Czytaj książkę: «Monty Python Speaks! Revised and Updated Edition: The Complete Oral History»

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

FOREWORD BY JOHN OLIVER

INTERVIEWEES

INTRODUCTION

PRE-PYTHON

BIRTH

TAKE-OFF

THE PYTHONS THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

The Control Freak

Splunge!

The Nice One

The Cheeky One

The Zealous Fanatic

The Monosyllabic Minnesota Farm Boy

The Group Dynamic

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY … THE SAME?

FEAR AND LOATHING AT THE BBC

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL

THE US INVASION BEGINS

THE FOURTH (AND FINAL) SORTIE

CAUGHT IN PYTHON’S ORBIT

LIFE OF BRIAN

FLYING SOLO

THE MEANING OF LIFE

LE MORTE D’ARTHUR

THE ‘IF YOU COULD SAVE ONLY ONE THING YOU’VE PRODUCED’ CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PYTHON

SPAMALOT

DÉJÀ REVUE

EXITING THE STAGE

FINAL THOUGHTS

FOOTNOTES

THE PYTHON OEUVRE

SOURCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

FOREWORD
BY JOHN OLIVER

Writing about the importance of Monty Python is basically pointless. At this point, citing them as an influence is almost redundant. It’s assumed. In fact, from now on it’s probably more efficient to say that comedy writers should have to explicitly state that they don’t owe a significant debt to Monty Python. And if someone does that, they’ll be emphatically wrong.

This strange group of wildly talented, appropriately disrespectful, hugely imaginative, and massively inspirational idiots changed what comedy could be for their generation and for those that followed.

I first discovered Monty Python when I was probably ten years old, and back then it felt like something I shouldn’t be watching. That was already a pretty big appeal. Then I saw Life of Brian in middle school, when a substitute teacher put it on to keep us quiet on a rainy day. I’m not sure he knew exactly what he was showing us, but I’ve always been hugely grateful for the reckless professional mistake he made that day, because I’ve never forgotten how it made me feel.

I think what I’ve always loved about all of Monty Python’s work is that they’ve never been afraid to get into trouble, and Life of Brian is the perfect distillation of that. There was a famous episode of a BBC talk show back in 1979, when John Cleese and Michael Palin were being interviewed alongside the Bishop of Southwark and a writer called Malcom Muggeridge, both of whom were furious about the film. Incidentally, the very name ‘Malcolm Muggeridge’ is so stereotypically English, it’s almost racist. It’s the name of someone who should be looking after the owls at Hogwarts. Anyway, for twenty minutes, Muggeridge told them off like a pair of naughty schoolboys, calling what they’d done a ‘miserable little film,’ ‘a squalid number’ and ‘tenth rate,’ and said it contained laughs that were ‘rather easily procured.’

And while everything he said was titanic nonsense, it was that last part that drove me crazy. Because nothing about what Monty Python did was easy – not their TV show, not their albums, and certainly not Life of Brian. It’s fucking hard to write such incredibly smart, incredibly stupid comedy.

I got to interview all the Pythons after a screening in New York a few years ago. It was total, beautiful chaos. The audience seemed to turn up in reverence of them, but you’re not going to find a group of people less interested in hearing how important they are. So, they took it in turns to try and create mayhem – turning their chairs the wrong way around, walking off stage when they got bored, and sitting with the microphones in their mouths. They treated the evening, each other, and their own legacy terribly, and it felt like a far more meaningful tribute.

That’s why one of the greatest acts of love I’ve seen was the funeral for Graham Chapman. It was a de facto roast. They saw him off in the spirit he would have wanted, with no respect whatsoever. Here’s what John Cleese said about one of his best friends:

‘I guess we’re all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, such capability and kindness, of such intelligence should now be so suddenly spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he’d achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he’d had enough fun. Well, I feel that I should say, “Nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard! I hope he fries. And the reason I think I should say this is, he would never forgive me if I didn’t, if I threw away this opportunity to shock you all on his behalf.”’

With that in mind, I’ll say this to you: Monty Python are a bunch of decaying old men, and they’ll all be dead soon. Their shrivelled testicles will become dust in the wind of history. But people will be laughing hysterically at their work long, long after they’re gone.

I really hope you enjoy this book. After you’re finished, find a ten-year-old who probably shouldn’t have access to it and give it to them. It might change their life.

John Oliver is a stand-up comedian and the host and writer of the Peabody and multi-Emmy Award-winning HBO series Last Week Tonight.

INTERVIEWEES
THE PYTHONS
JOHN CLEESE

Cleese escaped a projected career in law when he accepted a job writing jokes for the BBC. Beside Python, his talent made him a valued presence on radio (I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again), TV (The Frost Report, At Last the 1948 Show, and Fawlty Towers), in films (Silverado, A Fish Called Wanda, The World Is Not Enough, and the Shrek series), and in a frighteningly long list of commercials. He also penned the autobiography So, Anyway …

TERRY GILLIAM

Born and raised in Minnesota and Los Angeles, Gilliam’s early career as a magazine illustrator and advertising agency copywriter somehow pointed him towards creating animations for British television. As a director his films away from Python include Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and, finally, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He also directed the operas The Damnation of Faust and Benvenuto Cellini.

ERIC IDLE

A razor-sharp wit with a poison pen, Idle professes to shun acting for writing and yet has acted in a plethora of non-Python projects (Nuns on the Run, Casper, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, Quest for Camelot, and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut). He authored the novel The Road to Mars; a Grammy-nominated children’s story; and the Tony Award–winning musical ‘lovingly ripped off’ from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python’s Spamalot.

TERRY JONES

Most likely of the Pythons to appear in drag, Jones is a noted history buff who has written on Chaucer and hosted the documentaries Ancient Inventions, The Crusades, and Barbarians. He also directed Personal Services, Erik the Viking, The Wind in the Willows, and Absolutely Anything; wrote several fanciful children’s books; and has contributed political op-ed columns.

MICHAEL PALIN

The most innocent-looking of the group (and consequently able to play some of the most subversive parts), Palin starred in The Missionary and A Private Function. He has since become a trusty guide for armchair travellers with his globetrotting series, including Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Himalaya, and Sahara. He also wrote the novels Hemingway’s Chair and The Truth.

CO-CONSPIRATORS
BARRY TOOK

A veteran television producer and writer, Took’s credits on radio and television include Round the Horne, The Frost Report, and The Marty Show (with Marty Feldman). It was Took who proposed the teaming of the six members that made up Python to the BBC. He did duty in Los Angeles as a producer of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In but soon returned to the UK to work as a programming executive, columnist, and comedy writer. (Took died in 2002.)

IAN MACNAUGHTON

A veteran of the BBC’s drama department before being abducted by Light Entertainment and Spike Milligan, MacNaughton was the producer of all of Python’s TV output and director of all but a handful of their shows, as well as the feature And Now for Something Completely Different. He later worked as a television, stage, and opera director out of his home base in Germany. (MacNaughton died in 2002.)

