Copyright

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © David Morgan 2019

Cover design by Paula Russell Szafranski

Cover photograph © Michael Ochs Archives; Shutterstock

David Morgan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008336806

Ebook Edition © January 2019 ISBN: 9780008336813

Version: 2020-07-23

Dedication

To Gwen Dibley,

who was (almost) there at the start

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.

DIRECTOR: CLOSE UP, ZOOM IN ON ME

Ian MacNaughton was an actor before becoming a director at the BBC in 1961. After several years toiling in the trenches of the Drama Department, he was offered a chance by the then–head of comedy to direct programming for the Light Entertainment Division.

IAN MACNAUGHTON: I asked the head of comedy why did he ask me and he had a very funny answer: he had been in Studio 3, where they were doing a Light Entertainment show, and someone came to him and said, ‘Do look into Studio 2, where they’re doing a drama series called Dr Finlay’s Casebook – they’re getting more laughs in there than you’re getting out here!’

Dr Finlay’s Casebook was a very turgid drama, it was too dramatic, and I arranged with the script editor to write something funny, a small scene before the end in which we have a bit of funny to heighten the tragedy at the end of the piece, and so this came about that way. The head of comedy did look in, and the next day he asked would I like to do the funnies? And I said, ‘Yes, very much!’

And so I joined the Light Entertainment branch and was immediately handed a Spike Milligan show, Q5. Now Spike Milligan is a rather eccentric comic clown, and I don’t think anybody else was very happy to work with him – he was a very undisciplined man – but we did the show and it was a reasonable success, and the Python boys had seen this show going out and they asked the BBC if they could have me direct their first series. The BBC said yes, and so that’s how we started together.

IDLE: In fact, I hardly remember Barry Took being involved at all; the key meeting was with MacNaughton. He was directing Spike and we all liked the mad direction those shows were going in, so we met him and he seemed loony enough, so we said, ‘Okay’. He couldn’t do the studio direction for the first four (though he did do the exterior filming), so John Howard Davies did those. He was more in control and a bit less of a loony, and I found him very helpful on the early acting because he was an actor – indeed, he was Oliver Twist in David Lean’s movie!

Ian’s great brilliance was that he didn’t get in the way.

PALIN: We had a few battles over a director, because in early meetings some of us had found John Howard Davies to be completely wrong for the ethos of Python; he represented the most conventional, conservative side of BBC comedy. And there was this mad cat Ian MacNaughton, who seemed to represent the free spirit that we wanted. I remember a couple of fights over that – not fights, but sort of polite disagreements; there were some tensions over that. John Cleese was very much a John Howard Davies man; in fact, he used John Howard Davies for all of Fawlty Towers. And Cleese was guarded about Ian MacNaughton; he didn’t like Ian because he drank, he was sometimes out of control, he was a mad incomprehensible Scotsman, and Cleese saw him allying with the sort of wild, passionate [Pythons] on the other side. But in the end we got Ian MacNaughton.

I think probably we did need somebody like that who was going to be responsive to our ideas. John Howard Davies was a nice man, and he did four shows (although Ian always directed the film sequences). Davies found that it wasn’t a natural sort of programme for him to do, whereas Ian was very responsive to all our ideas, especially if we had him do something different. He would be at home with the anti-authoritarian aspect of it, which was something he liked and rather identified with, whereas I think John Howard Davies was much more identified with BBC structure as it was then. He wasn’t the kind to be taking risks; he was an organization man.

Ian would take some risks. Ian was always somebody outside the organization, probably because of his lifestyle: he was a Scottish actor, he didn’t see himself as a metropolitan London man at all, which helped, because Python was never metropolitan. As Barry Took once pointed out (which was very acute), all of the Pythons come from the provinces and none of us were Londoners. We all saw London in a sense as slightly the enemy, a citadel to be conquered, and of course Ian was definitely from Glasgow – he had this anti-metropolitan attitude, which helped us.

CLEESE: Well, I suspect my view on this is rather different from the others’, because I thought John Howard Davies was very good. But he wasn’t as skilful with his cameras as Ian was; Ian was a very visual director. John was a very, very good judge of comedy. He wasn’t a tremendously verbal person, but his instincts were extraordinarily good, and he was very good at casting. So I had a lot of respect for him to do comedy, but I know that the more visually oriented people felt that the show took a big step forward (from the point of view of form as opposed to content) when Ian took over. And I thought Ian was pretty good, but I never thought he was particularly expert in the direction of comedy. He was always more bothered by how he was going to shoot it than he was about whether the sketch was really working or not, whereas John Howard Davies’ focus on just those first four shows he directed was more towards the content, even if he didn’t actually shoot it so well.

GILLIAM: Ian had worked with Spike Milligan, that’s why we liked the idea of Ian coming in. He wasn’t forced upon us; we lucked out. Ian worked, because he put up with things. Everybody pushed him around. I like Ian a lot, I mean just his personality.

Ian held it together, but we would be constantly going, ‘Shit, why is the camera on that?’ But I think anybody would have been beaten up by us in the same way. He trotted on, he did it. If it had been left up to us, we couldn’t have done it, there’s just no way. We thought we could, but I’m sure we couldn’t have!

Ian MacNaughton directing Palin in ‘The Cycling Tour’.

TAKE-OFF
LET’S GET THE BACON DELIVERED

As the group prepared for the first series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (which began recording in August 1969), the notion of applying a stream-of-consciousness style to the show’s content and execution was accepted.

PALIN: Certainly Terry Gilliam provided an example of how you could do stream-of-consciousness comedy in his animations, which he’d done on Do Not Adjust Your Set. We thought those were remarkable and a real breakthrough; there was nothing like that being done on British television. We loved the way the ideas flowed one into another.

Terry Jones was very interested in the form of the show, wanting it to be different from any other – not only should we write better material than anybody else, but we should write in a different shape from any other comedy show. And probably Terry Jones and myself saw (or were easily persuaded) that Gilliam’s way of doing animation maybe held a clue to how we could do it. It didn’t matter if sketches didn’t have a beginning or end, we could just have some bits here or there, we could do it more like a sort of collage effect. I remember that everyone was quite enthusiastic about this, but it would have almost certainly come from Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and myself.

GILLIAM: I think it was more like saying ‘no’ to certain things, and the first thing was ‘no’ to punchlines, which is a really critical thing. We’d seen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore doing so many really great sketches where they traditionally had to end with a zinger, and the zinger was never as good as the sketch. The sketch was about two characters, so in a sense it was more character-driven than plot-driven, [but] time and time again you’d see these really great sketches that would die at the end – they wouldn’t die, but they just wouldn’t end better [than] or as well as the middle bits. So very early on we made a decision to get rid of punchlines. And then Terry Jones was besotted with this cartoon I had done, ‘Beware of Elephants’, [in which] things flowed in a much more stream-of-consciousness way. Terry thought that was the shape that we should be playing with.

