Monty Python Speaks! Revised and Updated Edition

IF THEY CAN’T SEE YOU, THEY CAN’T GET YOU

MACNAUGHTON: This was a very strange thing because when I’d done four or five Monty Python shows which had not yet gone out, I was called to the head of entertainment, who said to me, ‘I don’t think we’ll be renewing your contract.’ I had a year’s contract. So I said, ‘Oh, really? Why not?’ He said, ‘Well, this Q5 show of yours was a bit of a cult success, but only on BBC2. [!] And who really wants to see the Monty Pythons?’ They were ready to drop me. It wasn’t that they were going to drop the Pythons; they just didn’t think that the way we were doing it – which meant me as producer and director – was what was wanted. Fortunately I think their public became of a different mind – the Pythons went out and became a cult success.

Promotional item in the Radio Times:

MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS

is the new late programme on Sunday night.

It’s designed ‘to subdue the violence in us all’.

The first Python show, broadcast on October 5, 1969, demonstrated quite clearly that the group was after something quite uncategorizable. It presented a surreal mix of violence (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hosts a programme depicting famous deaths); television parodies (‘We find that nine out of ten British housewives can’t tell the difference between Whizzo butter and a dead crab.’ ‘It’s true, we can’t!’); occasions where all propriety is ripped to shreds (an interviewer proceeds to address his guest as ‘sugar plum’ and ‘angel drawers’); some intellectually tainted comic bits (Picasso paints while riding a bicycle, followed by Kandinsky, Mondrian, Chagall, Miró, Dufy, Jackson Pollock, ‘… and Bernard Buffet making a break on the outside’); and a loopy premise allowing for both some slapstick and social commentary (the tale of the World’s Funniest Joke, appropriated by the army as a weapon against the Nazis, who fail miserably at developing a counter-joke of their own). Running throughout the programme were gags and animations about pigs.

In the weeks that followed, the programme became more fragmented, more surreal, more violent. Sheep nesting in trees gave way to a man playing the ‘Mouse Organ’ (namely, some rodents trained to squeak at a certain musical pitch accompanied by a pair of heavy mallets), to a cartoon of a pram that ingests the doting women who lean too closely. Kitchen-sink melodramas were turned on their heads, as when a young coal miner returns home to his playwright father, who rants about his son’s values (‘LABOURER!’). A scandal-mongering documentary examines men who choose to live as mice (‘And when did you first notice these, shall we say, tendencies?’). And a confectioner is investigated for fraud in labeling his latest product, Crunchy Frog (‘If we took the bones out it wouldn’t be crunchy, would it?’).

How was the series sold originally by the BBC?

TOOK: Well, it’s this ‘new wacky series, these wacky kids, these bright new Cambridge graduates and Oxford lads who delighted us for years with their merry antics, now together at last in a brand-new series’. I suppose that’s what they did. That’s what they do about everything else!

GILLIAM: The BBC I think were constantly uncomfortable with us. They didn’t know quite what we were, and I think they were slightly embarrassed by it, and yet it was too successful, it was making all this noise out there. When they took us off after the fourth show (this was the first series), we were off for a couple of weeks, I think there was a serious attempt to ditch it at that point. But there was too much noise being made by us. The most wonderful thing was everybody tuning in when Python was supposed to run and it was the International Horse of the Year Show; in the middle of it, they were doing their routines to music, it was Sousa’s ‘Liberty Bell’ – our theme music. It was like Python was even there, you couldn’t keep it down!

But in the beginning they would put us out at all these different times, and change it, but somehow the word got out and they kept us on.

TOOK: The BBC split up into different areas, and the option was to take the show or not to take the show, and half the regions didn’t take the first series. So if you lived in London you’d get it; if you went down to Southampton on the south coast you wouldn’t be able to see it because they put on Herring Fishing in the North Sea or something. It was very irritating that the regions had that kind of autonomy; there was nothing you could do. But the word started to go around that this was very good and very new, and something they ought to have. So one after another came back into the fold, and by the time the second series was done, the complete network had it.

CLEESE: I had a friend who was trying to watch the series, and he sat down in his hotel room in Newcastle and switched it on and there was this hysterical start to Monty Python about this guy wandering around being terribly boring about all the ancient monuments around Newcastle. And he watched it falling about, and said it’s real nerve to do this, it’s really terrific and what a great start to the show. And about twenty minutes in he realized it was the regional off-time.

The nicest thing anybody ever said about Python was that they could never watch the news after it. You get in a certain frame of mind and then almost anything’s funny!

HE WANTS TO SIT DOWN AND HE WANTS TO BE ENTERTAINED

How was the public’s response to your work different from what you’d experienced on your previous series?

PALIN: I suppose the difference was that, partly because of its programming and the time it went out, Python clearly was seen as very much for an adult audience, which is very interesting because nowadays the spirit of Python burns on in ten-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds. So many children love Python. But at the time it was seen as an adult show. I’d never really been involved in an ‘adult’ show, kind of X-rated comedy show, and this seemed to be the image of it.

