The court reconvened some thirty minutes later, and Judge Lasker remarked wryly, “I have not had the benefit of talking to all my scriptwriters, or having this material edited one way or another.” He need not have apologized. His decision, with its alternating good news and bad news for everyone in the room, was equal to the theatricality of the occasion.

“I find that both of the parties here, as I said at the outset of the hearing this morning, have proceeded in good faith,” Judge Lasker began. The Pythons, he went on, “sincerely hold the view that they are entitled to have their work shown as they created it,” while ABC, in cutting the shows, manifestly believed “that it had the right to make those changes and that it was serving the interests of the public as well as of its own company in doing so.” He observed parenthetically that procedures probably ought to be tightened to avoid similar misunderstandings in the future, and he continued, “The law favors the proposition that a plaintiff has the right under ordinary circumstances to protection of the artistic integrity of his creation. In this case I find that the plaintiffs have established an impairment of the integrity of their work. Though the revised version, which I have no doubt was edited by those concerned with care and a desire to preserve the original quality of the work, does breathe the originality and fantasy and comedy of the uncut version, it nevertheless has caused the film or program, in my view, to lose its iconoclastic verve. If, to use the analogy used by one of the plaintiffs in his testimony, the nude remains a character in ‘Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,’ she is very much in the background. That the reasons for the changes which were made were made in good faith and for what may be considered sound professional requirements does not minimize the loss in aesthetic or philosophic punch. Furthermore, the cut is a heavy cut. It is a cut of twenty-two minutes out of ninety minutes, which comes near the border at which one might say that the cuts, if not fatal, certainly made it very difficult for the patient to live in good health. Finally, the damage that has been caused to the plaintiffs is irreparable by its nature.”

Hope was stealing across the faces of the Pythons. Lasker gave them the bad news all at once, like a bucket of cold water in a vaudeville turn: “Nevertheless, there are important reasons why I will decline to grant the injunction as requested.” It was not clear, he said, “who owns the copyright on the program we are talking about as distinct from the script.” It was not clear whether the BBC and Time-Life should have been parties to the lawsuit. But one thing was clear: “ABC will suffer significant financial loss if it is enjoined, though conceivably it might recover its monetary damages, if they occur, from Time-Life or the BBC, or both. ABC, however, has demonstrated that it will also suffer some irreparable damage if it is enjoined, including damage to its relations with affiliates, an implication of sloppiness of management—which I do not believe would be justified under the circumstances—and, finally, being put in an unfavorable light with the public and the government.” Lastly, he said, there was “a somewhat disturbing casualness” in the apparent tardiness of the Pythons’ discovery that they had been wronged. “Under the circumstances,” Lasker said, “the motion for a preliminary injunction for the relief requested, namely, to stop the show, is denied.”

That seemed to be that, but Lasker was not through. “However,” he said, “I am willing to consider—although I do not know precisely how to phrase it—a motion for more limited relief. I have in mind the possibility, if the plaintiffs would like to make such a motion, for some kind of statement to be made on the show with regard to the content of the show: a disavowal by the plaintiffs, or some explanation of the process that has occurred here, if the plaintiffs feel that that would be the next best thing or better than nothing with regard to their professional standing and their concerns growing out of the revision of the program. Of course, such an application would have to be made quickly. I would give it the most serious consideration, and I am telling ABC right now that I would, and I would be likely to grant such relief, as long as it was sensibly phrased and did not, of course, consume too much of the time of the program—and I don’t see why it would.”

This unexpected, Solomonic twist left the courtroom momentarily stunned. “My silence is not to be taken as any agreement or otherwise,” Clarence Fried managed to say. “I just don’t know what the position of ABC would be. I would have to consult with them.” When Shanks was asked what he thought of the decision, he said, with a smile that was only half ironic, “Justice has been served.” As for the Pythons, they began, after a few minutes, to imagine that they had won something like a victory. They stayed behind in the courtroom with their lawyer to work on the text of their proposed disavowal, which would have to be submitted after the weekend. Judge Lasker, still wearing his robes of office, came into the room, shook Gilliam and Palin by the hand, and told them shyly that he was one of their greatest admirers. Gilliam, who was returning to London that night with Palin, remarked to a friend wonderingly that one of the ABC people had asked him if he would mind making the disavowal funny.

On Monday, Judge Lasker ordered ABC not to proceed with the broadcast unless it included the following announcement, which had been written by the Pythons and toned down by the Judge: “The members of Monty Python wish to disassociate themselves from this program, which is a compilation of their shows edited by ABC without their approval.” The announcement was to be shown on screen for twenty seconds, and read aloud, at the beginning of the program, and it was to be repeated in full during the first commercial break.

By this time, ABC had had a chance to decide what it thought of such monkeyshines: it thought very little of them. As soon as Lasker issued his order, ABC’s lawyers went upstairs to the Court of Appeals and filed a motion for a “stay pending appeal,” the effect of which would be to queer the order. Three Circuit judges—Paul R. Hays, William H. Timbers, and Murray I. Gurfein—would rule on the motion the next day, and Fried and his associates used the time to draw up a number of papers in support of their position. They repeated the arguments they had used against the temporary injunction, and declared that ABC would cancel the broadcast rather than carry “a disclaimer which is so distasteful and which creates such a dangerous precedent that it is worse than the granting of the injunction without conditions.” They then made two startling claims. The first was that carrying the disclaimer would violate ABC’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression—an ingenious thought but one that seemed Pythonesque at best and Orwellian at worst. The second claim, expressed in unusually passionate language, was this: “To accept the conditions imposed by the Court would only invite actions for injunctive relief by every writer, artist, cameraman, director, performer, musician, lighting engineer, set and dress designer, editor and sound-effects man and many others who contribute to making a motion picture or television program on the claim that his component part in the composite undertaking was not according to his liking or artistic sense.” What this remarkable outburst seemed to reveal was a great network’s naked fear of the people who create programs for it—people who, however hypnotized by money they may or may not eventually realize, are always motivated in the first instance in their choice of profession by an aesthetic impulse. But ABC’s vision of itself as a kind of corporate St. Sebastian martyred in a hail of legal arrows was probably, from its standpoint, if not from that of the viewing public, too pessimistic. The Bosch-like horde of minions falling over each other to plunge ABC into an inferno of court-induced chaos would almost certainly never have materialized, however salutary an effect such a development might have had on the quality of the network’s programming. Most people who choose to work in television, particularly in commercial television, are prepared to accommodate themselves to the prevailing realities. The Pythons had the psychic and financial resources—and the safe shelter back home at the BBC—to enter the lists against Goliath. Few others do.