TV Comedy Tie-In Books - Monty Python

These were the books for me that kick-started my dedicated fascination with the comedy tie-in book. In particular, it was two books packaged together for sale:- Monty Python’s Big Red Book (which is blue, ha ha) and The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok (sic). Of the two, I prefer the Papperbok and there’s more new material in it but both have a pleasing design sense and play slightly with the form of the book itself, featuring differently sized insert pages to simulate brochures, etc.

This lead me to the script books for the films - Life Of Brian, Holy Grail and Meaning Of Life. Of those, The Meaning Of Life is perhaps least interesting as it merely reproduces the shooting script. The Life Of Brian is a massive A3 flipbook with the script (including some deleted material) on one side and a scrapbook with additional scenes, stories and articles on the other. The Holy Grail includes a very early draft of the film (which, although interesting to see their initial direction, would have been slightly disappointing seeing as it largely recycles the longest sketch from the shortened fourth series of the TV show) and also the budget sheet for the film as well as a large number of deleted/alternate scenes with crossings out and scribblings all over it.

In addition to the main Python books, you also had ones such as The Rutland Dirty Weekend Book, written by Eric Idle and based upon his follow-up show, Rutland Weekend Television as well as general comedy spin off books like Dr Fegg's Encyclopedia Of All World Knowledge (originally released as Bert Fegg's Nasty Book For Boys And Girls) , an educational textbook which appears to have been written by a psychopath (but was in reality written Michael Palin and Terry Jones)

(In the 90s, they did ultimately release two hardback script books for all four series of the TV shows but these really are just a transcript of what you see on screen with nothing in the way of any insight into the processes, discarded sketches, etc. of making an iconic TV comedy show. Very disappointing really.)

In large part, I think it’s the design that appeals for the more successful of their efforts. A chance to break out of the more traditional structures of a book and play around with the form a bit more. Like the comedy albums that were prevalent in the 70s and into the 80s, Python really embraced this as another way of getting material out there.

Of course, they weren’t the only ones doing it...