April 23rd, 1977, the host is Eric Idle and the musical guest is Alan Price

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

The framing device of Eric Idle’s second stint as host of Saturday Night Live has the Monty Python alum hosting a fundraiser to raise money for the United Kingdom. Idle trots out the Queen of England and various oddities in an unsuccessful attempt to raise funds for his home country.

It’s a spectacularly silly conceit for an especially silly episode. Idle isn’t just British; he is exceptionally English. The episodes he hosted are equally English in the extreme.

Idle was the only member of Monty Python to harness the electric power of Saturday Night Live in its prime. He was just an episode away from joining the vaunted Fiver-Timers club. 

The Rutles precede Idle’s appearances on Saturday Night Live, but it was Lorne Michaels who had the good taste and solid judgment to suggest that the Rutles become the subject of an hour-long television film documenting the Pre-Fab-Four’s rise and fall. 

Michaels produced 1978’s All You Need Is Cash, Idle’s greatest and most loved non-Monty Python project with Idle and Gary Weis, the show’s in-house short filmmaker, who also co-directed with Idle.

All You Need is Cash is a collaboration between Idle and the cast and crew of Saturday Night Live. In addition to being co-directed by a staple of the show’s early years, the iconic special featured appearances from John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Michaels, Al Franken, and Tom Davis. 

When Idle returned to 30 Rock, he brought the Rutles with him. Neil Innes channels John Lennon as Ron Nasty, performing The Rutles’ classic “Cheese and Onions” on piano. 

It follows in the Beatles’ footsteps in pairing an absolutely gorgeous melody with borderline nonsensical lyrics. “Weird Al” Yankovic has said that he has never done a Beatles pastiche because it would be impossible to do one half as good as The Rutles. 

Idle, Innes, and their comedically and musically gifted associates have clearly studied the entirety of The Beatles (and there is a lot to their mythology; they were actually quite popular) so that they could create songs that sound more like The Beatles than the Beatles themselves. 

That is equally true of “Shangri-La,” a tribute to the trippy psychedelia of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band-era Beatles. 

Things get off to an appropriately silly British start with a cold open where Idle plays a deranged English officer who torments an Irishman, played by Bill Murray, by doing cruel things to potatoes, the beloved staple of the Irish diet. 

Idle then appears as David Frost opposite Dan Aykryoyd’s Richard Nixon in a parody of the Frost/Nixon interviews. In it, the disgraced ex-president fills dead air with the most boring banter conceivable. 

It’s hard to make dullness funny rather than boring, but Aykroyd manages that feat here. I also liked the gag of having the end credits list Frost as the show’s sole writer, followed by forty to fifty “additional writing” credits involving lots of people who are most assuredly not Frost. 

Having Idle as host made the show automatically more droll, but this was still Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, so it’s chockablock with sex, drugs, violence, and shock. 

In a bit that has aged in a deeply disturbing way, Bill Murray appears on “Weekend Update” to comment on a court ruling involving the legality of spanking children. 

Murray first presents a nightmarish vision of childhood and adolescence where he was mocked for being insufficiently manly and lived to enact a weird form of spiritual revenge on all of his childhood and adolescent tormentors by taking great delight in spanking a child in an unmistakably sexual way. 

The word “panties” is inherently creepy. It’s seldom creepier than when Murray, in character, imagines the pleasure of spanking an 11-year-old girl, “It takes what seems like an eternity, but you take the trembling girl on your knee, and you pull up her dress. Yes, you’re almost home now. Your hands are shaking, but you must continue. And then the panties, oh, the panties. They’re white, and they’ve got pink or light blue trim. And you touch the panties, and you pull down the panties. And there are firm, white mounds of heaven. Sweet, sweet, sweet nirvana. The girls made fun of me, yeah. They giggled, they pointed, and they stood me up. But now they’ll pay for it.

And you hit those mounds, [pounds his right hand on the desk repeatedly] and you hit those mounds again and again, you hit them until you beg for mercy, and are you gonna do it again? And you’ll show em. Gramps? Huh? Why did you die? I missed you! Mom? Why did you remarry? Huh? Why did you leave me? Why can’t I be like everybody else? Huh? I’ll show you why! Are you gonna do it again? No!”

There is a line when it comes to dark humor. Murray’s monologue crosses that line, then recrosses it, then crosses it all over again.

Saturday Night Live was infamous as well as famous for shock in its early years but sometimes the result was less transcendent than just gross. 

Violence is the order of the day in the final sketch, where Idle plays a passenger on an airplane who very politely gets the stewardess to do his bidding by pointing a gun at her. Everyone else on the plane employs this tactic effectively as well. 

According to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s Saturday Night Live: a Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Garrett Morris was known at 30 Rock for his love of pornography, so it feels like an inside joke that he’s asking for nudie magazines here. 

Not all of the silliness works. A sketch about the Heavy Wit championship where Idle and John Belushi square off in a boxing ring in a battle of minds rather than might is too cute and nowhere near funny enough, and a sketch where Dan Aykroyd and Eric Idle converse in total gibberish is impressive from a technical standpoint but otherwise lacks both jokes and a point. 

This doesn’t quite live up to Idle’s first time on the show, but he nevertheless established himself as an ideal host, as well as one of the driving forces behind All You Need, Is Cash, one of the all-time great Saturday Night Live-derived projects 

Grade: B

Best Sketch:  The Nixon Interviews 

Worst Sketch: Heavy Wit Championship

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