Monty Python's Flying Circus (Seasons 1–4)

Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974) is the BBC sketch series that rewrote the rules of TV comedy, and you can watch online on iFILM. Four seasons, six writer-performers, and zero interest in where a joke is "supposed" to end.

Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin wrote and played nearly all of it themselves. Sketches stop without punchlines, bleed into one another, and detonate into Gilliam's cut-out animation. The Ministry of Silly Walks, the dead parrot, the Spanish Inquisition nobody expected — bits that strangers still quote half a century later started here. Don't look for logic; the show dismantles it on purpose.

The troupe lent its name to a programming language and to "spam" in its internet sense — that canned-meat sketch traveled further than anyone could have guessed. The humour is absurd, sometimes deliberately tasteless, and it doesn't land for everyone — but when it lands, it lands for life. Stream every episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus online on iFILM.