Spike Milligan had been doing some amazing things just before; his Q series in a sense really freed it up, playing with the medium of television, admitting to it being television, and commenting on that. We just continued to do even more of that than he had done, but once we agreed on the idea of not having to end sketches, and having things linked and flowing, it allowed us to get out of a sketch when it was at its peak, when it was really still good; we would laugh when it was funny and it would move on when it wasn’t funny. That also immediately made a place for me; it sat me in the middle, connecting things.

IDLE: We were young, and doing a show we would be in charge of for the first time. There were no executives. This freedom allowed us to experiment without having to say what we were trying to do – indeed, we didn’t have a clue what we were trying to do except please ourselves. This was the leitmotiv: if it made us laugh, it was in; if it didn’t, we sold it to other shows.

THIS YEAR OUR MEMBERS HAVE PUT MORE THINGS ON TOP OF OTHER THINGS THAN EVER BEFORE

JONES: The way we went and did the shows is, first of all we’d meet and talk about ideas. And then we’d all go off for like two weeks and each write individually or in our pairs. Mike and I tended to write separately and then get together, read out material to each other, and then swap over and mess around like that. So at the end of two weeks we’d all meet together, quite often downstairs in my front room or dining room, and we’d read out the stuff. That was the best time of Python, the most exciting time, when you knew you were going to hear new stuff and they were going to make you laugh.

GILLIAM: And so you get a sketch where John and Graham had written something and it got that far and it was really good, but then it just started dribbling; well, either you stop there, or maybe Mike and Terry would take it over with some ideas to patch it up. I always liked the fact that there was just a pile of material to start with all the time, because everybody would go their separate ways, come back, and there would be the stuff, [sorted into] piles: we all liked that pile of stuff, [we were] mixed on that one, we didn’t like that one.

You had to jockey for position about when and where a sketch was going to be read out, which time of the day; if it came in too early it was going to bomb. And you knew that if Mike and Terry or John and Graham had something they wanted to do, they wouldn’t laugh as much [at the others’ material]. And I was in a funny position, because I was kind of the apolitical laugh; I was the one guy who had nothing at stake because my stuff was outside of theirs.

IDLE: It seems to me since all comedians seek control we were a group of potential controllers. Obviously some are more manipulative than others, or cleverer at getting their own way. Cleese is the most canny, but everyone had their ways. Mike would charm himself into things. Terry J. would simply not listen to anyone else, and Gilliam stayed home and did his own thing since we soon got tired of listening to him trying to explain in words what he was doing.

The writing was the most glorious fun. We would go away and write anything at all that came to mind for about two weeks, then get together for a day and read it all out. Then, what got laughs was in, and people would suggest different ways of improving things. This was very good, this critical moment. Then we would compile about six or seven shows at a go, obviously moving things too similar into different shows, and then noticing themes and enlarging on strands of ideas and then finally linking them all together in various mad ways that came out of group thought. This, as far as I know, was an original way of working which hasn’t been tried before (or since) and was unique to Python. Gilliam was there, too, as an individual non-writer, and whenever we were stuck we would leave it to him to make the links, which he would do.

PALIN: By [the time Python started] Terry and I were working separately; there’d be a couple of days just writing ideas down and then we’d get together, talk about things, so some of the sketches that were Jones and Palin would be entirely Jones or entirely Palin, but the other would add lines here and there. So it was good in that way; we were writing separately perhaps more than we had before.

I think we were all (certainly to start with) anxious to be generous to each other, and give each other time and due consideration. You know, it was important that everybody write something that was funny, otherwise it would have been very difficult, and generally I think everybody did. Spirits were pretty high. It was not difficult for some of those sessions to be happy at the way things were going because the material was fresh; we could chop stuff around and not be confined to the shapes of previous comedy shows; we were really getting some very nice, new, surreal stuff together.

The best sessions I remember were when we were just putting the whole lot into a shape, into a form. Certainly there would be some sketches that were still very conventional, and others would just be fragments. We’d have read the stuff out and then we’d try and put them together, follow this by that, and then, ‘Why don’t we introduce that Gambolputty character and then try to say the name “Gambolputty” later in the programme,’ something like that. ‘Yes, that’s right, he can come in and we do this, and then the Viking can come in and sort of club him or something.’ The idea of having characters in quite elaborate costume just coming in to say one word – ‘So’ or ‘It’s’ – in the middle of a bit of narration, all that seemed very fresh. We enjoyed that feeling of being able to clown around the way we wanted to. And the material coming in was (we felt) pretty strong and really unusual. Things like the man with three buttocks seemed just wonderful, especially because it was done in this very serious mode – bringing the camera around to see this extra buttock, and he’d say, ‘Go away, go on!’ – this man who’d agreed to go on television because he’s got three buttocks then getting rather sort of prudish about any talk about buttocks! Really nice ideas.

How did your own work habits change as you started working as part of a larger group?

PALIN: I wasn’t used to working like that, but basically I have such respect for the other writers. I mean, Graham and John were just writing the best sketches around at that time, so to be able to give them [something] they would then take away, one had absolute confidence. And the same usually with Eric; we’d worked together on Do Not Adjust Your Set. There was really, as far as I can remember at that early stage, very little wastage. I mean, sketches didn’t just disappear if someone screwed them up; it would happen: someone would take something away and it just didn’t work out, and we would similarly take other people’s ideas. It didn’t happen that much. And in the early shows John and Graham were still writing ‘sketchey’ sketches; ‘The Mouse Problem’ or ‘The Dead Parrot’. They came fully formed, four or five minutes of stuff which didn’t need to be changed, so very often it was just the links that would be our group. There wasn’t an awful lot of cross-writing.

If anything strengthened Terry and myself as a team, I think we felt this was highly competitive in a way it hadn’t been before. We’d send sketches to Marty Feldman or The Two Ronnies and someone somewhere would take a decision and you get the word back – ‘We love this, we don’t like this’ – we wouldn’t be in the room at the time, we wouldn’t be part of that process. Here, because we were writing the whole thing and performing it ourselves, the atmosphere was quite competitive. We felt we really had to get our ideas really right before they were read.

That was an interesting thing. We’d have a discussion the day before: ‘Shall we read this, shall we read that?’ Terry and I always wrote more than anybody else – a lot of it was of a fairly inferior quality – but we didn’t want to read the group too much because there was a certain point where you could see people getting restless: ‘And what have you got?’

‘Oh, we’ve got another six sketches!’

‘[Huffing] All right, we’ll have some coffee and then read these next six sketches for Mike and Terry!’

You had to be a bit careful about how you sold your stuff!

Were you at a disadvantage because you didn’t have a writing partner helping to ‘sell’ your material?

IDLE: No, no. The other teams had two people to laugh. But I had the advantage of working with myself, a far more interesting partner!

Comedy writing is done often in pairs, but I always found it boring. I occasionally worked with John (‘The Bruces’, Australian philosophy professors with a passion for beer and a distaste for ‘pooftahs’; ‘Sir George Head’, the mountaineering expedition leader with double vision) and a bit with Mike. But I like writing by myself.

