And here we have three DVD sets that no fancier of Monty Python should be without. At Last The 1948 Show was a British series broadcast in 1967 which starred John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. It was an obvious antecedent of Python and some of it was very funny. Alas, most of the thirteen shows produced have either been lost or exist in not-the-greatest video. A few whole episodes survive as do a lot of bits and pieces of different episodes. According to someone who knows more about this stuff than I do, a number of scattered sketches have been assembled to form the five episodes that are on this DVD. So the material is fuzzy and the shows aren't the way they were originally aired…but it's still those four guys working near the peak of their game so it's funny enough for me. (The "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch, later used occasionally by Python, is present and worth the price, all by its lonesome. That's the one with the old guys sitting around saying things like, "We used to dream of living in a corridor…")
Shortly after Cleese and Chapman finished that show, the BBC began airing a very hip kids' show — hip in the way Soupy Sales was hip over here — that attracted something of an adult following. It starred Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, David Jason and Denise Coffey, and it was also a precusor of Python, even foreshadowing certain sketches and characters. It was called Do Not Adjust Your Set and the DVD release has about two hours of that material, some of which is also very funny. (Terry Gilliam is credited with animation but there isn't much on the episodes included.) Shortly after both this and the 1948 program went off, two guys from one and three guys from the other got together, added in the animator, and you had a very fine Flying Circus, indeed.
Lastly, after Python, Michael Palin and Terry Jones went off to do an odd but sometimes brilliant series called Ripping Yarns, and all nine episodes are on this set which also includes commentary tracks, outtakes and other special features. The show, it is said, did not do well when it first made the rounds, failing to please audiences expecting another Monty Python show. If you expect that, you'll probably be disappointed, too. If you can wrap your mind around the notion of Palin and Jones doing something different, you might enjoy it a lot. I eventually did.