And also we became sort of the intellectuals’ darling for a bit, written up in The Observer, things like that, which was again quite different from anything I’d done before. The word ‘cult’ was quite soon applied to Python, though we weren’t quite sure what a ‘cult show’ is. It applies to something that is the property of only a very few select people. I’d never been interested in doing that before. Frost Report was a very popular show; Do Not Adjust Your Set was aimed at a popular audience. But Python seemed to fit into this niche of daring, irreverent, therefore only accessible to those of a certain sort of intellectual status, and that lasted for a long time.

So much in television depends on when programmes go out. The BBC labelled the programme – without meaning to – by the time we put it out. We were put out so late at night and people who had to work early next morning couldn’t see it; there wasn’t videos, you couldn’t tape them and run them the next morning if they were put out late at night. Insomniacs and intellectuals were the only people up!

MACNAUGHTON: You do know about Spike Milligan’s remark on the radio once when somebody asked him about the success of the Pythons? ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘my nephews are doing very well, aren’t they?’ Which is a very reasonable thing, because they loved Milligan.

Python would not have been what it was had it not been for

The Goon Show or the Q series.

MACNAUGHTON: Precisely. But would The Goon Show have been what it was were it not for the Marx Brothers? And then would the Marx Brothers have been the way they were were it not for burlesque, and would burlesque have been the way it was were it not for music halls? And so it’s got a wonderful progression, I think.

The trouble is, since Python I haven’t seen anything come up yet that takes its place. And I’m very pleased, because quite honestly I don’t think you can. I guess that’s one of the big pluses for Python, in that nobody can really copy their style – it doesn’t work. I mean, Morecombe and Wise can be copied. But how do you copy [these] guys? I think it would be very difficult to do it again.

CLEESE: My experience is that critics recognize what is slightly original, but very frequently miss what is very original! And if you look back at the reviews of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, they were really not particularly noticeable – nothing remarkable about the reviews for quite a long time. I suspect you would probably get to show nine or ten of the first series before anybody was really writing that something remarkable was happening. A few people got it right away. But critics on the whole did something that they do when they’re insecure: they describe what the show was like without really committing themselves to a value judgment.

GILLIAM: We’d rather be making films that people are passionate about than, ‘Oh, that’s a nice film.’ And Python’s always managed to do that; people are passionate about Python. I think that’s where we’ve always been good. That’s probably the area we should stay in. It’s like comic books; comic book artists and people who deal in comic book all feel like outsiders, they’re never given respect. There’s an amazing skill involved in making a good comic book. The artwork in comic books is brilliant, some of the writing is brilliant – comic books is a really great art form, but it’s not [considered] art. Not literature. It’s this bastard thing hanging out there. And they complain, [but] I keep saying, ‘No, you’re lucky that you haven’t been accepted – keep being angry and outside and doing stuff.’ Because if you become a Keith Haring or Basquiat or any of these people who get drawn into the Establishment, they die, they just freeze up. What’s Keith Haring? His stuff is nice and it’s sweet and it’s cute, it’s all right, but I don’t think when they look back a hundred years from now they’re going to say, ‘He nailed it.’ Except maybe they will: that’s how infantile and silly things had got, that in fact he captured the essence of the whole thing doing just nice, sweet stick figures and nice colours. I don’t dislike his stuff at all, I think it’s nice, but I don’t think it’s Wow!!

I think certainly with comedy, comics, and all that – comics/comedy, we’re stuck with sounding very similar! – that’s outside, and it should stay outside.

MACNAUGHTON: They were quite surprised by the positive reaction to the Gumbys, these daft people with the handkerchiefs tied on their heads. When they walked into the studio one time, what happens but the whole front row of the audience had handkerchiefs tied around their heads! Gumby just had to appear and there was a roar of laughter.

GILLIAM: I’m the luckiest one because I’m the least known, the least recognized. And it’s nice to be recognized occasionally. I get enough, somebody saying ‘Hi,’ just to assuage my fading ego: ‘That’ll keep me going for a month or two.’

And the whole thing is so ephemeral, it’s just incredible how thin the line is between being known and not known. There was one day after we’d done a chat show here after one of these series, my wife, Maggie, and I were shopping somewhere, and someone all excitedly started shouting, ‘Hey, hey, look who’s here!’ Oh fuck. It’s this piece of meat that is being attacked by all these excitable people who had just seen you on television the night before. And then you realize, ‘Thank God I’m not John.’ It’s an awful job to walk down the street and be John Cleese, because you can’t escape from it!

CLEESE: You know when you do something and it catches on, and everybody likes it, then for the next eight years as you creep out of your house at half past eight in the morning: ‘Oi, do your funny walk there, John!’ Just so painful!

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