Last time I looked, writing was always largely a solitary occupation. I like to write first thing in the morning and then stop when I feel like it. I don’t like to talk. I don’t much care for meetings. My favourite form of collaboration is with a partner on email who bounces back my day’s work. I think you need partners for shape, notes, and criticism.

CLEESE: I was the one who was having to write with Graham. Now I thought early on, before Graham’s drinking was any sort of a problem, it would be much more fun if we occasionally broke up into different writing groups; we could keep the material more varied. To some extent there was a Chapman/Cleese type of sketch (which was usually somebody going into an office of some kind and probably getting into an argument in which there would be quite a lot of thesaurus-type words), whereas Mike and Terry would nearly always start things where some camera would pan over Scottish or Icelandic or Dartmoor countryside and afterwards would get into some sort of tale. And Eric’s was largely one man sitting at a desk talking to the camera and getting completely caught up, as they say, disappearing up his own arse.

The result of this switching was that Eric and I wrote ‘Sir George Head’, and Michael and I wrote about Adolf Hilter standing for Parliament in Minehead. I thought those were rather successful. But there was a general resistance to that switching around, and maybe it was partly that nobody else wanted to write with Graham. I think he was regarded as my problem, which naturally I thought was a little unfair. But I think that Terry was always very keen to write with Michael, that it was quite difficult for him to let go of that. And Eric liked to write on his own because it gave him such autonomy – for instance, he could write when he wanted to. There are many good things to be said for that, because if you write with someone else it becomes an office job.

So I guess Terry wanted to reclaim Michael, and Eric maybe liked being on his own, and Graham was my problem; I guess that was the dynamic.

Did you and Terry ‘perform’ your sketches for the group at these meetings?

PALIN: No, no, no. I used to read our stuff, and John used to read the stuff that he and Graham wrote. I can’t really give you a reason for that other than Terry was happy that that’s the way it was, and Graham was quite happy that John should read his. I think we were perhaps wary of selling this as a complete sketch. In a way by just one person reading it would be like reading notes for a sketch, it wouldn’t be taken too seriously – you know, this wasn’t a full performance you were being judged on, this was just a way of gauging whether it was funny or not. You could also read it much more quickly, it was much easier to get the essence of it quite quickly.

CLEESE: The great joy of the group was that we made each other laugh immoderately. We had dinner together quite recently, all of us except Eric, and we all said afterwards we don’t really laugh with anyone else the way we laugh together – we really make each other laugh more than anyone else makes us laugh. And so the great joy of the meetings, one of the totally positive things that kept us ticking over and happy for a long time and probably helped us when things weren’t so easy, was the fact that we laughed so much.

But if you read something out at a meeting and people became hysterical with laughter, whatever was read out next would always be anticlimactic. So there was a certain amount of very careful stage managing going on during meetings, because I would come in with the material that Graham and I had written, and I would be very aware that approval would vary according to certain extrinsic factors. The usual psychological factors were at work, such as don’t read your best stuff out first. Also, the first couple of things read out were unlikely to produce enormous laughter.

While I was reading material out, I was often adjusting the order because you could sometimes sense the energy of the group start to slump after a couple of hours; and if Mike and Terry just read out something screamingly funny, I would not try and read out something terribly funny after that; I would read out something that was sort of interesting and clever and witty.

JONES: We just read out material, it wasn’t performing it. Quite often there might be two or three characters, so it’d be difficult to actually perform it. Mike’s the better reader of the two of us, in the same way that John was the better reader. And I always felt if I read something it wouldn’t do it justice – partly because of my reading, and partly I think I didn’t quite know what kind of mood John would be in – he might sort of take against something if he felt it was partly mine!

PALIN: And also it was the sensitive area of casting. If you cast it already, even if it’s just the two writers, you in a way staked a claim on those characters, which was difficult for the others to take. We would not make suggestions [on casting]; it was done really quite democratically. We’d actually rather people say, ‘I’d like to do that’ or whatever, or then we’d say, ‘This is a sort of Eric-type character.’ Sometimes it was clear, it didn’t need discussion. Sometimes very often the people who’d read that sketch had read a character so well that there was no point in putting it out to tender, as it were. But then casting would come slightly later because you’d have to assemble the show first. Once the show’s assembled, then the casting could really begin because we wanted it to be fairly equal; one didn’t want one person to dominate, and everyone wanted to perform – everyone was dead keen to get up there and do the sketches. We were aware without ever saying it absolutely, as a sort of rule, that there should be a balance in casting. When we had all the sketches together, we would say, ‘Actually you can’t put those three together because they’re all three John characters; so let’s put this sketch in show eight, and then bring an Eric sketch from show eight to this one. So you have John, Eric, then the thing which Mike and Terry are doing, then one for John and Eric should come nicely there.’ So casting would very much depend upon the actual shape of the show itself, so everyone got time on screen.

JONES: If you’d written it, you tended to get the first say-so if you really wanted to do it. People would tend to come up with what they wanted to do. And then it would be thrown around; there would be a discussion if somebody else wanted to do it.

IDLE: Casting always came last in everything. That was the brilliance of it being a writer’s show. Once we were happy with the text, then we cast. It was usually fairly easy, like the John parts were obvious – people who shouted or were cruel to defenceless people or animals. Mike and I were usually the ones who could play each other’s parts. Usually people spoke up if they felt they were a bit light in a show; they might sulk until someone noticed, but it was swings and roundabouts, really. Also, we had no girls to sulk or feel left out (i.e., Saturday Night Live) and we would happily grab most of the girls’ parts for ourselves. Serve ’em right, too. Get their own bloody shows! How many men are in the Spice Girls?

Did everyone have an equal interest in performing? Did you all consider yourselves writers first and then actors, or writer/actors?

PALIN: Writer/actors I think, yes. Everybody loved performing, absolutely. Everybody wanted to go out there and put the dress on or whatever! I rarely heard an instance where someone said, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that.’ The great thing was, because we were all brought up in the university cabarets, to get out there and show your own material was all part of it. Writing was merely 50 per cent; the other 50 per cent was the performing of it.

IDLE: Sometimes I enjoyed performing more. In film, I loved the scene in Grail where the guard is told not to leave the room till anyone, etc., because the first time it went right and it’s there on film. It just felt funny – all one take. (Well done, Jonesy. I have to say I love filming for Jonesy.) And likewise in Brian with me as the jailer and Gilliam as the jailer’s assistant. I loved playing both these Palin-created scenes. I wish he had written more. He has an effortless grasp of character for an actor, especially scenes where all three parts are funny. Graham only hiccoughs in the guard scene, but it just adds a wonderful pleasant madness. In Brian, Terry Gilliam makes dark, grunting noises where I stutter away and Michael is this very pleasant lost man who is somehow in charge of these lunatics. It is pure Palin at his finest. They are delightful scenes and my personal acting favourites.

