by David Morgan
Colin “Bomber” Harris wrestling Colin “Bomber” Harris, from Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl.
SPLUNGE!
I’d Like to Answer This Question if I May in Two Ways: Firstly in My Normal Voice and Then in a Kind of Silly, High Pitched Whine
JONES: I always loved Graham as a performer, from when I first saw him in “Cambridge Circus” and then in At Last the 1948 Show, because you could never quite see what he was doing. I mean, John I dearly love as a performer, but from the moment you first see John you know where John is; Graham was always very intangible.
I think Graham always played everything as if he didn’t think anything was funny, [as if] he didn’t see the joke in anything, really, which was just wonderful. Which was why he worked for the leads in Holy Grail and Life of Brian, because he played it so straight and sincerely and seriously.
PALIN: The characters that Graham played were again great Establishment characters. He would play a colonel exactly right and add this wonderful mad streak throughout. I think Graham took more risks than John, and I think when they wrote together, although John I’m sure put together eighty percent of their sketches, the twenty percent that Graham put in was the truly surreal and extraordinary. Graham had a wonderful gift with words; I’m sure “Norwegian Blue” for a parrot would be Graham’s. There’s something about it: a Norwegian Blue parrot—that just sounds like Graham.
Graham as a performer had a quiet intensity which, if you look at all of his performances, quite unlike any of the rest of us, is very convincing whatever he does. That’s why he was so good as Brian, so good as Arthur; here was a man who genuinely suffered, you know, trying to get through this world—he just happened to be a king, it wasn’t his fault—he was trying to do his best, and all these people around him were just mucking him up. One really felt for him. Graham could portray that very well, partly because I think he was a little nervous as a performer, because he took to drink at one time. By Life of Brian he had given it up, and he didn’t need that, but he was always slightly nervous about it. There’s a concentration in the way Graham does things which looks good, it comes across as very natural and very right.
CLEESE: Graham was fundamentally a very, very fine actor. He could do very odd things, like mime, and he did a very funny impression of the noise made by an espresso machine, things like that. He was a really, really good actor. But to understand Graham you have to realize he didn’t really work properly. If he was a little machine, you would take him back and somebody would fiddle with it, and then it would come back working properly. So he was a very odd man; he was in many ways highly intelligent and quite insightful, in other ways he was a complete child, and not someone who was really any good at taking any sort of responsibility and discharging it.
His best function, and the reason that I wrote with him all those years, is that we got on pretty well. We laughed at the same things, we made each other laugh. And he was the greatest sounding-board that I ever worked with. When Graham laughed or thought something funny, he was nearly always right, and that’s extraordinary. For example: when we were writing the “Cheese Shop” [sketch], I kept saying to him, “Is this funny? Is this funny?” And he’d go, [puff puff on his pipe] “It’s funny, go on.” And that’s really how the “Cheese Shop” [sketch] was written as opposed to just being abandoned, because I kept having my doubts. He was a wonderful sounding-board.
And the other side of that was that he was very disorganized—I mean we were all a bit disorganized, but he was really disorganized, and really fundamentally very lazy. His input was minimal; I remember working with Kevin Billington on a movie that turned out to be called The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer. After a couple of sessions, Kevin said to me very quietly, perhaps on a lunch break when Graham had gone to the bathroom, “Does Graham usually make so little contribution?” And I remember being quite surprised by the question, because I’d gotten used to the fact that he made so little contribution.
He didn’t say very much, but when he did say something it was often very good. But he was never the engine; someone had to be in the engine room driving something forward, and then Graham would sit there and add the new thought or twist here or there, which is terribly useful. But I remember saying to somebody once that there were two kinds of days with Graham; there were the days when I did eighty percent of the work, and there were the days when he did five percent of the work.
To give you a real example of how bad it could be: when we finished the first series of The Frost Report in 1966, David Frost gave us £1,000 to write a movie script. With the money we went off to Ibiza, and we took a villa for two months and decided to write there, and a whole lot of friends came and stayed with us and passed through, and that is when Graham met David Sherlock. I remember that I would sit inside at the desk writing, and Graham would literally be lying on the balcony outside sunbathing, calling suggestions into the room as I sat there writing.
And the funny thing is I don’t remember being cross about it; I think I just accepted that writing with Graham I was going to have to do eighty percent of the work and sometimes more. And it always slightly annoyed me when people used to come up to me on Fawlty Towers and say, “Well, how much did Connie Booth actually write?” And I wanted to say to them, “Certainly a lot more than Graham ever wrote.” That used to annoy me, the assumption that because Graham was a man he was obviously making a bigger contribution than Connie as a woman.
SHERLOCK: Graham would have been a very good shrink, because if nothing else he understood what made people tick. And if he couldn’t understand, he would make it his job to find out. And his interview technique, if he was looking for prospective interesting people wanting to join his coterie, within five minutes he could sum somebody up and sort them out.
However, I think he was far less astute financially than Cleese, who had a great many friends who were accountants—hence a lot of the sketches!—but he learned from them. Sadly those sort of people bored Graham, I don’t think he was even interested [in connecting]. That’s why he lost money while others were gaining.
