to see it. Indeed, it wasn’t until I was well into my teens that I first watched an episode.
I would imagine I wasn’t alone. In those days there were things called long-playing records (LPs) and much of Python’s catalogue was released on this format allowing the crackly pirate recordings of same on cassette tape to be passed around my school with the same reverence as the centre-fold spread in a girlie magazine.
Live at Drury Lane even saw the use of the F-word – our parents would have been outraged. It was mainly the boys who were taken with this humour; girls didn’t seem to ‘get’ it. And, I fear, if SWMBO is an example of the modern female generation, nothing has changed in 40 years.
Now, the Oxbridge team who, along with the anarchic Goons changed the course of British comedy, are far from outrageous – indeed they have become mainstream. The DVD of the very first series carries a 12 rating.
Does this mean society has lower standards today? Or simply we’re more tolerant of irreverence? What it undoubtedly does mean is that 12-year-olds in 2009 are lucky little sods, because I never got to watch this sort of brilliance at the same age. When I was their age I was already 19!
But today’s 12-year-olds won’t want to see it. It’s not ‘in yer face’ enough; it requires too much thought; and a great deal of imagination.
Today’s 12-year-olds wouldn’t see anything funny in Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky producing a painting while cycling up the A3 past the Tolworth roundabout – yes, that classic was in the very first episode.
Closeted in my bedroom with my woolly old cassette player, Python introduced me to names I’d previously not heard of; it was an education: Picasso, Kandinsky, Henri Bergson, René Descartes, Sir Kenneth Clarke and Jack Bodell.
Python didn’t play to the lowest common denominator.
Forty years on the standards have indeed been lowered; but not socially, merely in the quality of comedy on offer.
I can’t imagine clandestine exchanges of VHS copies of My Family taking place in comprehensive schools nationwide, can you?
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