PALIN: Personally, I always enjoyed when you were able to flesh the character out a bit, even within a sketch. I mean, I loved playing the man in the ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch or the ‘Cheese Shop’, because you can give them some sort of character – they’re not just somebody saying, ‘No, we haven’t got this,’ ‘No, we haven’t got that.’ It isn’t just the words, it’s the evasiveness and the degree of evasiveness, and why a man should be that evasive, and what’s going through his mind [that] appeals to me. I really enjoyed getting to grips with characters like that, even within a fairly short sketch.

CLEESE: I remember once that I particularly liked a sketch that either Mike or Terry had written about one of those magazines that is just full of advertisements, so if you wanted to buy a pair of World War II German U-boat commander field glasses or a mountain bike or a garden shed you went to this magazine. And I liked the sketch so much I asked if I could do it – very unusual for me. And Mike had slight reservations about whether I should do it, but they let me. And I didn’t do it particularly well, and I remember discussing it afterwards with Mike, and it was because I was trying to go outside my range – in other words, I didn’t do it as well as he would have done it because he’s better at doing the ‘Cheerful Charlie’ salesman.

But similarly if you’d given Mike that scene where I go on about the Masons and start that strangely aggressive and resentful speech, I think Michael wouldn’t be so good in that area. But it’s much more complicated than you might think because it is not that I am happy about shouting at people, because actually I’m extremely unhappy, I’ve almost never shouted at anyone. I’ve found it almost impossible to do, but I seem to be able to do it on screen. So it’s not like saying, ‘In character you’re the same as you are in everyday life’; that would be utterly simple-minded and untrue, but it just seems to be the case that some people are more comfortable portraying some emotions; I don’t mean that it isn’t utterly connected with their ordinary life, but that it’s not as connected with it as you might think.

Which of the Pythons did you think was the prettiest in drag?

GILLIAM: Prettiest woman, goodness! I don’t know. John was actually pretty nice when he played in ‘The Piranha Brothers’, he’s wonderful sitting in the bar: ‘He knows how to treat a female impersonator.’ John was fantastic in that. John loved it so much I was beginning to have concerns there! The most convincing woman? I think Eric was the best woman. I’m not sure ‘pretty’ came into it. Do you have another adjective?

‘We could have it any time we wanted.’ Chapman and Idle as the Protestants in The Meaning of Life.

‘Least unattractive’?

GILLIAM: I think in Meaning of Life, Eric as the Protestant Wife was spectacular. I just thought that was an extraordinary, wonderful performance. Terry and Mike were always very broad, and Graham was also very broad, but I actually thought the Protestant Wife that Eric played was amazing. Eric’s father died when he was young, so his role model was his mother, and maybe that’s why he was good.

THAT’S MY FLANNEL

Once the shows were assembled, was it easy to see it as a group effort, or was there still a sort of jealous, protective feeling:

‘This is our sketch, that is their material’?

PALIN: I’d like to think we naturally were rooting for every sketch [rather than] anyone wanting their sketches to go down better, although there probably was a little bit of that, but basically you just wanted the show to have laughs all the way through. Putting together that show involved decisions which we’d all taken – the choice of the material, the casting, the links, all that – as part of the group. So if something didn’t work, then yes, it was seen as a failure of the group: ‘We shouldn’t have put that in or cast it that way, set it up in such a way.’ It was very much all group decisions.

And quite interesting, because early on John was undoubtedly the most well-known, [yet] he was very happy to be part of that group – he didn’t want it to be in any way The John Cleese Show, and I would have thought if there was going to be a possible area of difficulty, that would have been one of the problems. John was the ‘star’ before Python; he wasn’t necessarily the star of Python, although he probably was – he was the best known and possibly the best performer. But John didn’t see it that way; John saw it as a group, and Python [assumed] responsibility for everything that went up there, rather than your individual responsibility.

I’m sure at the end of the day there was a bit of, ‘Terry and Mike … ehh!’

SHERLOCK: Graham and John did a bizarre murder sketch for David Frost whereby I think the murderer turned out to be the regimental goat mascot that belonged to the guard who was a suspect: ‘It was the Regimental Goat wot done it!’ It was new in terms of off-the-wall wacky humour. At the time we thought it was hysterical, but most people wondered what the hell the sketch was about. Some of the more surreal sketches they were doing [for Python] had been rejected by every other thing they worked for.

JONES: One of the first sketches was about sheep nesting in trees, which John and Graham had offered to The Frost Report, and the producer Jimmy Gilbert had said, ‘No, no, no, it’s too silly. We can’t do that.’ John’s thing was always, ‘The great thing about Python was that it was somewhere where we could use up all that material that everybody else had said was too silly.’

Did you and Michael also use sketches you had written for other comedians?

JONES: All ours was original material, squire!

Was there EVER any consideration given during the writing process to how an audience would respond to the material?

IDLE: None whatsoever.

PERT PIECES OF COPPER COINAGE

JONES: I think our budget was £5,000 a show. It had been kind of a tight operation. Everything was planned very rigorously. We’d do the outdoor filming for most of the series before we started shooting the studio stuff. We had to write the entire series before we even started doing anything because we’d be shooting stuff for show 13, show 1, or show 2 while we’re in one location, so that while you’re at the seaside you can do all the seaside bits.

PALIN: A lot of the early arguments were just over money; we were paid so incredibly little. So in a sense the BBC committed a lot, they’d given us thirteen shows (which was nice), but they’d taken away with one hand what they’d given us with the other. But on the other hand they let us go ahead and do it!

MACNAUGHTON: Because I was the producer as well as the director, I was able to speak as a producer, so I could say [to the Pythons], ‘That is impossible, we have only got so much of a budget; can we alter this slightly to allow that we don’t go too far over?’ Because you know at the BBC in those days if you went too far over budget the people got rather anarchic. Unless you were exceptionally successful.

PALIN: We presented a script to Ian, we knew what we wanted to do on film and what should be done in the studio, and Ian didn’t really get involved in that aspect of it. On the other hand when we were discussing things like where we would film and how we could best get the effect of a piece of film he would have quite a bit of input. And we’d actually film in Yorkshire and Scotland – that was very often Ian saying, ‘Let’s go out and do that.’

MACNAUGHTON: We used to plan about eight weeks in advance of the series. We knew we wanted an average of, say, five minutes of film per episode (in the first series anyway). The series was thirteen, so we needed time to [shoot] an hour and a half of film. We would plan what sketches or what sequences were better filmed than done in the studio, etc. And as the Pythons went on, they got more interested in the filming side than in the studio side.