DAVID SHERLOCK

A drama teacher and writer, Sherlock was Graham Chapman’s companion of twenty-three years and witnessed the birth of Python. He also collaborated with Chapman on several projects, including Yellowbeard.

CAROL CLEVELAND

Born in the UK, Cleveland was raised in the United States but pursued acting (both comedic and dramatic) in England. Aside from her Python roles, she has appeared in numerous television series (including The Avengers, The Persuaders, and Are You Being Served?), films (The Return of the Pink Panther), and stage shows (The Glass Menagerie, Dial M for Murder), as well as her own one-woman show, Carol Cleveland Reveals All.

JOHN GOLDSTONE

The executive producer of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Goldstone was the producer of Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. He also co-produced quasi-Python projects such as Terry Jones’ The Wind in the Willows.

MARK FORSTATER

A flatmate of Terry Gilliam’s in New York City in the 1960s, Forstater served as producer of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. His other film and TV credits include The Odd Job, The Fantasist, and Grushko.

JULIAN DOYLE

Doyle’s duties as production manager on Holy Grail included staging the Black Knight sequence in East London, locating a Polish engineer in the wilds of Scotland to fashion a cog for a broken camera, and transporting a dead sheep in his van at five o’clock in the morning. He took the more sedate job of editor for Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. He has also edited Brazil and The Wind in the Willows.

TERRY BEDFORD

Director of photography for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Bedford also served as DP for Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky. He has since become a director for television and commercials, and helmed the feature Slayground.

HOWARD ATHERTON

A fellow alumnus of the London International Film School with Bedford, Doyle, and Forstater, Atherton was camera operator on Holy Grail. He has served as director of photography for such directors as Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, Lolita) and Michael Bay (Bad Boys).

NANCY LEWIS

Python’s New York-based publicist and, later, personal manager during the Seventies and Eighties.

DOUGLAS ADAMS

Not a Python, but an incredible simulation. Before creating The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams collaborated with Graham Chapman in the mid-Seventies, and even contributed a few morsels to Python. He later collaborated with Terry Jones and John Cleese on the video game Starship Titanic. (Adams died in 2001.)

HANK AZARIA

A six-time Emmy Award winner, Azaria has appeared in the Mike Nichols film The Birdcage, Cradle Will Rock, Mystery Men, and Tuesdays with Morrie, and the series Mad About You, Huff, Ray Donovan, and Brockmire. But he is probably best known as the voices of Moe, Chief Wiggum, Apu, Comic Book Guy, and several dozen other characters on The Simpsons. Azaria was a Tony Award nominee for the original Broadway production of Monty Python’s Spamalot.

INTRODUCTION

This revolution was televised.

When the six members of Monty Python embarked on their unique collaboration fifty years ago, they were reacting against what they saw as the staid, predictable formats of other comedy programmes. What they brought to their audience was writing that was both highly intelligent and silly. The shows contained visual humour with a quirky style, and boisterous performances that seemed to celebrate the group’s creative freedom. But what made Monty Python extraordinary from the very beginning was their total lack of predictability, revelling in a stream-of-consciousness display of nonsense, satire, sex, and violence. Throughout their careers they were uncompromising in their work, and consequently made a mark on popular culture – and the pop culture industry – which is still being felt today.

Two of the more revolutionary concepts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (the BBC Television series which premiered in Britain in 1969 and in the United States five years later) were the lack of a ‘star’ personality (around whom a show might have been constructed), and the absence of a specific formula. Typically, the most popular or influential comic artists in film or television were those who had shaped a powerful persona, either of themselves or of an archetypal character. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Bob Hope, Woody Allen, and Richard Pryor all worked within a formula in which the comedy would be built around a recognizable character. And while a few experimented with the conventions of motion pictures (such as Allen’s character Alvy Singer breaking the fourth wall while standing in a cinema line in Annie Hall), it was still in support of a comic personality.

Television (and radio) also perpetuated the situation comedy, in which narrative possibilities were limited by being subordinate to the conventions of already-accepted characters, with no deviation allowed. Even Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which was heralded in its time for its fast, freewheeling format, nonetheless had a format, in addition to recurring characters and situations.

Python would have none of that. Apart from a few repeated characterizations such as the Gumbys (irrepressible idiots, which were themselves pretty vaguely drawn), the series’ forty-five episodes marked a constant reinvention. Each production had its own shape, with only rare reminders of what other Python shows were about. There might be a theme to a particular episode’s contents, but even that was a pretty loose excuse for linking sketches together. It was that fluidity of style that made the Pythons seem like a rugby team which kept changing the ground rules and moving the goalposts, and still played a smashing good game – one could barely keep up with them. And even as audiences became more familiar with each Python’s on-screen personality, the six writer/performers were so adaptable and chameleonic that no one ever stood out as the star of the group – the cast was as fluid as the material.

This very flow of action and ideas was the most potent source of humour for Python. The comedy had an inner logic (or illogic) that was not contingent upon generally accepted notions of drama: there was no narrative drive, no three-act structure, and no character development (and in fact, there was often anti-character development, as when the camera turns away from a couple deemed ‘the sort of people to whom nothing extraordinary ever happened’).

As the series progressed, the troupe experimented with doing longer and longer sketches, or (as in ‘Dennis Moore’) creating characters or situations which would reappear at different points throughout the show. By the end, a couple of episodes (‘The Cycling Tour’, ‘Mr Neutron’) were in effect half-hour skits, though their lack of dramatic arc pointed to the fact that separate, disparate sketches were in effect draped over a specific character serving as a linking device.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus never had the tight adherence to form or place that John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers had, and never really told a story, as the Michael Palin and Terry Jones series Ripping Yarns did. What it did have were odd and surreal juxtapositions, a penchant for twisted violence, and a belief that the human condition is, on the whole, pretty absurd.

The films that followed – Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and The Meaning of Life – demonstrated quite vividly that this stream-of-consciousness approach could be transferred to feature-length films, but the Pythons also showed that they could (when they wanted to) have the discipline to tell an actual story. Brian is a fast-moving, fully formed tale whose comic asides never distract from the central figure’s arc. More importantly, the filmmakers offer some serious social commentary mixed in with the humour, without ever seeming pedantic or boring – a very rare talent.

Python was not about jokes; it was really about a state of mind. It was a way of looking at the world as a place where walking like a contortionist is not only considered normal but is rewarded with government funding; where people speak in anagrams; where highwaymen redistribute wealth in floral currencies; and where BBC newsreaders use arcane hand signals when announcing the day’s events. And as long as the world itself is accepted as being an absurd place, Python will seem right at home. That is why the shows and films remain funny to audiences fifty years after their premiere, even after the routines have been memorized.

