The Complete Ripping Yarns

After the Monty Python's Flying Circus series ended in 1974, two of the group's members, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, went on to write these nine half-hour programs, shot on film rather than video and first broadcast between 1976 and 1979. Absurdist takeoffs on the sort of tales found in boys' adventure anthologies from the turn of the century, they're all hilarious, a pitch-perfect marriage of genre convention and Pythonesque eccentricity that include a parody of Tom Brown's Schooldays, a riff on the old monkey's paw horror story, a wildly convoluted murder mystery, a World War I “Great Escape” tale, a surrealistic spy spoof, an episode set in British India, and a story about an intrepid, but very stupid, explorer. Perhaps the funniest are the quasi-Horatio Alger yarn about the most boring man in his village and the piece about a soccer fanatic obsessed with saving his hometown team. Palin stars in all of the episodes and plays multiple roles in several, and though Jones appears only in the Tom Brown takeoff, the supporting casts include some of the finest British character actors of the day. This two-disc DVD set features superbly restored transfers of the shows (one of the extras illustrates the improvement, before-and-after style), complete with amiable, though sometimes surprisingly critical, audio commentary from Palin and Jones. Other extras include an autobiographical 1983 featurette on Palin's comic roots, a deleted scene, a photo gallery, six of the original scripts, and a lavish souvenir booklet. The Complete Ripping Yarns represents some of the best British television humor you're likely to encounter, and the series is beautifully presented here. Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. (F. Swietek)