It's memories that I'm stealing, but you're innocent when you dream

For the second week in a row the best thing on television was the Best of Monty Python on PBS. This week's episodes (3 and 4 in and series of 6) featured the Best of John Cleese and the Best of Terry Gilliam.

The premise of Cleese's episode, that he's now a senile, cantankerous old man, started off as funny, but became a little tired by the end. Still, I really liked that the show began with a fake memorial to Cleese - showing, once again, that there's not much funnier than death. Again, the focus of the show's is not (necessarily) the most popular sketches, but the personal favourites of the individual members. Cleese has always been my favourite Python. He plays straight-laced authority figures so well - trying so hard to be proper, but seething with rage just beneath the surface.

Gilliam's all animated episode worked surprisingly well. Originally, the stuff that linked the sketches together, there's more than enough substance in these pieces to warrant a full hour. While he's had the most obvious success post-Python, Gilliam always seemed the odd Python out: American, an animator, absent from most sketches. The framing narrative of Gilliam's episode is Terry exposing the secret origins of "Monty Python's Flying Circus." The show was originally supposed to be all animation and that he'd hired these unemployed "University boys" to do voices and a bit of live action filler, who later kissed butt to the bigwigs at BBC to get bigger parts. Gilliam's animation was (and is) unlike anything before. In an age when major animation studios are turning their attention the possibilities of computer-animation, there's a lost magic about the found art and unique vision of Terry Gilliam.