John Cleese: "We had the first show written and we didn’t know what to call it, and we had a whole lot of fanciful titles:' A Horse, A Spoon and A Basin', which I really liked; 'Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble and Boot'; 'Owl Stretching Time'; 'The Toad Elevating Moment'. In fact, the BBC had started to call it 'The Flying Circus'. They’d started writing it into their schedules, in ink, and so they said, “Well, could you call it The Flying Circus? Because otherwise we’d have to write out new schedules.”
Then we couldn’t decide who. We thought it might be 'Gwen Dibley’s Flying Circus', because she was a name Michael had pulled out of a newspaper, and then somehow we went off Gwen Dibley. But somebody came up with Monty Python and we all fell about, and I can’t explain why; we just thought it was funny that night!"