Terrence Vance "Terry" Gilliam ( /ˈɡɪliəm/; born 22 November 1940) is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam is also known for directing several films, including Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), 12 Monkeys (1995), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). The only "Python" not born in Britain, he took British citizenship in 1968.

Gilliam was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Beatrice (née Vance) and James Hall Gilliam, who was a traveling salesman for Folgers before becoming a carpenter. Soon after, they moved to the nearby Medicine Lake.

The family moved to Panorama City, California, in 1952. Gilliam attended Birmingham High School where he was class president and senior prom King, was voted "Most Likely to Succeed", and achieved straight A's. During high school, he began to avidly read Mad magazine, which was then edited by Harvey Kurtzman; this later influenced his work.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus (known during the final series as just Monty Python) is a sketch comedy series created by the comedy group Monty Python and broadcast by the BBC from 1969 to 1974. The shows were composed of surreality, risqué or innuendo-laden humour, sight gags and observational sketches without punchlines. It also featured Terry Gilliam's animations, often sequenced or merged with live action.

The first episode was recorded on 7 September and broadcast on 5 October 1969 on BBC One, with 45 episodes airing over four series from 1969 to 1974, plus two episodes for German TV.

The show often targets the idiosyncrasies of British life, especially that of professionals, and is at times politically charged. The members of Monty Python were highly educated. Terry Jones and Michael Palin are Oxford graduates; Eric Idle, John Cleese, and Graham Chapman attended Cambridge; and American-born member Terry Gilliam is an Occidental College graduate. Their comedy is often pointedly intellectual, with numerous erudite references to philosophers and literary figures. The series followed and elaborated upon the style used by Spike Milligan in his groundbreaking series Q5, rather than the traditional sketch show format. The team intended their humour to be impossible to categorise, and succeeded so completely that the adjective "Pythonesque" was invented to define it, and later, similar material. Terry Jones once commented, jokingly, that the fact that they had inspired a new word in the dictionary shows how miserably they had failed.^{[citation needed]}

This is a list of all 45 episodes from the television series Monty Python's Flying Circus:

The original air dates do not all apply to BBC Scotland, which took a different approach to airing the series.

(episode 1; aired 5 October 1969; recorded 7 September 1969)

(episode 2; aired 12 October 1969; recorded 30 August 1969)

(episode 3; aired 19 October 1969; recorded 14 September 1969) This episode had the longest title.

(episode 4; aired 26 October 1969; recorded 21 September 1969)

Owl Stretching Time was a proposed name for the series itself.

BBC-1 began colour broadcasting officially on 15 November 1969. Since September 1969, however, they had been broadcasting colour programmes "unofficially", so while the whole of the first series was broadcast in colour, this episode was the first to be advertised as being in colour (source: Notes taken from BBC videotape operators and transmission managers made at the time).

Many sketches in this episode are ended prematurely by Graham Chapman's army character ("The Colonel"), who protests rip offs of the British army's slogan, "It's a Man's Life in the Modern Army"