Monty Python Speaks! explores the world of the Pythons, who describe in their own words their coming together, their collaboration, their struggles to maintain artistic control over their work, and their efforts to expand themselves creatively in other media. It also documents the stamp they have made on humour; the passion of their fans; and the lasting appeal of their television and film work, books, recordings, and stage shows, in Britain and around the world. It also reveals what is perhaps the definitive meaning of ‘Splunge!’

And now, ‘It’s …’

PRE-PYTHON
IN THE OLD DAYS WE USED TO MAKE OUR OWN FUN

If there is a progenitor to credit (or blame!) for Monty Python, the innovative and surreal comedy group that turned the BBC and cinema screens on their ends, one need look no further than a tall, undisciplined, manic-depressive Irishman, born and raised in India, who spent his young adulthood playing the trumpet for British troops in North Africa, before wrestling his fervent notions of humour onto paper in the back of a London pub.

Spike Milligan, author of such pithy memoirs as Adolf Hitler – My Part in His Downfall, created the revolutionary BBC Radio series The Goon Show, which was to radio comedy what Picasso was to postcards. Aired between 1951 and 1960, and featuring Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and (briefly) Michael Bentine, The Goon Show was a marvellously anarchic mixture of nonsensical characters, banterish wordplay, and weird sound effects all pitched at high speed. The surreal plots (such as they were) might concern climbing to the summit of Mt Everest from the inside, drinking the contents of Loch Lomond to recover a sunken treasure, or flying the Albert Memorial to the moon.

Milligan’s deft use of language and sound effects to create surreal mindscapes showed how the medium of radio could be used to tell stories that did not rely on straightforward plots or punchlines; it was the illogic of the character’s actions bordering on the fantastic (e.g., the hero being turned into a liquid and drunk) which moved the show along. It was a modern, dramatized version of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear – fast-paced and hip, its language a bit blue around the edges.

The artistic and popular success of The Goon Show inspired many humourists who followed. Although its surreal nature could not really be matched, its fast-paced celebration of illogic and its penchant for satire opened the doors for some of the edgier comedy that came to light in Britain in the Sixties, such as Beyond the Fringe (an internationally successful cabaret featuring Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, and Dudley Moore), and the television series That Was the Week That Was and The Frost Report.

But while The Goon Show demonstrated how broadcast comedy could bend convention, it was the passionate satire of the rising talents from university revues that forced satire – typically a literary exercise – into the vernacular of the day. If a map were to be drawn of the comedy universe in the late Fifties and early Sixties, its centre would assuredly comprise the halls of Cambridge and Oxford; between them, they produced a flood of talented writers and performers who were to raise the comedy standard, extending from stage to recordings, magazines, television, and film.

Among the many illustrious figures who began their careers in the Cambridge Footlights comedy troupe or in revues at Oxford were Humphrey Barclay, David Frost, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, Jo Kendall, David Hatch, Jonathan Lynn, Tony Hendra, and Trevor Nunn. Also from this rich training ground came five writer/performers of deft talent: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin – five-sixths of what would become the most successful comedy group in film and television, Monty Python.

Leading up to their first collaboration as Python in the spring of 1969, these five Cambridge/Oxford university graduates were working separately or in teams for several radio and TV shows at the BBC and at independent television (ITV) companies. They soon recognized similar tastes or aesthetics about how comedy should be written and performed. It was partly magnetism and partly luck which brought the group together, and the result was a programme that reinvented television comedy, launched a successful string of films, books, and recordings, and turned dead parrots and Spam into cherished comic icons.

I MEAN, THEY THINK WELL, DON’T THEY

TERRY JONES: Mike and I had done a little bit of work together when we’d been at Oxford. I first saw Mike doing cabaret with Robert Hewison, who later became a theatre critic. Mike and I and Robert all worked together on a thing called Hang Down Your Head and Die. It was in the style of Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War, and it was a show against capital punishment, which we still had in this country at that time. That was the first time Mike and I worked together. And then we did an Oxford revue called Loitering Within Tent – it was a revue done in a tent – and he and I worked out a sequence called the ‘Slapstick Sequence’ [in which a professor introduces demonstrations of various laugh-inducing pratfalls]. As far as I remember that was the first real writing collaboration we did, and in fact that sketch was later done in the Python stage show.

I did a bit of writing with Miles Kington (who was a columnist for The Independent), and then when Mike came down (I was a year ahead of Mike) he worked on a TV pop show for a while. By that time I’d got a job at the BBC, so I kind of knew what was happening, and Mike and I started writing stuff for The Frost Report. We were contributing little one-liners for Frost’s monologue and sketches, and then we got to doing these little visual films which we actually got to perform in. Little things like, ‘What judges do at the high court during recess’. We just filmed a lot of judges with their wigs and gowns in a children’s playground, going down slides.

We weren’t being paid very much for the writing; our fee in those days was seven guineas a minute – of course, that’s a minute of airtime, not how long it takes to write! We were kind of lucky [if] we got two or three minutes of material on the show, so by letting us appear in our little visual films, it meant that they could pay us a bit more.

MICHAEL PALIN: Terry and I worked together since I left Oxford, which would be 1965. Terry by that time had a job in the BBC in a script department, and we worked together very closely. We saw each other on an almost daily basis, and that was true from that period right up to the Python times; we wrote for all sorts of shows, tons and tons of stuff.

Apart from your collaboration with Terry,

were you also writing on your own?

PALIN: Not really, there wasn’t time. We had to make money in those days, too. We’d just got married and [were] having children and all that sort of thing. I probably had days when I thought, ‘Today I’m going to start The Novel,’ or whatever. And then we’d be offered by Marty Feldman a hundred pounds a minute for this new sketch (that’s between the two of us). ‘A hundred pounds a minute? I don’t believe that, that’s fantastic, so we better write something for Marty!’ So that day would be spent writing something for Marty Feldman. So yeah, we were real genuine writers during that time, we worked as a team. Although the mechanics of writing were not necessarily that we would sit in the same room with a giant piece of paper and say, ‘All right, now we’re going to make a sketch.’

JONES: Originally when we’d been writing for The Frost Report and for Marty Feldman, Mike and I would go and read them through, they’d all laugh, the sketch would get in, and then you see the sketch on the air and they fucking changed it all! We’d get furious. There was one sketch Marty did about a gnome going into a mortgage office to try to raise a mortgage. And he comes in and sits down and talks very sensibly about collateral and everything, and eventually the mortgage guy says, ‘Well, what’s the property?’ And he says, ‘Oh, it’s the magic oak tree in Dingly Dell.’ And the thing went back and forth like that. Everybody laughed when we did it, and when we saw it finally come out on TV, Marty comes in, sits cross-legged on the desk, and starts telling a string of one-line gnome jokes. This wasn’t what the joke was at all.