Nothing was too ridiculous for us to try. You have a silly sketch like ‘Spot the Loony’ and you happen to be up in Scotland shooting ‘Njorl’s Saga’, and you suddenly think, ‘Wouldn’t it be good to have the loony here in the middle of Glen Coe leaping through the thing?’ These kinds of things happened. They enjoyed all that kind of thing. And it was not particularly more expensive than filming, say, in London because the permission and the fees we had to pay in filming in Glen Coe or Oban or whatever were much less than what we had to pay at the Lower Courts or Cheapside. So the expense was not so great, [and] the opulence of the locations was there, you didn’t have to build them!

GILLIAM: We weren’t doing drama, we were doing comedy, which fell under Light Entertainment, and light seemed to be required constantly so that you could see the joke! Feel the joke! And I just always had a stronger visual sense than [what] we were able to get on those filmings. There would be all these times I’d get in there: ‘The camera should be there.’ Terry would do the same thing; we were always pushing Ian around! I think we were just frustrated because we wanted to film this, too; we were convinced we could do it better. But the BBC didn’t work that way. They would put a producer/director on the thing. And there was a kind of Light Entertainment direction at the BBC which was very sort of sloppy.

I was always frustrated because it didn’t look as good as it should; the lighting wasn’t as good as it should have been. Everything was done so fast and shoddily, there was very little time to get real atmosphere on the screen, or to shoot it dramatically enough or exciting enough. But you churned it out; it’s the nature of television.

We wanted it to look like Drama as opposed to Light Entertainment. Drama was serious; that’s where the real talents hung out!

They ate at a separate canteen?

GILLIAM: It’s almost like that, it always felt like that; they had more money, they can light this stuff. If you’ve got something beautifully lit and the costumes are really great and the set’s looking good and then you do some absurd nonsense, it’s funnier than having it in a cardboard set with some broad lighting. And especially since a lot of the stuff would be parodies of things – if you’re going to do a parody, it’s got to look like the original.

So when we were able to do Holy Grail and direct it ourselves, it looked a lot better. I think the jokes were funnier because the world was believable, as opposed to some cheap LE lightweight. I mean, we approached Grail as seriously as Pasolini did. We were watching the Pasolini films a lot at that time because he more than anybody seemed to be able to capture a place and period in a very simple but really effective way. It wasn’t El Cid and the big epics, it was much smaller. You could feel it, you could smell it, you could hear it.

JONES: Poor old Ian had me [to deal with]. I insisted on going on the location scouts with him and then when we were filming was really sitting in and seeing what Ian was doing all the time. And it was awful for me, too; I used to go out with this terrible tight stomach because we’d see Ian put the camera down and I’d think, ‘It’s in the wrong place, it should be over there!’ So I’d have to go up to Ian very quietly and sort of say, ‘Ian, don’t you think you should put it over there?’ or something like that, and then depending on Ian’s mood at the time, because if it were morning when he hadn’t been drinking he would be very good, but sometimes he got a bit shirty.

Obviously when we were in the studio on the floor you can’t do very much, so Ian had his head then. But in the editing I’d always ring Ian up and say, ‘When’s the editing?’ I could see Ian going, Jesus Christ! Sort of tell me between gritted teeth, and then I’d turn up.

Did he ever purposely tell you the wrong time, to put you off?

JONES: I get the feeling he wanted to do that, but he was too honourable a man! Especially at the beginning, I’d turn up and he’d say, ‘Look, we’ve only got two hours to do this in.’ And I just had to shut out of my head everything about that and say, ‘Well, let’s just see how long.’ We’d end up doing the whole day. I’d see something and I’d think, ‘Ian, we have to take that out, there’s a gap there.’ Usually it was cutting things out, and closing up the show so that it went fast. But it was very hard, because every time I wanted to change something, my stomach would go tight because I knew Ian would go, ‘We’ve nearly had two hours now and we’ve only done ten minutes!’ So we got on a bit like that. And then at the end of the day I’d ring everybody up to have a look at the show. But then as it went on Ian really got very good, actually, because although it was a bit sticky in the first series – and it shows, I think; the first series is not edited as tightly as it could have been – as it went on, Ian got really good at it, and realized that I wasn’t trying to muscle in on his thing; we were just trying to make the best show possible, making sure the material actually came over. So it was very hard for him, but eventually the relationship got really good, and Ian and I worked really well. Ian got very creative, and once you relaxed he got very creative about it, and then came up with a lot of different stuff.

TEN, NINE, EIGHT AND ALL THAT

CLEESE: My memory is that on the whole Ian did not, let’s be polite, interfere much with the acting! We tended to watch each other’s stuff – not all the time because a certain amount of rehearsal is just practice, but we would keep an eye on each other’s sketches, and at a suitable moment somebody might suggest an additional line, or we might come forward and say, ‘I think that bit isn’t working.’ But there was such an instinctive understanding within the group that you probably didn’t even have to say that because people would already know it wasn’t working. It was very much a group activity – not that we were all sitting around desperately focused on each other’s sketches, because people sat around and read the paper and wrote up their diaries.

MACNAUGHTON: We did the usual BBC style of five or six days’ rehearsal. On the sixth day there would be a technical run-through for all the lighting, etc., and then we were one day in the studio. And of course all the stuff we had filmed we showed to the audience in the studio as we did each episode.

Cleese and Idle in rehearsal, c. 1971.

From the beginning I had no problem working with them because they’re extremely disciplined as actors, as comic actors.

We honestly had a very good working relationship. I have never from the beginning had one problem with any of them. I felt myself to be a part of the team anyway.

I can remember one time John looking at me after a sketch had been done and saying, ‘Why aren’t you laughing?’ And I said, ‘Well, there’s something not quite right with this sketch.’ He said, ‘You hear that, gentlemen? Let’s do it again.’ They did it again, and he said, ‘No, I think we’ll find a new one,’ and did a new one the next day.

I can’t remember any explosions. Come the second series there was one moment and that was quite fun: we were making the film ‘The Bishop’, and I’d set up the opening shot with a lower-level camera. The bishop’s car raced up to the camera, stopped, out jumped all the mafia bishops, etc., and ran up to the church. Now Terry Jones said to me, ‘No, no, you must do this in a high angle.’ And I said, ‘No, I think the low angle’s better for this opening,’ knowing what had gone before. ‘No, no, no!’ We had a bit of a row, and we walked off together, Terry kicking stones right and left. And I said, ‘Look, Terry, just leave it for a moment – anyway, I haven’t got a cherry picker with me and can’t get the big high angle that you’re looking for.’ We came back and did it. We then went on another location in Norwich I think it was, and where we saw the rushes from the previous week, up came the rushes for ‘The Bishop’ – and this is what’s so nice about the whole group: Terry Jones turned around in the hotel’s dining room where we were watching the rushes, held his thumb up to me, and said, ‘You were right, it worked perfectly.’ And that is I think the biggest row we ever had, and it’s not a very big one, you must admit.

JONES: In studio, we tried to do it sequentially as much as we could. It was a bit stop-and-starty sometimes, but we tried as much as we could to rush through the costume changes. We only had an hour and a half recording time anyway, so you had thirty-five minutes of material to record. We very often did it as a live show with just a few hitches, try and keep the momentum going to keep the audience entertained. We didn’t want to stop the show because it meant the audience going off the boil a bit.

