Nathan and Ben return with a scheme called “The Other Podcast” where we threaten to analyse episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus if you don’t listen.  The next podcast scheme might be the turning point. Until then, enjoy their musings on Graham Chapman’s depictions of camp and a quiz on Cartesian Dualism.

Sources and References:

The BBC provided this retrospective article about the Kray twins, but the embedded video didn’t work for me, so I instead watched this brief excerpt from a studio interview with the twins that I found on YouTube. It may or may not have been the same interview.

The New York Times review of The Boys in the Band, by the always idiosyncratic Glenn Kenny, and Glen Weldon’s perspective for NPR make for a nice set of responses to the history of the work and its relationship to the time, the original theatrical production, and the previous cinematic adaptation.

Looking briefly into finding a parallel source for Nathan’s memory of the requirement that any portrayal of gay persons on TV must be caricature, I stumbled upon this timeline of LGBTQ+ life at the BBC, which mentions that perhaps the first mainstream broadcast of gay slang Polari is done in a script by Cleese-compatriot Marty Feldman. The ’70s, the article says, “see many camp, effeminate but never actually out and positive LGBTQ+ characters on TV” and wonders if queer performers “present[ed] their authentic selves in the only way TV allowed at the time?”

This week’s underlying quiz music was clipped from the opening to a foxtrot by Michael Jary, listed as in the public domain on Archive.org.