What happens is that people (especially someone like Marty) would start rehearsing it, and of course after you’ve been rehearsing it a few times people don’t laugh anymore. And so Marty being the kind of character he was, he’d throw in a few jokes, and everybody would laugh again. And so that’s how things would accumulate. It was things like that that made us want to perform our own stuff. We sort of felt if it worked, you wanted to leave it as it was.

Humphrey Barclay¹ asked if Mike and I would like to get together and do a children’s show with Eric Idle. We’d seen Eric in Edinburgh in my final year in the Cambridge revue, a young blue-eyed boy; he looked very glamorous on the stage as I remember! So we knew of Eric, but we’d never worked with him. The three of us wrote Do Not Adjust Your Set. It was basically a children’s TV show but we thought, ‘Well, we’ll just do whatever we think is funny, we won’t write specifically for children.’ And we had the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band in it.² And then at the same time we were doing the second series of Do Not Adjust Your Set, Mike and I were also doing The Complete and Utter History of Britain for London Weekend Television.

PALIN: The Complete and Utter History had a narrative [like] a television news programme. You had someone in the studio describing events that were going on, and then the camera would go out ‘live’ to, for instance, the shower room leading out to the Battle of Hastings where all the teams were washing, cleaning themselves off, and talking about the battle, as if it were a current affairs show in 1066 or 1285 or 1415. It was a very simple set-up. So we could parody television a little bit, but on the other hand we had to accept the convention of a television show, which made it a much more regular shape.

JONES: My big hero is Buster Keaton because he made comedy look beautiful; he took it seriously. He didn’t say, ‘Oh, it’s comedy, so we don’t need to bother about the way it looks.’ The way it looks is crucial, particularly because we were doing silly stuff. It had to have an integrity to it.

One time on The Complete and Utter History, we were shooting the Battle of Harfleur, the English against the French, and we wanted to shoot it like a Western. It was parodying Westerns where you see the Indians up on the skyline; when you come closer they’re actually Frenchmen with striped shirts and berets and baguettes and bicycles and onions, things like that. And then the Frenchmen breathe on the English: ‘They’re using garlic, chaps!’ And the English all come out with gas masks. All pretty stupid stuff. But it was very important that it should look right.

Anyway we turned up on the location to shoot it, looking around with the director, actually it was a nice gentle bit of rolling countryside amongst the woods. I said, ‘Where’s the skyline? There isn’t a skyline, doesn’t look like America, it looks like English countryside.’ We were there, we had to shoot it, but it wasn’t the thing we meant to be shooting. It wasn’t a Western parody – that element was missing from it – so it looked like just a lot of silly goings-on in front of the camera. And it was at that moment when I realized you can’t just write it, you can’t just perform it, you’ve actually got to be there, looking at the locations, checking on the costumes – everything was crucial for the jokes.

Curiously, we thought Complete and Utter History was wiped.³ The only things that existed of that were the 16-millimetre film inserts which I collected, but in fact a couple of years ago somebody turned up a whole programme that had been misfiled. All the stuff filed under ‘Comedy’ had been wiped, but this was filed under ‘History’ and so it was still there! But it was quite odd seeing it again, after all those years, and how Pythonic it was, way more so than Do Not Adjust Your Set.

Terry Jones in The Complete and Utter History of Britain.

NOW WHICH ONE OF YOU IS THE SURGEON?

John Cleese and Graham Chapman met in the Footlights club at Cambridge, where they were studying law and medicine, respectively. Cleese had originally gone to university for science, but upon realizing it wasn’t for him, he found his choices limited to archaeology and anthropology (‘which no serious-minded boy from Weston-super-Mare would waste a university education on’), economics (‘which I couldn’t think of anything much more dreadful to study’), and law.

JOHN CLEESE: Graham and I met at Cambridge when we were both auditioning for a Footlights show, which would have been 1961, and we both auditioned unsuccessfully. And we went and had a coffee afterwards and the funny thing is I remember that I quite disliked him, which is not a reaction I have to most people. But it was odd that that was my first reaction to him. It was purely intuitive.

What I liked about Footlights (which numbered about sixty) is there was a wider cross-section, so you got English people but you also got scientists, historians, and psychologists. Also, there was much more of a mix of class. A lot of the other clubs tended to have a predominant class or predominant attitude; the Footlights crowd were very mixed and very good company, very amusing, and a lot less intense and serious and dedicated than the drama societies, who (it seemed to us) took themselves a bit seriously.

At the beginning of the following university year, a number of us arrived back at Cambridge and we went to the Footlights club room and in bewilderment we saw a notice board informing us that we were now officers! We had been in the club for such a short period of time that we’d not realized that almost everyone in the club had left the previous year. So I found myself registrar, Tim Brooke-Taylor was junior treasurer, Graham was on the committee, we all had these jobs (without having the slightest idea what they entailed), but it meant that we got pushed together because we had to run the club.

Chapman and Cleese and friends.

So I got to know Graham. And he and I (and I don’t remember how) started to write together, and most of the things I wrote at Cambridge after I met Graham were written with Graham.

And then at the end of that year he went to London to continue his medical studies at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. He used to do some moonlighting, a late-night revue (which I never saw) with a guy called Tony Hendra, in a little room above the Royal Court Theatre. Graham used to come up to Cambridge occasionally and we continued to write a bit. And then when the Footlights Revue of 1963, A Clump of Plinths, started, Chapman used to come and watch and I used to make him laugh!

Then on the opening couple of weeks two very nice men in grey suits, Ted Taylor and Peter Titheradge, turned up at Cambridge. They’d noticed that I’d written a large portion of the material and they offered me a job. I was never very committed to being a lawyer, so when these guys offered me £30 a week when I was facing two and a half years in a solicitor’s office where I was going to get £12 a week (which was not much money even in 1963), I took the BBC job. I wasn’t at all sorry to say good-bye to the law; it was easy to convince my parents that it was okay because this was the BBC so there was a pension scheme – it was almost like going into the entertainment branch of the civil service.

Later when the Footlights Revue (which obviously didn’t have Graham in it) transferred to London, Anthony Buffery did not want to stay with the show very long, and his place was taken by Graham.

Cambridge Circus, directed by Humphrey Barclay, was a smash in the West End in August 1963. The show featured Chapman, Cleese, and Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor (who would later form two-thirds of the Goodies), David Hatch, Jo Kendall, and Chris Stuart-Clark. Cleese followed the stage show with a knockabout radio programme, I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, which Barclay produced for the BBC. It borrowed not only material from Cambridge Circus butalso several of its stars: Oddie, Brooke-Taylor, Hatch, and Kendall.

CLEESE: That’s what I did for a time until Michael White, the guy who put Cambridge Circus on in London, got in touch with us all about the middle of the following year and said, ‘Would you guys like to come to New Zealand and probably Broadway?’ So we all gave up our jobs and joined up.

