And Now for Something Completely Different

And Now for Something Completely Different (1971) is the Monty Python troupe's first feature, and you can watch online on iFILM. It takes their sharpest bits from the first two seasons of Flying Circus and re-shoots them for the cinema, aimed at audiences who'd never caught the show on the BBC.

Don't look for a plot. There's a parrot the shopkeeper insists is merely resting, though it is plainly dead. A lumberjack who breaks into song about habits nobody asked about. Gangs of marauding grannies, a pageant for the year's most useless aristocrat, conversations that derail mid-sentence. The six writers — Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin — play nearly every part themselves, with Gilliam's cut-out animation gluing the chaos together.

Ian MacNaughton, who directed the series, keeps it moving across a brisk 88 minutes. In that time the Pythons skewer British manners, bureaucracy, advertising and the very notion of a tidy storyline. The humour is dry, rude and entirely deadpan: it either lands at once or sails right past you. If you've never met them, this is the cleanest way in before the series proper. Stream And Now for Something Completely Different (1971) online on iFILM.