One of the most delightful sounds I’ve ever heard was Graham and John writing. This was in the days when we lived in Highgate in the seventies. I would often be preparing food for our large nuclear family (who could be anything from three to four to ten on an evening sometimes, depending on who Graham invited back from the pub or whatever). Part of my life consisted of keeping the household kicking over. I didn’t do it very well, but it was fairly Bohemian anyway, so it didn’t matter too much. But in the morning if I was making coffee for them, I would often hear a delighted shriek as they hit on some outrageous idea, often followed by the thudding of bodies hitting the floor, and the drumming of feet like a child with a tantrum, only this was the sheer delight of the idiocy of the idea, which would absolutely floor either the people at the BBC or the watching public. And they would howl screaming with laughter before they could even get back to finishing the sketch. Sometimes Gray [Graham] would go off to the pub for lunch, and John would say, “No, I’m not coming,” and he would do his Alexander technique exercises on the floor and would want to borrow a couple of books to put under his head. I often wondered in fact whether he needed that technique to get over the stress and strain of rolling about and falling to the floor!
Graham’s work with John would start off with apparent normality and then slowly chaos starts to seep in; all the time they try to drag the character back to reality or they try to keep control of whatever it is, but eventually it ends in chaos. I always see most of their classic sketches to be about that. One thing that was very important to them was a concrete time and place—even the maddest sketch had to have solidity, a reality. The sets were as realistic as the budget would allow and so were the costumes.
They had some extraordinary ideas when they were working to pressure; everyone knew they had so many sketches to bring to the table at the end of their writing time, half or two-thirds may be completely scrapped
. Well, in their case, they would often flip through a paper while starting a very, very late morning. Mornings would be very testy because sometimes there would be nothing done at all other than playing with crossword, making umpteen coffees, and searching for an idea for that very first thing. Once they’d got an idea they were off and they could finish the sketch in record time. On a good day, when they were working happily together, they would work from eleven in the morning, have a proper lunch break of an hour, and then work through till four in the afternoon, sometimes six.
But of course Cleese was a great perfectionist; Graham is on record saying that John could spend a day worrying about a single word that was placed in each sketch; as far as he was concerned a sketch was not finished until that word was placed or removed.
Cleese was definitely extremely disciplined. Graham was often seen as a loose cannon. But that’s not entirely true. When I was working with Graham he would be very disciplined, but he could do six things at once, which was pretty amazing. When working at home he could often answer the telephone in the middle of writing a sketch with a line half-finished or not even written down, and I often as the scribe would find myself pen poised. He could come straight back to that line having had an extremely complex conversation with an agent or whatever, and yet the whole shape of the sketch so far (even though it was very often with three wheels) was [still] in his head.
But very often it was Graham who would absolutely throw John by turning a sketch on its head or literally introducing some extraordinary character or even an animal. It’s very interesting, many of the more bizarre sketches such as the “Pet Conversions” sketch, where they’d doing absolutely hideous things to small furry animals (“Terriers make lovely fish. Legs off, fins on, stick a little pipe through the back of its neck so it can breathe, bit of gold paint…”), have been Cleese and Chapman.
GILLIAM: Graham’s contribution was greater than I think John pretended in a sense; he was so frustrated writing with Graham, yet Graham would make those leaps that nobody [else] John has worked with has done. Graham was just on another planet at times. Suddenly he’d say, “Splunge!” What, Splunge? And after that, you had to then deal with it; [it became] part of the comedy equation: E = mc2splunge.
Graham was there and he had to be dealt with in some way. And that’s what was so interesting in the end, becoming the best leading man of the group. He was the one on films who was the straightest in a sense, he just had a really interesting presence there.
SHERLOCK: I think in his biography (A Liar’s Autobiography) it was plain that he was this extraordinary mixture. He came from a very dedicated family. Their devotion to duty—it’s a very old-fashioned term, and it’s almost died out as a human quality—was (and still is) very strong. In some ways it was something [the Pythons] sent up.
Graham was a dam good sportsman. He was a good runner, he played rugby, he loved climbing mountains particularly. Graham was a very different mixture altogether from this rather reflective [image]. My mother was terrified of him. She said, “He just sits there smoking his pipe not saying much and I know he’s taking it all in, every word! I know it’s all going to come out on the television.” So that’s your average sort of middle-class attitude to what Graham was like. But yes, there were definitely two sides to his character, and the Jekyll and Hyde side, if you like, was very pronounced; it’s one reason why he drank as much as he did, because he was very shy, and he knew that his shyness could totally override everything unless there was some way of dealing with it.
Graham was fairly notorious as a boozer through the seventies, and yet he could often start work eleven in the morning with a large tumbler of gin and tonic beside him and work through the whole day apparently sober, absolutely totally undetectable. He was a gentleman drunk, rather like Jimmy Stewart in Harvey, sort of gentle. The whole fun of that movie is that Jimmy Stewart is actually drunk all the time and yet you’re never quite sure. That was the same with Graham.