Graham interrupted his medical studies. He always had a nice story that the Queen Mother came to St Bart’s around this time to take tea with some of them, and he actually put his quandary in front of her, and said, ‘Should I go on being a medical student or should I go off to do this show in New Zealand and Broadway?’ And she said, ‘Oh, you must travel.’ So he came! We had fun in New Zealand, which was a strange part of the Empire: very refined and very well mannered and sort of stuck around 1910. I remember [in] one town you could not find a restaurant that was open after eight o’clock!

DAVID SHERLOCK: Graham was training at St Bart’s Hospital at the same time that Cleese was still training as a solicitor. A Footlights-type revue was brought every Christmas to the patients in the wards, with all the people Graham worked with – Cleese, Bill Oddie, Jo Kendall, all the cast of Cambridge Circus – moving from ward to ward. Graham often directed; later on, he worked with other young doctors who were equally talented.

Cambridge Circus had so many elements of Python – the anarchic humour, sketches which had no punchline. The New York show was produced by Sol Hurok, who was better known at that period for bringing ballet over to New York (the Royal Ballet, etc.). It turned out these almost-schoolboys were brought over specifically as a tax loss, and on the first night they were given their notice – which is a hell of a way to open in New York, particularly as I think Clive Barnes absolutely raved.

CLEESE: We were always puzzled because it got such good reviews, with the exception of Howard Taubman of the New York Times, the former sportswriter (which I always add!), and it got this terrific review from Walter Kerr, who then – when he heard we were coming off – wrote another to try to boost the audience, which was marvellous. We could never figure out why Hurok had bothered to bring us to New York and put us on, when after we got such good reviews he didn’t bother to publicize the show. Somebody said he was looking for a tax loss and I don’t know whether there was any truth to it, or whether it was the exact truth or whether it was a rumour.

After Broadway, we went and performed at a small theater club off Washington Square called Square East. And after a time we put together a second show, but Graham said, ‘I must be off.’ So he went back to England to continue his studies.

I stayed on, got invited to do Half a Sixpence with Tommy Steele for six months, and tried to have a journalistic career at Newsweek, but my mentor disappeared to cover a crisis in the Dominican Republic so I sort of resigned before I was fired. I did one more show which took me to Chicago and Washington, and then came back to England in the beginning of 1966.

The threads start to come together at the end of 1965. David Frost had called from the airport and said, ‘Would you like to be in a television show? There are two other guys who are very funny but they’re unknowns – Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett – and there’s me, and it’s a sketch show and I’d like you to be in it, and it starts in March.’ And I said, ‘Yes, please!’ I mean, I was astonished, it was just absolutely out of the blue. David was the only person in England who knew my work at all and who was in any position of power to give me a job, so it was very lucky.

While I was in America doing these other things, that’s when they got I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again together on a regular, organized basis, and they did one or two series with Graeme Garden, and when I got back in 1966 they asked me to join the team, and I was very happy to do it. But the big thing was the television show, The Frost Report, for a number of reasons: one was I had never been particularly picked out or noticed as being especially good on stage. The moment I appeared on television something else happened, and I can only assume that some of the acting stuff I did worked better in close-up than it did from the tenth-row stalls. Because the moment I appeared on television there was a bit of a rustle of interest, and I’d got used to there not being a rustle of interest. Because when Cambridge Circus started most of the reviews were garnered by Bill Oddie (who was singing songs which he did very, very well, and he also had a couple of very amusing parts like a dwarf in a courtroom sketch), and the next most successful guy was Tim Brooke-Taylor (who had two or three big funny set pieces). I picked up a few reviews along with David Hatch, but I was not singled out.

Did Graham write outside of his partnership with John?

SHERLOCK: Graham wrote links for Petula Clark when she was doing her early Sixties television show over here. Petula Clark, while being a wonderful singer, could not ad-lib at all. She was very frightened about opening her mouth on stage and not knowing what to say. So everything had to be scripted, all the links between the songs. So he had a close rapport with Clark, which is very funny, particularly when you see some of the Python sketches later on which reference her.⁴

CLEESE: So I’d got The Frost Report, and sitting at the scriptwriter’s table were five future Pythons: Mike and Terry tended to write visual, fill-in items, which we used to shoot during the course of the week and then they would be edited into the show. And Eric typically used to write monologues which Ronnie Barker often did. So the show frequently consisted of a filmed item by Mike and Terry, one or two sketches by Graham and me, occasional Ronnie Barker pieces by Eric, and then a lot of other material from another dozen scriptwriters, of whom the leader was Marty Feldman. Graham didn’t perform; Mike and Terry would probably say that he turned up in one of the filmed items at some point, but I don’t remember him.

We did these half-hour shows every week for thirteen weeks, each on a theme. Tony Jay, who founded Video Arts and has been a friend of mine for thirty years, wrote a theme each week – advertising or education or transport. Everybody used to read the theme paper because it was actually insightful and original, and then we completely ignored it! Then, because it had gone well, David Frost said to Tim and me, ‘Would you like to do a show together?’ And we said, ‘Yes, we would,’ and we immediately said we’d do it with Graham, and then we said to Frost that as the fourth member of the team we would like to have Marty Feldman. I remember that David was quite thrown, a little embarrassed, and said, ‘Well, people would be put off by his appearance.’

So Graham and I, along with Tim and Marty, did At Last the 1948 Show, which was very much more way-out than anything we’d done. Some of it was very bizarre and very funny, it was a good little show, done on no money at all. I remember we used to edit the videotape with a razor, literally.

So in my first two years of television, between The Frost Report and At Last the 1948 Show, I did forty television shows, which is quite a lot when you’re contributing as a writer. It was pretty busy. And then I got married to Connie Booth (whom I’d met in New York), and I thought it was not fair for me to spend time in the studios until she got used to London, so I forswore acting, which cost me nothing at all. I’ve never been that attached to acting, and I can easily live without it, it’s just that it pays much better than writing – that’s the problem. And I didn’t in fact perform for really quite a long time, something on the order of eighteen months.

And during that time Graham and I wrote various things; at one point for some reason Graham, Eric, and I wrote most of a special for a very good English comedian, Sheila Hancock. We just did one show – I’ve no idea in retrospect why. And we got to know Peter Sellers. Graham and I wrote two or three screenplays for Sellers, the only one of which that got made was The Magic Christian. We came in on about draft nine of that, did I think a good draft on which they raised the money, and then Terry Southern came back and rewrote it again, and – we thought – made it worse. A certain amount of our stuff survived that, including my scene at Sotheby’s, cutting the nose off the portrait.

Graham and I towards the end of Thursday afternoons formed a habit of turning on the television to watch Do Not Adjust Your Set, which was much the funniest thing on television; although it was thought of as a kids’ show it was really funny stuff. We knew these guys although we had not spent that much time with them, and I picked Palin out as a performer and asked him to be in How to Irritate People, a special produced by Frost.

