Still having us in stitches after all these years

I'm looking forward to John Cleese's magisterial history of psychoanalysis, myself. Not commissioned yet, at least not as far as I know, but having watched Terry Gilliam tackle the early history of cinema on Saturday and Terry Jones take on the C rusades(BBC2) last night, you wonder if it can be far off. In fact, now I think of it, the series is shamefully overdue: one of the most influential intellectual movements of the century and John Cleese on hand to play the Rat Man, if things threaten to get a little stodgy. Shouldn't be any problem in whipping up American co-production money, either. Six parts, Spring 1996 please.

And, unless you are exceptionally puritanical, there needn't be huge sacrifices in this concession to popular taste. This is partly because of the coat-tails you are riding on - after all, we're not talking about Bobby Davro, who might be pushed to give a convincing account of the Albigensian Heresy. We're talking about the Monty Python team. They virtually invented the notion of the erudite joke with all those gags about Kierkegaard and Proust, and they proved that you could turn intellectual R historyinto surreal comedy for a general audience. Now they appear to be working out whether the process is reversible.

Happily the answer seems to be yes, even though there is the odd moment when everyone forgets why they're there - when Jones interviewed a goose you had to look away in embarrassment until he'd finished. I'd also better confess that I approve of the programme as someone whose stock of knowledge about the Crusades was increased around a hundredfold by watching it, so if there were gross errors of fact or hideously wayward judgements don't expect me to detect them. I take some reassurance, as m any viewers will, from the presence of Sir Stephen Runciman, the most distinguished British historian of the Crusades, who both appears and is credited as a special consultant. This is part of the point of hiring consultants, of course; they hang on the wall therelike a lawyer's diplomas, impressive and reassuring. It's also, incidentally, a wise strategy to get the leading authorities on board, to reduce the possibility of a volley of canonical fire coming in your direction after transmission. In this respect Alan Ereira and David Wallace have been particularly careful, also signing up Professor Suheil Zakhar - for the other side, as it were.

There's an oblique hint at the vivacity of this history in that fact alone; the long combat between Christianity and Islam is hardly a dead subject. But Jones gave further life to the thing by his judicious use of anachronism, a risky device but a usefulone too. Sometimes it was just a grace note in passing; "Today the largest enclosed space on earth is the Pentagon. In the 11th century it was [the cathedral at] Cluny," said Jones, a beautifully economical hint at the geography of power in the Middle Ages. His account of the rival noblemen contending for the prestigious leadership of the First Crusade was insinuated into a Pathe-style propaganda film ("The Pope says Go!"), quite fun in itself but also suggestive about the popular response to the Church's recruitment drive. The Emperor Alexius had asked for some help in fighting the Turks; to his dismay he got 60,000 armed pilgrims, fired up by medieval atrocity stories and bent on Jerusalem or bust.

There were times when levity (not necessarily inimical to serious concerns) threatened to become flippancy - in particular when Jones was discussing the barbarous cruelties of the early crusaders, their pious eagerness to slaughter and torture. It matters to the programme that this isn't just a joke, that we see these savageries as continuous. Indeed that large ambition may be the best defence of the populist manner adopted here, treating history as if it happened yesterday.