Extract from Spike Milligan's Q5 series, shown March/April 1969 and acknowledged by the Pythons as a major influence on their FLYING CIRCUS which first aired in October of the same year: John Cleese (quoted in THE PYTHONS), "(Terry Jones and I) both happened to watch Spike Milligan's Q5 and one or the other of us phoned up and said kind of jokingly, but also rather anxiously, 'I thought that's what we were supposed to be doing?' And the other one said, 'That's what I thought too.' We felt that Spike had got to where we were trying to get to, but if you'd asked us the previous day, we couldn't have described very well what that was. However, when we saw it on the screen we recognised it, and in a way the fact that Spike had gone there probably enabled us to go a little bit further than we would have otherwise gone."
[Note: Q5 episodes were originally screened in Colour but only 3 are believed to survive and only as B&W 16mm copies]