Mike and I got on very well. I wrote a lot of that with Graham and one or two of the sketches with Connie, like the upper-class couple who can’t say, ‘I love you’; they have to say, ‘One loves one’.

The cast of Do Not Adjust Your Set (clockwise from top left: Idle, Palin, David Jason, Denise Coffey, Jones).

I didn’t enjoy the experience. The recording of it was a nightmare; everything went wrong. I remember starting one sketch and then we had to relight it, we stopped in the middle of the sketch and then started again, and again stopped it and relit it. And the audience had been there so long, about halfway through the recording they started leaving to be able to catch their buses home. I remember standing in front of the camera reading something and thinking, ‘I don’t think I want to do this again as long as I live!’ It was an awful experience. Maybe that helped put me off the acting!

WITH A MELON?

Eric Idle, who was also in Cambridge (and as president of Footlights allowed women in as full members for the first time), appeared onstage in Oh, What a Lovely War, contributed to I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again and The Frost Report, and helped create (with Palin and Jones) Do Not Adjust Your Set and We Have Ways of Making You Laugh.

How familiar were each of you with the other Pythons before the group was formed?

ERIC IDLE: We weren’t new to each other at all. I met Cleese in February 1963 at Cambridge; Jonesy, Edinburgh 1963; Palin, Edinburgh 1964; Chapman, also Cambridge, summer 1963. We had all worked together as writers and actors. Jones, Palin, and I were perhaps the closest, having written two whole seasons of Do Not Adjust Your Set, but I had written six episodes of a sitcom with Graham, and we had all worked together on The Frost Report. So we weren’t new to each other at all, but were actually very familiar; what was new was being free to decide what we wanted to do.

HAVE WE SHOWN ’EM WE GOT TEETH?

The lone American of Python – a native of Minnesota and a product of Los Angeles – Terry Gilliam fled the land of his birth in the late Sixties by turning the advice of Horace Greeley on its end and heading east, first to New York, then London. He worked in magazines as an illustrator and designer, most notably for Help!, published by the creator of Mad magazine, Harvey Kurtzman.

TERRY GILLIAM: I always drew when I was a kid. I did cartoons because they were the most entertaining. It’s easiest to impress people if you draw a funny picture, and I think that was a sort of passport through much of my early life. The only art training I had was in college, where I majored in political science. I took several art courses, drawing classes, and sculpture classes. I’d never taken oil painting, any of those forms of art, and I was always criticized because I kept doing cartoons instead of more serious painting.

My training has actually been fairly sloppy and I’ve been learning about art in retrospect. In college I didn’t take things like art history courses. I didn’t like the professor and it was a terribly boring course, so I didn’t really know that much. But I’ve always just kept my eyes open, and things that I like I am influenced by.

Once I had my little Bolex camera, every Saturday with a three-minute roll of film we’d run out and invent a movie, depending upon what the weather was. I remember doing animation that way as well; we would go around the dustbins and get old bits of film and then we’d scratch on them, each frame, make little animated sequences; it was pathetic! But you were kind of learning something in the course of all this – anger, I think, is what I was learning, hatred for society, and wealth, and powerful people who I’ve never been able to deal with subsequently!

I spent about a year and a half in advertising in Los Angeles. My illustrating days were becoming less and less remunerative, and Joel Siegel (now the famous television critic) was an old friend, in fact the very first cartoon I ever had published was an idea by him. He was working at an ad agency and got me in because I had long hair – the agency needed a longhair in the place – so I became an art director and copywriter. The last job we had there Joel and I were doing advertisements for Universal Pictures, and we hated the job. Richard Widmark did a film called Madigan, and the kinds of things we were throwing back at Universal were: ‘Once he was happy, but now he’s MADIGAN!’

CLEESE: I’d got to know Terry Gilliam in New York a little bit.⁵ He turned up in England out of the blue – must have been 1966 – and I remember having lunch with him when I was doing At Last the 1948 Show. I introduced him to one or two people, including Humphrey Barclay, who was producing Do Not Adjust Your Set. So Humphrey used him on a London Weekend Television show called We Have Ways of Making You Laugh. Terry used to do little sketches, caricatures of guests appearing on the show.

How did you start with animation in England?

GILLIAM: That was just a fluke, really. When I was in London, still drawing these fucking cartoons, I was on a show doing caricatures of the guests, and they had some material they didn’t know how to present. I remembered seeing somewhere years earlier, projected on a sheet in somebody’s flat, a Stan VanDerBeek cartoon. It was the first time I’d ever seen cutout animation, and it was Richard Nixon photographed with a foot in his mouth, trying to get it out. I thought it was outrageously funny. So on the show I said, ‘Why don’t I make an animated film?’ And they let me. And overnight I was an animator.

I had two weeks to do it in, and four hundred pounds. The only way I could do it in that time was using cutouts. I just did these silly things with these cutouts and nobody had ever seen that before on British television. And the result was instantaneous; within a week I had all these offers to do all this other stuff. That’s the power of that going out there and millions of people seeing your stuff.

BIRTH

Chapman in the delivery room, from The Meaning of Life.

LEAVE IT ALL TO US, YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT HIT YOU

How did the grouping of Python come about?

BARRY TOOK, BBC AND INDEPENDENT TELEVISION PRODUCER: Marty Feldman and I were sitting in an Indian restaurant. He had been working on The Frost Report with John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and I’d been working at Thames Television with Michael Palin and Terry Jones, and I said, ‘I’ll put my two Oxford chaps against your two Cambridge chaps.’ It started as a joke – hah hah hah – so I got home and I thought, ‘Hey, that’s not a bad idea.’

So I put it to Michael Palin, and he said yeah, he thought it’d be fine by him, but if it came off could he bring Gilliam and Eric Idle because they’d been working together at Thames on this children’s show, Do Not Adjust Your Set. And I took it to Cleese and Graham Chapman, and we got together and talked about it, and I went to the BBC.

CLEESE: So what happened – and I am fairly clear that my account is fundamentally right – after Graham and I had been laughing at Do Not Adjust Your Set every Thursday, we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do something with those guys, because they are the funniest people around.’ Connie had now been in England for a year and a half and had found her feet, so I didn’t feel guilty about going off to the studio for rehearsal. We rang them up – I rang them up, because when I say ‘Graham and I’ rang them up it always meant I did; Graham didn’t do that kind of thing, he’d sit there sucking on his pipe – and I suggested it to them, and they were a bit cautious. They didn’t say, ‘What a wonderful idea!’

I was told later that they’d had an offer from Thames Television, so they were making up their minds how to proceed. And then about two weeks later they rang back and said, ‘Okay, we’ve thought about it and we like the idea.’

