Monty Python's Flying Circus is a disease, one of those mad maladies propagated by public television, the same people who hooked audiences on Julia Child's personality by promising them an educational cooking show, The French Chef. In fact, the Flying Circus has less to do with the three rings of Barnum and Bailey fame than does a boarding-house bathtub.

The success of the Flying Circus is an anomaly. It is so terribly, terribly British that the political and social satire soars archly over the heads of an American audience….

Yet, despite its incorrigible and mysterious Britishness, Monty Python's Flying Circus threatens to become an authentic hit…. Cleese and his collaborators have … captured a sense of the television medium itself. To revert to a mildly quaint McLuhanism, they have exploited the medium so completely that the Albion-bound message is really reduced to an insignificant position of importance. Who cares...