MACNAUGHTON: We had a studio audience of 320; that was a BBC policy, to have a studio audience. And you know, never had we laid a laugh from a laugh track on Python. It was a kind of policy, because we thought if the audience don’t really like it, they won’t laugh anyway, and there’s nothing worse than listening to shows that have laugh tracks on and the audience is roaring with laughter at something you’ve found totally unfunny yourself.

JONES: For me, when we came to the editing the audience was always the great key – we always had that laughter to go by so you knew whether something was working or not. And if something didn’t get a laugh, then we cut it. A lot of the time we were actually having to take laughs out because it was holding up the shows.

I remember one show that didn’t seem to work in the studio, and that was ‘The Cycling Tour’. Everybody came out very disappointed, all the audience and our friends going, ‘Eh, that wasn’t very good, didn’t really work, that.’ And of course the trouble with that was that it wasn’t shot sequentially, or even when it was shot sequentially it was very stop-and-starty. Like all the stuff in the hospital, the casualty ward, was very quick cuts – a sign falling off, a trolley collapsing, a window falling on somebody’s hand – that all had to be shot separately, so they didn’t seem very funny at the time. But when you cut them in very fast, that made it seem quite funny.

MACNAUGHTON: At the beginning they all wanted to come to the editing, and I said, ‘That’s no use, we can’t have five guys standing around me standing around the editor.’ So in the end only Terry used to come to the editing. We’d sit together and we’d say, ‘Yes, I think cut there,’ and ‘No, I think it should be cut later,’ and ‘No, I’m sorry, I think it’s quicker’ – the usual thing. There were honestly no problems.

GILLIAM: Terry tended to be the one to be in the editing room, sitting looking over Ian’s shoulder, and keeping an eye on things. I popped in occasionally, John, different people. Terry was almost always there.

Ian dealt with the BBC, basically; we didn’t have to. That’s the great thing about the BBC, it’s not like American television; once they said ‘Go’, they basically left. It was a real, incredibly laissez-faire operation. That was the strength of the place, because it just allowed the talent to get on to do what it did. And in the end the talent ended up producing more good material than all these meetings are producing now. I don’t think the batting average is any better now than it was then, it’s actually worse, and they all end up sitting around talking things to death. It was very simple: you’ve got this series, we want seven shows now and six later and you do it, that’s it.

We had freedom like nobody gets now, basically. And the only time we started getting some involvement from them was later on, I think it was probably the third series, because as we’d become successful they felt that they had to interfere in some way, to be involved in this thing.

WHY DON’T YOU MOVE INTO MORE CONVENTIONAL AREAS?

PALIN: I think there was always a conscious desire to do something which was ahead of or tested the audience’s taste, or tested the limits of what we can or cannot say. I think it’s probably strongest in John and Graham’s writing; they enjoyed being able to shock, whereas Terry and I enjoyed surprise more than shock. For us it was more putting together odd and surreal images in a certain way which would not offend but really jolt, surprise, and amaze. John and Graham took some pleasure in writing something which shocked an audience. I think this came from within, but John never seemed to be totally happy or centred – there was always something which John was having to cope with. And that desire to shock I think came from the way Graham was, too. Graham was a genuine outsider, a very strait-laced man who was homosexual and an alcoholic at that time and therefore found himself constantly in conflict with people, and so he would fight back. And the two of them would put together things like the ‘Undertaker Sketch’ purely because they knew it was outrageous, and yet they did it in a way none of the other Pythons would have done, so it was quite refreshing. When we first heard that we thought, ‘Well, we just can’t do it.’ But then you think about it: this is a really good, refreshing view of death, talking about it that way. In that particular case I think yes, there was a desire to shock an audience by talking about something that was not talked about.

Terry and I were not quite so interested in taboos.

Was it because, having been journeymen scriptwriters for hire, your previous experience did not allow for taboo material?

If you had written taboo material for others, you wouldn’t have got hired again.

PALIN: No, I don’t think that’s it, I think it just wasn’t in our nature to write deliberately shocking material; we couldn’t make it very funny. We could surprise, we could amaze. It was personal, it was nothing to do with our writing; in fact, quite the opposite: the writing that we had to do in the Sixties made us relish Python and the freedom Python had. We utterly supported John and Graham and what they were writing, and for us it was all part of the freedom of Python: to do stuff we wouldn’t have been able to do as journeymen writers. Great, someone writes a sketch about undertakers; it seemed shocking to start with it, you look at it and say, ‘Okay, let’s give this a go.’ And that was part of the exhilaration of doing Python. But no, I don’t think Terry and myself were particularly good about getting laughs [from] very abrasive material. There might have been instances, I can’t remember, [but] we were more about human behaviour, moralizing.

SHERLOCK: Cleese as he’s got older has become more conservative, but when they first started out Python was really quite left-wing; it was considered by some to be commie and subversive.

IDLE: Always we tried to épater les bourgeois.

Once when filming, a British middle-class lady came up and said, ‘Oh, Monty Python; I absolutely hate you lot.’ And we felt quite proud and happy. Nowadays I miss people who hate us; we have sadly become nice, safe, and acceptable now, which shows how clever an Establishment really is, opening up to make room inside itself.

FRANKLY I DON’T FULLY UNDERSTAND IT MYSELF, THE KIDS SEEM TO LIKE IT

MACNAUGHTON: Now Terry Gilliam was meanwhile working on the animation links for all the shows; sometimes Terry’s film would arrive on the day we were recording that certain episode. No one had seen it beforehand, but everybody trusted everybody else. Which was a very good thing.

GILLIAM: [In story meetings] I always had the most difficulty because I could never explain what I was doing; whenever I did, there would be these blank faces. I was in maybe the best position because I had the most freedom. The others had to submit all their material to the group and get rejected or included or changed; mine, because I couldn’t explain it, and because we were always revising at the last moment, was pretty much never touched.

What was the actual process like for you?

GILLIAM: Sometimes I had an assistant working on Python; Terry’s sister-in-law Katie Hepburn assisted me for a while. Basically it was me on my own, with books.

I’d always start: there were the scripts, they go from there to there, and I just sort of had an idea, an image to start with. A lot of times I had a lot of ideas, a lot of things I wanted to get into the shows; I just had to stick them in between and find connecting tissues to get from there to there. So I would use these little storyboard sketches, then I would start looking for the artwork; whether it was stuff I had drawn myself or pictures that I got from books, I’d start getting the elements together.

And in the end the room is all these flats full of artwork. It became like a scenic dock for a studio: I’d have the ground, and I’d have different skies, and I could build a background very quickly after a certain point, and then I just started, totally a magpie approach, things that I liked I use and chop up. If it was photos I needed, I’d send the books in to the photographic place and blow them up to the sizes I want and start cutting them out; usually they wouldn’t be complete so I’d have to draw or airbrush part of it.

