by David Morgan
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 nonwriter, 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 program,” 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 have 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 poof-tahs; “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 favorite form of collaboration is for a partner on e-mail 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 ass.
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 bei
ng 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 defenseless 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 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 fifty percent; the other fifty percent 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 favorites.
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 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?
“Least unattractive”?
“We could have it any time we wanted.” Chapman and Idle as the Protestants in The Meaning of Life.
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.