Marty Feldman’s writing partner was Barry Took, and they’d written hundreds of very good radio shows together of which Round the Horne was the best known. Graham and I wrote a certain amount of stuff for Marty during that period when we weren’t performing, so I knew Barry a little and I’d always liked him, and I knew he was some kind of comedy advisor to the BBC. I spoke to Barry and said, ‘Look, I’ve talked to the Do Not Adjust Your Set people and we’d like to do something.’ And my partly constructed memory is that Barry said, ‘I’ll speak to someone.’

PALIN: I can remember John ringing me up and saying that he’d seen The Complete and Utter History of Britain that Terry and I did, and saying, ‘Well, you won’t be doing any more of those!’ – John’s estimation of The Complete and Utter History, which had been a partial success (or partial failure, according to which way you looked at it)!

Terry, Eric, and myself had all been contributors to The Frost Report, [but] I had worked as an actor with John and Graham on a thing called How to Irritate People which was made in 1968. I think this was the first time that I’d actually acted with John in sort of long sketches. John was pretty much a star in the television comedy world by 1968 because of The Frost Report and then At Last the 1948 Show, and I was very flattered that I was asked to go and do this show, because John was the best around – by far he was the most interesting, the most effective television comedy writer/performer around, as far as I was concerned. I think it was doing that that we realized that we enjoyed working together, we had a similar sense of humour, but also a similar attitude to comedy performing: playing it straight for laughs rather than to handle it too obviously. So that really brought John and myself together. I don’t think John had worked with Terry Jones, but he knew Terry Gilliam of course because he worked with him on that magazine in America.

So anyway this phone call came and I think it must have been early in ’69, John saying why don’t we do something together. I think not just because Complete and Utter History was over but [also] I don’t think John wanted to do any more of At Last the 1948 Show. I think he had had enough of those for whatever reason. Marty Feldman had gone on to be a big star, and I think John saw his future with a style of writing that Terry Jones and myself were doing being compatible with his and Graham’s writing.

TOOK: By then I had become the advisor to the comedy department at the BBC on what they called cheerfully a ‘peppercorn rent’, meaning they paid me nothing but I was allowed to steal; I didn’t steal because I’m not that sort of person, but I desperately wanted to get some shows together. Things were pretty flat [at that time] because David Frost had gone elsewhere, the Marty Feldman series was finished, and they had a show called Broaden Your Mind with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden which was a bit flabby.

I had seen Barry Humphries, the Australian, in a one-man show and thought he would make good material for television, and I had this idea of putting this Cleese/Chapman/Palin/Jones together. So I arrived at the BBC and they said, ‘Well, Barry Humphries was a female impersonator.’ I said, ‘He’s not, he’s a very broad, interesting comedian, he does all kinds of things, and Edna Everage was just one of his jokes’ – it came to overwhelm him in the end, but I mean in those days he had several characters. And they said, ‘Oh, this Palin and Jones, all that is much too expensive.’ I said, ‘You must do it, you’ve got to. Why the hell have you employed me? You said come in, bring us new ideas, I bring you new ideas, you say: We can’t do it. Too expensive.’

I thought, you can’t fiddle about with these guys, you’ve got to go for the throat, you’ve got to say, ‘You’ve got to do this!’ So my boss at the time, an eccentric man by the name of Michael Mills, said, ‘You’re like bloody Barry Von Richthofen and his Flying Circus. You’re so bloody arrogant – Took asks you a question, halfway through you realize he’s giving you an order.’

So it was known internally as Baron Von Took’s Flying Circus. It was then reduced to The Flying Circus and subsequently The Circus. All the internal memos said ‘The Circus’: i.e., ‘Would you please engage the following people at these prices dah dah dah.’ I have a copy of the memo somewhere which predates anybody else’s claim to have invented the name, it’s something I’m fairly jealous about – I mean, I don’t give a damn, but I did invent it.

When they wrote their first script, it was called Owl Stretching Time or Whither Canada? and Michael Mills said, ‘I don’t give a damn what it’s called, it’s called The Circus in all the memos – make them call it “something Flying Circus.”’

PALIN: Pretty soon after we decided to do something together, John and Graham went off to finish a film they were doing with Carlo Ponti or somebody like that and then take a holiday in Ibiza, leaving Terry and myself and Terry Gilliam to think more about a shape for the show. That would have happened during May or June of ’69; when they came back we actually started writing.

IDLE: I remember sitting on the grass in some London park idly discussing what we should do. Mike, me, Terry G., and Terry J. already had an offer to do an adult version of Do Not Adjust Your Set on ITV, but not for another year. John and Graham came with an offer to go straight ahead in the autumn. John was keen to get Mike, and we had him. John was not keen to do a show on his own that the BBC had offered him, therefore he came to us. Our decision was to blend the two shows: At Last the 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Set.

Mike said Cleese was interested. We met up with him and Graham in this park somewhere, [and] said, ‘Let’s do it.’ [We] went to the Beeb, who said, ‘Right you are, thirteen on air in September,’ and that was it.

It wasn’t like US TV at all! We didn’t have to do anything as stupid as selling a concept. There was no executive structure. They just gave us thirteen shows and said, ‘Get on with it.’ Executives only spoil things and hold back originality – that is their job.

CLEESE: The worst problem we had with the whole show was finding a good title for it. 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, I don’t know why – she could be famous now, you know? 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!

TOOK: I fended off the BBC, who were constantly whinging about how much it was going to cost. They just thought there was too many of them, they knew the animation would be very expensive, and they knew these guys had a lot of imagination and they’d rush off into the fields and film, they would have elaborate sets and all that, and they knew the whole bag of tricks would be very costly, as indeed it was. I said, ‘How much is in the budget for scripts?’ And they said such and such, and I said, ‘Well, split it in six and give them a sixth each. And how much for performing? Do the same thing. It won’t cost you any more.’

‘Well, we can’t because John Cleese gets more than Michael Palin.’

‘That’s irrelevant; if they’re going to do it they’re going to do it.’

I was about ten years older than the Pythons were and was regarded by them as a man who had a track record which was quite respectable, and I looked a fairly cheerful person. I could be objective. We used to have these meetings at my home in the study, and they used to come in, have tea and cakes and chat and discuss ideas, and they would argue and discuss and they would all agree, and then they would go home. An hour later, the phone would start: ‘Is this a bad move for me, is it worth doing?’ And I said to all of them, anybody who would ask me that, ‘Well, if it’s a success, it can’t possibly hurt your career, and if it’s a failure it’ll be off so fast that nobody within six months will remember it, so it won’t hurt your career at all.’

Were they confident in being able to carry the show by themselves?

TOOK: Well, yes, they’d been given free rein. They were told by the BBC, ‘Yes, you can do whatever you like, within reason, as long as it’s within the bounds of common law.’ I made the BBC make that statement to them so they wouldn’t feel threatened. And that was my role, then I got out of the way!

To see people with real talent using that talent to the full, it’s terrific and if I’ve been involved in somehow helping to shove that along I’m even more pleased. I suppose I remember my own struggles and how you need patrons and people who help you along in the beginning.