Conrad Poohs and His Dancing Teeth.

So I’d have all this artwork and I’d go to the BBC’s rostrum camera, set it up, and just start pushing the stuff around. You’d find at three or four in the morning the papers arranging themselves after a while! The stuff kind of made itself. You pile all these things there and they start forming patterns, a thing lands on top of that; ooh, that’s an idea. It was really free, because even though I had storyboarded and set out with a very specific look or an idea I was after, if I couldn’t find it I’d grab something that was just as good or it would be a little bit different than I expected but I could make it work, and it would flow in that direction.

And I would always shoot long; a lot of the work was done in the editing room afterwards, because I never knew quite [how long] somebody would talk. I would just wiggle the mouth up and down – leave it open for twelve frames, close it for ten – and then later I would chop frames out to try and get it vaguely to [match] whatever was being said. And then for voices I either do them myself, or I’d run and get the guys in the corridor, or in rehearsal. I just stand there with a tape recorder and say, ‘John, say this, say that; okay, good, thank you. Terry, say that …’ And the BBC had a great sound effects library which is all on discs, [but] a lot of times I’d just sit at home, a blanket over my head, with a tape recorder, making noises with kitchen utensils, and just record this shit. And then I’d get down to the editing room and we’d start sticking it all together. I was working seven days a week, it was just crazed. There’d be at least one all-nighter in there.

Cannibalism, Gilliam-style.

All the underground press were convinced I was an acidhead, they thought all of us were on drugs but me in particular, and we weren’t – it’s all natural stuff!

And it’s not like a Disney cartoon where everything’s planned and drawn; it’s using things around me, and just incorporating and letting it grow organically.

I was producing this stuff in two weeks [for each show]. Some of the [location] filming I wouldn’t get to because I was desperately trying to get ahead. I’d have to keep up with the shows, so by the end of the series it was always a mad rush. It was weird.

When you sail in a race, you just go out on the ocean, and you come around a buoy and all the boats are there, and before you get to the next marker everybody disperses and goes a different way; suddenly you’re alone. And then you come to the next marker buoy and Oh! Everybody converges. And it was kind of like that in doing the shows; we’d have the meetings, I’d be there as part of the group, then I’d go off into my world, and we’d only get together the days the shows were being recorded. So they were always together, they were always at rehearsals. My problem was there was one side of me that wanted to be a performer as well, but I really didn’t think I was in their class, so I’d just turn up on the days we were recording and take that little part there, put on a costume, do something silly there, just to keep myself both from being bored and feeling more a part of the thing. Because they were having all the fun, and I felt I was doing all the work!

In story meetings, would you ever bring a fully devised sketch to be animated, such as ‘The House Hunters’ [in which two hunters armed with ‘condemned’ posters track a wild building]?

GILLIAM: I wouldn’t have brought it in as a sketch – I would bring it as an idea. ‘I want to do this whole thing about house hunters, it’s a literal thing.’ And again they didn’t know quite where to put those things because they couldn’t imagine them; that was part of the problem. If I wanted to do that little story, in a sense it was up to me to find the right spot to slide that in. I’m trying to remember whether I would actually say, ‘I’ve got a thing that’s probably going to run about three minutes.’ I honestly can’t remember whether I was ever that specific. Because we’d try to work out a thirty-minute show, so I’m sure I must have been saying ‘a big chunk’. ‘I’ve got a big thing to do here,’ something specific!

A typical magpie approach.

Terry always loved what I was doing, and Mike. It’s so weird because Terry and Mike are much more visually oriented than the others, but it may just have been my inability to explain things. John I think was constantly bemused by my stuff, he was so – ‘intimidated’ is probably too strong a word, but he didn’t know how to criticize it, so he never criticized it except for this one thing where he could actually go, ‘Well, that’s blasphemous,’ or ‘That’s offensive.’ [See page 146.]

That was the bad side of it: I felt at times I wasn’t getting any of the benefit of the criticisms of the group. We all had to be self-criticizing, saying, ‘That doesn’t work,’ ‘That’s not good enough for the shows.’ But a lot of times I never got a sense that they knew whether [what I did] was good or bad, whether it worked or didn’t work, because it was another language that they don’t understand. John didn’t understand the language.

In the English language there’s no word for ‘visual illiteracy’. You have ‘illiterate’, but visual? There’s no term for it; it’s the idea that visual things are not a language. There is a visual language, and yet people who invent words don’t invent that word. I want to use ‘ivvisualites’, people who are visually illiterate.

It’s a thing that intrigues me, the information you get from images; they’re saying things and they’re telling these stories and they don’t necessarily have to be words. Being down with these kids at the Royal College’s Animation Department, some of the stuff they’re doing is just wonderful, but if you sit down and go, ‘Tell me the story,’ they can’t do it. A splotch of stuff here, a funny little noise happens there, what’s that? And yet it’s fantastic – at least it is for me. I look at some of their stuff and I’m not sure that John Cleese would find it funny, I don’t think he would know what to say about it. Sounds like I’m picking on John, but he was the most visually illiterate; I think it’s that. But I wish the others would have been able to come up and say, ‘Terry, that’s pretty weird.’ They didn’t!

Was any animation ever rejected out of hand?

GILLIAM: There was this thing that Ian MacNaughton just completely fucked up because he didn’t understand it, and Terry hadn’t been in the editing room that day. It was a strange abstract thing – it’s really hard to describe! I mean, it was like trees growing and reaching barriers in space you can’t see, and then they go around and did all sorts of really strange and interesting things. And I don’t know what he was thinking when he did it, he just didn’t get what it was and he cut it. That was a big mistake, [but] that wasn’t like somebody censoring.

BUT IT’S MY ONLY LINE!

CAROL CLEVELAND, ACTRESS: I had been doing a fair amount of work at the BBC, doing what I call – I think this is my own definition – a ‘glamour stooge’, working alongside people like Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker, and Spike Milligan.

When the Pythons were starting, I hadn’t met any of the fellas at all, though I knew a little of their work. They’d written five episodes of the original thirteen, and they were looking for a female. Somebody at the Beeb suggested my name and John Howard Davies saw me and cast me. I hadn’t realized at that stage that my contract wouldn’t go further than four episodes; I only discovered that when my agent got in touch with the Beeb. By this stage we’d got going and I got on extremely well with the guys, they thought I fitted in beautifully. I think they were more than happy with my contribution, and when Michael came up to me when we were doing episode three and said, ‘Oh, we have got something great for you coming up,’ – because already they felt that they weren’t quite utilizing my talents enough and they wanted to give me something more to do than just giggle and smile, as I did in the ‘Marriage Guidance Counsellor’ sketch – I said, ‘Well, it sounds great but I’m not in episode six.’ And he said, ‘What? What?’ And he went over and spoke to the others, John came over and said, ‘What’s this?’

