Monty Python Speaks

by David Morgan

  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.”

  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 allowed women in as full members of Footlights for the first time), appeared on stage 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.

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

  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 subsquently!

  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 long-hair 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 gotten to know Terry Gilliam in New York a little bit. 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 Vanderbeck 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 Home 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 Histories, which had been a partial success (or partial failure, according to which way you looked at it)!

  Terry, Eric, and myself had been all 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 humor, 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 flobby.

  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 arrive 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 fall. 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 U.S. 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 reign. 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!