It's the day before a holiday. Or in this case, ten days when Cadence will be shut down. As is traditional, I write about whatever I feel like, provided it has nothing to do with EDA or semiconductors. Today, some TV programs. This has been a big year for major anniversaries of TV shows. Two of them are still going.

Monty Python

October 8 was the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of Monty Python. Or Monty Python's Flying Circus, to give its full name, which nobody ever does. It only ran for three seasons, but it had a major effect on TV comedy going forward. 

There were two forerunners of Monty Python, both in spirit and personnel. One was a radio program called I'm Sorry I'll Read that Again, which ran from 1964-1973. John Cleese appeared there, along with Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie, who would go on to make their own comedy TV series called The Goodies (never broadcast in the US). Graham Chapman wrote some of the material with Cleese. At the boarding school I attended at the time, we all listened to it every Sunday evening.

Meanwhile, there was a children's TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, although many adults watched (me, for example), it ran from 1967 to 1969, and the cast included Michael Palin, Eric Idle, and Terry Jones. Strange animations appeared from time to time, made by Terry Gilliam. The music was provided by the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, which included Neil Innes.

The Pythons were John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, and Eric Idle, with animations by Terry Gilliam. In the third season, and in the movies, Neil Innes did the music.

The school I went to from the age of 7 to 13 was in Weston-super-Mare, where John Cleese was brought up. It turns out he went to the same school, although he is a decade older than me so our time didn't overlap. Roald Dahl went there decades earlier, too. It seems, from his autobiography Boy, that he hated it, although I was happy there. Cleese seemed to like it, according to his autobiography, and in fact returned to teach there, although again that was before I was there.

Monty Python ran for three seasons, the last one without Cleese. There were books and records, plus three movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and The Meaning of Life (most famous for Mr. Creosote finishing his meal with a very thin mint). I was at boarding school (no, we didn't play Quidditch but we did have houses) and we would all cram into the room with a small black and white TV to watch it. Since it was broadcast on a weeknight, we were not meant to be watching TV at all. But all the prefects who were meant to stop us were watching, too.

Apparently, Guido van Rossum liked Monty Python. Despite the books on the Python programming language having snakes on the cover, he actually named the language after Monty Python.

Here's perhaps the most famous Monty Python sketch of all, the dead parrot pining for the fjords:

The Simpsons

Just this week, December 17 was the 30th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Simpsons. There's actually a British connection even here since the original Simpsons animations were shorts used in The Tracy Ullman Show. She is British and her comedy career started in programs on British TV.

When the Simpsons first appeared in 1989, I was living in France. French TV picked it up and so, somewhat bizarrely, the first episodes I saw were all in French. I don't remember after 30 years whether the names of the characters were changed. Once she started going to school, my daughter spoke fluent French and she liked to watch it when it was on in the early evening. (I've also seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs many more times in French than English (Blanche Neige et les Sept Nains). Want to know the names of the dwarfs? Prof, Grincheux, Joyeux, Dormeur, Atchoum, Timide, Simplet.)

The Simpsons in French:

While on the subject of French, but nothing to do with The Simpsons, I asked someone in France once how they handled the Pink Panther movies. After all, some of the humor flows from Inspector Clouseau's (Peter Sellers) ridiculous French accent: "I've come to fix your fern". Apparently, they just dubbed it so he was speaking normal French, which wasn't funny at all. That was very different from what French TV did with the British TV program 'Allo 'Allo. This was set in France during World War II, with characters who were English, French, and German. The English spoke normally. The Germans spoke English with a ridiculously over-the-top German accent, and the French spoke English with a ridiculous French accent. In the French version, the French spoke normal French, the English spoke French with a ridiculous English accent (I'm afraid I sound a bit like that when I speak French), and the Germans spoke French with a ridiculous German accent. They completely entered into the original spirit of things, unlike the Pink Panther movies.

Sesame Street

November 10 was the 50th anniversary of the start of Sesame Street. I didn't live in the US then, and it wasn't broadcast in Britain, so the first time I came across it was when I moved here in the early 1980s and my son got old enough to watch it. One thing that I think is clever about it is the way that they insert jokes for adults that the children won't understand, which makes it interesting to watch with your kids.

Amazingly, it was not until 2006 that Abby Cadabby was introduced, the first female muppet with a starring role, 27 years after the show debuted. So for more than half of its 50-year (so far) run, there have been no female muppets as role models for girls. I only know this, since my Sesame-Street-watching-days are over (my kids are now in their 30s) since it happened to come up in a Freakanomics episode I listened to.

One thing on Sesame Street that shows you how much things have changed around here was a few lines in one episode. Guy Smiley, the smarmy game-show host is going over the prizes:

First prize, one week in Milpitas, California
Second prize, two weeks in Milpitas, Calfornia

When I first came to the US, Milpitas was just getting away from its reputation of being nothing much more than a truck-stop (similar to the reputation of Needles, California). But by the time I saw these few lines, Milpitas was the city in the nation with the fastest increasing median income in the entire US. Silicon Valley started at Palo Alto, and over time came down to North San Jose, and then curved around the bottom of the bay to go up to Milpitas and then on to Fremont (somehow missing out Alviso which remains largely un-Silicon-Valley-ified).

Sesame Street with Jack Black defining an octagon:

Hiatus

Breakfast Bytes is off for the holidays. I will be back on January 2. I wish you all the best over Christmas and the New Year.

UPDATE: Neil Innes (mentioned in the Monty Python section above) died during the hiatus on December 29th.

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