So they said, ‘Absolutely no way – we want you with us for the rest of the series.’ So that’s what happened. I really owe it to the fellas that I became the Monty Python girl because they put their foot down.¹

By now Ian MacNaughton was doing the directing. Ian wanted to have different ladies in each episode and he wanted to be responsible for the casting, so the fellas put their foot down and said, ‘Uh-uh.’ They came to the agreement that if Ian wanted someone to just literally stand there and say nothing and just look pretty, fine, he could cast that, but if there was any sort of acting involved, the fellas wanted me. And that was the agreement they came to and that was how I came to be in the series.

How was working with the Pythons different from working on other comedy programmes?

CLEVELAND: Working with Spike Milligan was almost traumatic – an amazing experience but exhausting because you never knew what this man was going to do next. But the other people I worked with were all fairly sane – I mean, very funny but it was all fairly sane stuff, you knew what was going on; there wasn’t quite such a lunacy with those. With the Pythons I really didn’t know what to expect. It’s just a wonderful combination of looniness and great wit and intelligence and foresight. When I first joined them, I didn’t honestly quite know what to make of it to begin with. I remember the first two or three days of rehearsal thinking, ‘I don’t know if this is going to take off,’ because they were sort of all over the place. It was fairly manic.

We didn’t actually do a lot of rehearsal. If anything, it was under-rehearsed to keep it fresh and fun. Lots of people say to me, ‘How much of that was improvised?’ Because it came over so fresh, they felt a lot of it was being improvised. And I say, ‘Well, none of it; none of it was improvised. It was all scripted, everything.’

Carol Cleveland, steadfast straight woman to the group, in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl.

There wasn’t a lot that went on in the first few days of rehearsal; because they had written it themselves, they knew exactly what they wanted, so they knew just what was going to happen. Once they knew exactly what they were doing, in order to keep it fresh, we’d just stop rehearsing and the rest of the time was mucking about. Once we’d done our little bit of rehearsal we’d go, ‘Right, that’s good now, we don’t want to sort of louse it up,’ we’d do something like play football. So all of the furniture would be moved aside and we set up a couple of goals at each end and we’d have a football match. I was always a goalie! And we had a great time at rehearsals mucking about, I have to say, much to the amusement of passers-by. When we were in the BBC Centre rehearsal rooms (which are great, big, vast rooms), all the doors have little peek-through windows, and it was wonderful – as people pass by, you’d see them come back and take a double take, and not know what to make of it. They thought we were rehearsing a football sketch that went on day after day after day.

What allowed you to work so well with the group as their foil?

CLEVELAND: Well, certainly I was very prepared to have a go. There was very little they could ask me to do that I would ever say ‘no’ to. I was willing and able, and I’d throw myself into it with great gusto. I guess there’s a fair amount of lunacy in me, there must have been to get into things the way I did, and I think that was very appealing to them. I could do the sort of ‘glamour dollie bird’ bit and put that across very well but at the same time send myself up on that. I was quite happy to go over the top with anything and I think that was the other thing that they liked. And obviously they felt I had quite a good comedy flair and I looked good as well, which was a combination they wanted.

It still irritates me that I meet Python fans and their recollections seem to be of me without any clothes on! I never took my clothes off in Python, not entirely. There was a lot of me in underwear and showgirl outfits and bathing suits and lingerie, but never without any clothes. The nearest I came to that was when we were filming ‘Scott of the Sahara’. In that I’m being chased by a man-eating roll-top desk, having my clothes ripped off bit by bit by cacti. I’m running towards the camera on each occasion, and on the last one my bra comes off and I’m still meant to be running towards the camera and I was feeling a little bit shy about all sorts of things, and certainly the fact that we were filming on a crowded beach and there were masses of people milling about, so I did feel a little bit inhibited about that. I wasn’t happy about running towards the camera with my bra coming off so in fact they did change it. The last shot is of me topless running away with my back to the camera as I pass John sitting at his desk facing the camera. But that was the only time I think I ever resisted. And the funny thing is that I suppose if they asked me to do it now, I’d say, ‘Yeah, great, I’ll do it!’ But it’s too late now, they won’t ask me!

Was there difficulty in that there were Python wives and girlfriends who also appeared in the shows but not as frequently as you?

CLEVELAND: I suppose if I had been a wife or a girlfriend I wouldn’t have got the job! Connie Cleese appeared occasionally, and Eric’s then-wife Lynn Ashley appeared, but only occasionally. Neither of them would have actually wanted to be involved, I think; it was only because they were wives that they were brought in.

I don’t think I would have got the job if I had been heavily involved [with one of them]. And I remember very early on Terry Gilliam did ask me out on a date – when I think how things might have turned out if I’d said ‘yes’! I said ‘no’ for two reasons: first of all because I actually had a boyfriend who was an extremely jealous Italian, but I think I would have said no anyway because business and pleasure don’t mix. As it turns out Terry dated a make-up girl on the show, Maggie, and they’re now married and very happy.

What were your impressions of the Pythons?

CLEVELAND: Individually they were all as they were collectively: brilliant, clever, fun, very nice men. The only one I never really felt close to was Eric. All the others treated me like one of the boys, and I never quite felt that with Eric. Eric always seemed a little distant, rather aloof. He in my opinion was the most serious of the lot, and the most businesslike. He was the one that always had his head together as far as the financial side of Python was concerned. If anyone started getting a little bit too wacky he would be the one to say, ‘Well, yeah, but this one is going to cost such-and-such.’

Terry Jones: very excitable, being a Welshman very emotional, quite fiery at times. I was never present at the writing sessions or the business meetings but I’m told that he was the one that had been known to throw things. And he, along with Terry Gilliam, were the two looniest of the lot, who would cause the most havoc and confusion during the rehearsal period.

Terry Gilliam, also very excitable, very visual, very loud! And you never quite knew what was going on in his head, until you actually saw the animations – and when you saw the animations you really got quite worried about what was going on there!

Graham always did everything to excess, everything he did: obviously his drinking, and the way he flaunted his homosexuality, which wasn’t the done thing in the early Seventies certainly, and caused a certain amount of embarrassment at the time. Personally I felt quite embarrassed by some of his behaviour. I don’t know quite how to describe Graham; I sort of describe his behaviour rather than his personality. He was a lovely man. I think because of his drinking and his homosexuality, everyone felt they needed to take care of Graham a little.

John: the most logical, definitely moody, like all comic geniuses a complex man but he was the only one who really changed during the course of Python. When he was going through his questioning period with his psychoanalysis, he was actually at times quite unpleasant to be around. He was unfriendly and difficult – certainly that’s what I noticed. Fortunately, by the time we were doing Life of Brian he was back to being his fun self.

And as for Michael, well, Michael has never changed. He’s the one that’s never changed at all, and he remains the same charming, shy, sweet, helpful person that he is, and he is of course the only one who’s actually quite shy, and that’s very appealing, which is why all the women adore Michael. He was always the ladies’ favourite.

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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