It is difficult to imagine, after four decades of watching the many television series, movies, and individual projects of each if its members, that there is anything more to be mined from Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Its arrival on New Zealand television in the 1970s marked such a radical shift, such a quantum leap in comedy, it was as if it had arrived from outer space.
Such was its popularity, parties in the 1970s were never complete without a Monty Python bore who could repeat, verbatim, the whole of the parrot sketch.
Either that, or the "I had to get up in the morning at 10 o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work 29 hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah" sketch.
Oops.
The movies, and John Cleese's Fawlty Towers, meant it was a comedy staple for a long, long time.
In fact, it all got just a wee bit lame.
Even I started to tire of Michael Palin's round-the-world experiences.
Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Prime, 8.50pm, Sunday), though, proves there is life in the old python yet.
Who knew, for instance, John Cleese's fathers name was actually Reginald Francis Cheese, and that he changed it to Cleese in 1915? And please don't email me if you are a Monty Python fanatic and you already knew that, or if Mr Cleese was joking.
I don't care.
Almost the Truth will be mana from heaven for fans, but the six-episode documentary that mines the history of the members of Monty Python is a fascinating and entertaining watch, even for the three or four people in the far north of Siberia not familiar with the comedy troupe's work.
Mr Cleese senior's decision to change his name had little effect on the early life of his most famous son.
"I don't know why," Cleese says, "cos when I went to school I was always called old cheese. It made no difference at all."
Almost the Truth begins at the beginning, with the childhoods of each of the famous six: Cleese, Terry Gillam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Palin and the late Graham Chapman, growing up in black and white in post-war Britain with rationing and the Goons or, in Gillam's case, Medicine Lake, Minnesota, with Mad magazine.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the Footlights Club at the latter with its bar that allowed access to alcohol at all hours, moulded the individual members.
So did Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and the "enormous release of energy" that was the 1960s.
Later episodes of Almost the Truth cover the success of Monty Python, censorship, controversy and celebrity.
Fun, funny, and very watchable.