When did his alcoholism affect his work?
SHERLOCK: It did affect his work, recording Python shows. It’s an aspect which really bothered the other guys. One of Graham’s best friends, who was at St. Bart’s Hospital with him, became the medical officer (or one of them) at the BBC during the time that Python was being made. He remembers the set for the show—you know how a TV studio works: you’ve got one set and it’s all built so that one doorway leads through into another which is a totally different set when viewed from the right angle—behind the flats, the actual scenery, very often there’s a ledge which held the thing together, on which at the end of a recording he could find behind each set at least one tumbler full of gin and tonic still bubbling away. Because there were one or two occasions when Graham’s terror of losing his lines, forgetting them completely, would be so much that he would freak out. It is after all every actor’s nightmare, this thing of losing lines. Graham did it once so spectacularly that I think he had something like forty-eight takes. Now in a TV studio that is not funny; with an audience, it’s even more frightening.
When did you first recognize that Graham’s drinking was a major problem?
CLEESE: I have one very, very, very clear memory, and it was the day we were shooting the “Upper Class Twit of the Year” at some big sports arena in North London for And Now for Something Completely Different. Graham for some reason wasn’t there, and we all wanted to check a point in the script, and none of us could find a copy, and Michael said, “Oh, Graham’s got a script in his briefcase.” And Michael opened the briefcase, took the script out, and then did a double-take, because there was a bottle (I think of vodka) in the briefcase. And Michael looked absolutely stunned, and somebody said, “What’s the matter?” And Michael said, “That was full when we left this morning,” and it was like quarter past ten, and the bottle was half empty. That was the moment when I realized that instead of needing a bit of a drink now and then, he was seriously into it. But my recollection is that his performing began to get affected in the second series.
JONES: When he was drinking the worst thing would be he couldn’t remember his lines, and Ian would be quite remorseless with him like in the studio shows, and make him go over and do it. I remember doing one sketch where we must have done about twenty-four takes of something, and then we had a problem because when Graham eventually got the line right, the audience cheered; [just listening to it], you don’t know why there’s cheering! We tried taking the cheer off [in the editing room] but we couldn’t quite do it. That was a bit awkward.
I remember one time we were filming out in Glen Coe and Graham had a long speech to do and you knew he wasn’t going to get it. And instead of doing Graham’s bit before lunch, Ian broke for lunch, and of course it was a disaster. You say, “Please, you want to do Graham’s bit first.” But no, no, no, he had to break for lunch. And Ian was also drinking, and so you knew after lunch you weren’t going to get a lot of sense out of Ian, either. And they came back and both were a bit squiffy. Graham couldn’t quite remember his words, and Ian couldn’t think of how to do it without just plowing on. But instead of just doing little snatches, Graham insisted on doing the whole thing together. It was a nightmare. I think in the end I had to hold my script up so Graham could read.
CLEESE: Certainly by the third series there was one sketch that we had to abandon because he literally couldn’t get through it; he literally couldn’t remember a line. He used to always get more nervous than the rest of us, and then he would drink to kill the nerves, so the chances of his memory functioning got damaged by that. And then he got so worried by the fact that he was going to have to perform his words in public that I think he got to the point where he didn’t even learn them properly, maybe so then you couldn’t really say that he’d forgotten them. It’s an extrordinary kind of defense, but my intuition tells me that’s what was going on.
And later we were very careful in casting; although we would give him things on film because he could have several goes at it, we used to keep any pa
rts away from him in the studio. But I do remember his shooting one piece in Devon dressed as a naval commander or something, and it was take after take after take. I think the director decided instead of letting him off he would keep at it, and he did so many takes that it got embarrassing. I mean, we got to slate one take seventeen, and I think they then made it “slate two take one” so it wouldn’t look so embarrassing.
By the end Graham was really not able to remember in the afternoon what we’d written in the morning. He was sipping very early on and simply just got vaguer and vaguer—I’m really talking about the time when we were writing Life of Brian, that was the very worst.
Then on Christmas Eve 1977, Graham fell over in a drunken state and gashed his head pretty badly on a fender by the fire. And he did an extraordinary thing: without ever going to AA, he stopped drinking, and that’s remarkable. For all his vagueness and laziness, and the complete complacency with which he would take the same money as everyone else while doing considerably less work, for all that he was capable of this great act of will.
And he wanted to clean up. I think he realized he had just reached a point where he just had to, but also he very much wanted to play the role of Brian, and he knew he couldn’t do it. If you watch him playing King Arthur you can see he’s drunk quite a lot; his face would get puffy and he would squint his eyes. So he got himself together. The infuriating thing was that in about six months he was in better shape than anybody! If you look at him in Life of Brian, he was in very, very good shape.
But writing Life of Brian was probably when he was at his worst, and that’s when he literally could not remember in the afternoon what we’d worked on in the morning. I remember I would go up and write at his place quite a lot—I used to go up there because it was the only way of getting started on time!