The only criticism that I actually had to face head-on was [from] the head of Light Entertainment, a man called Tom Sloane, [who] came into my office one day and said, ‘Excuse me, Barry, I’ve just been looking at a playback of Python. Does John Cleese have to say “bastard” twice?’ I said, ‘Yeah, if he wants to.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m just asking! I’m not trying to –’ He shut the door and went away. And that was that!

They were sort of a bit scared of me, and a bit scared of them because they’re a pretty high-powered bunch, as time has revealed.

Did the BBC know what they were getting with the Pythons?

PALIN: I think probably something like Dad’s Army¹ was more up their street than Python, because we couldn’t tell them what we wanted to do – we didn’t know ourselves. Barry Took was very much involved in introducing us to the BBC as a group. Barry at the time was very interested in exporting British comedy to America, because Laugh-In had just come to England and made a big impression on BBC2, I think. And Barry knew George Schlatter, who was Laugh-In’s executive producer. They wanted to produce comedy shows in this country that would have that sort of effect in America. Which was ironic, because they said, ‘Well, we can’t show this at all’ (for the first few years anyway). And the BBC were not particularly committed to Python in the sense that ‘we need this sort of show’. They had lots of shows going on at Light Entertainment at the time.

So Barry just had to present us as decent, responsible young men who could produce this sort of wacky new show that we couldn’t quite describe but was going to be something very fresh.

The BBC did have a certain amount to go on: John was a big name for them, one of their new great discoveries of the Sixties, so whatever John wanted they considered that to be significant. The rest of us, I don’t think they particularly cared; we were journeymen scriptwriters. We’d done most of our shows for independent companies: Do Not Adjust Your Set, The Complete and Utter History, and for that matter, At Last the 1948 Show were all made for ITV companies, so we hadn’t really worked for the BBC except for The Frost Report. So their attitude was [to] take a gamble, saying, ‘Well, you know, you could do more good than harm letting these people produce a series.’

But the early steps were very faltering. For a start they gave us thirteen shows, which was quite a commitment, and then they immediately started trying to strangle us financially by offering pitiable money. And they regarded Gilliam as something quite unnecessary: ‘An animator? Who wants an animator? There’s no animators in programmes, what’s an animator going to do, for God’s sake? That’s Walt Disney, we can’t afford that!’ So they showed their confidence in Terry by giving him about a hundred quid a week extra to make these animations, and Terry couldn’t afford an assistant – he had to do them all himself.

ALL BRONTOSAURUSES ARE THIN AT ONE END, MUCH MUCH THICKER IN THE MIDDLE, AND THEN THIN AGAIN AT THE FAR END.
– (MISS) ANNE ELK

CLEESE: When I was working on The Frost Report I felt quite frustrated – not in a desperate, emotional sense, but held in – by the format of sketches, by the tyranny of the punchline, by the fact that more surreal things would be suggested and all the writers would laugh, and the producer/director Jimmy Gilbert (a man I liked hugely) would smile and be amused himself, and say, ‘Yes, but they won’t understand that in Bradford.’ So we were straining against conventions.

I do know when we sat down for Python that we were convinced we were not going to do something in a conventional format. On At Last the 1948 Show we managed to parody the format without breaking it; in other words, between sketches we would cut to this delightful girl, Aimi MacDonald, and Aimi would say with this extraordinary voice of hers – it was like someone had escaped from a cartoon and had elocution lessons – ‘Well! That was a funny sketch, wasn’t it?’ We were already beginning to play with the form; it was definitely a step towards Python.

I had a gut feeling that the sort of thing we were going to do on Python was all the things that made the writers laugh on The Frost Report but which we weren’t allowed to put on. But of course we didn’t know how, and if you look at Python, the first few are much more conventionally constructed (although to my taste the humour is very, very good; I think a lot of the early stuff is very odd and very funny). And what happened was the material in some cases got rather less funny, but we began to package it more skilfully as we played with the format.

How was the format or shape of the show ultimately decided upon, as it was quite different from what had come before?

JONES: We never really discussed it that much. John, Eric, and Graham weren’t particularly interested in the shape of the show; they were just interested in funny material, making sure the sketches were funny. I was much more concerned – and Terry and Mike also felt a bit more like I did – that we needed to find a new formula, a new format, really. Apart from the sketch material, the earliest meetings were mainly discussions about the name of the show! But I remember I really had this feeling that this was going to be an absolutely crucial time, that we had to get this one right, this is our chance.

So I was thinking quite hard about the shape of the show, and I saw [Spike] Milligan’s Q5, and I thought, ‘Fuck! Milligan’s done it!’ He did a show [where] one sketch would start and drift off into another sketch, things would drift into one another; he made it so clear that we’d been writing in clichés all this time, where we either did three-minute sketches with a beginning, middle, and end, or else we did thirty-second blackouts – one joke with a blackout – so it was still very much the shape of a traditional English revue. Milligan was messing around with this and doing something totally different.

I can just remember walking upstairs at my parents’ home in Claygate and suddenly realizing that Terry Gilliam had done an animation for one of the Do Not Adjust Your Sets called ‘Beware of Elephants’. He’d been a bit diffident about it; he’d say, ‘Well, it’s sort of stream-of-consciousness, one thing leads to another, it’s not really about anything.’ He’d done another one called ‘Christmas Cards’. And so I was going upstairs and I suddenly thought, ‘That’s what we could do: we can do what Milligan’s done with breaking up the sketch format and just do a whole thing that’s stream-of-consciousness, and Terry’s animations can go in and out and link things, and the whole show would just flow like that. And I phoned Mike, I suppose, and Terry G., in great excitement. [They went,] ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!’

And then as far as I remember, we put this to the group and they were grumbling: ‘Yeah, all right, well anyway, let’s get on with the sketch.’

So the first series was very much a fight between the Oxford contingent, if you like, trying to push this stream-of-consciousness into the thing, and the Cambridge group. The Cambridge side weren’t particularly interested; they weren’t against it, but they weren’t particularly interested.

IDLE: We had already tried something like this on Do Not Adjust Your Set and also We Have Ways of Making You Laugh with Gilliam. It was the natural way to go. We were essentially avoiding doing anything that was like the shows we had already worked on or were on the Beeb at the time. Cleese was tired of formats, Jonesy the keenest on experimentation – or at least the loudest in praise of it. But Gilliam was keen to experiment and Graham always anxious to push the envelope: ‘Can we make it a little madder?’ he would say.

GILLIAM: My memory of the first meetings was in John’s flat in Basil Street in Knightsbridge. I just remember sitting up in John’s room a lot and talking and arguing. I think by loosening it up as we did, it then freed us up so that we could have everybody write what they wanted to do, and then we start filtering it through the group’s reaction to the stuff.