by David Morgan
Did you ever just refuse to write with him?
CLEESE: I don’t think so, because we were very incapable of any kind of real confrontation. Later I did sometimes suggest we should write on our own, and I did write some things on my own. But when you have a group—and I was as guilty as everyone—where the basic ethos is that nothing causing the group any difficulty is really confronted, it becomes pretty problematic.
MACNAUGHTON: BBC Light Entertainment used to have a party every Christmas and all the L.E. directors and actors used to come. We were all standing in this party one day, and suddenly up came the boss, Michael Mills, and he said to me, “For God’s sake, get Graham Chapman out of here.” I said, “Why?” “Why, he’s crawling about the floor biting the ankles of everybody in the room!” Okay. I went to him, I found him, and I said, “Graham, can you just select whose ankles you bite?” Graham said, “I get the picture, old boy,” and he stood up and that was it. That was a typical Python thing!
GILLIAM: Graham to me was the guy that wherever we went, he was the one who would come back the next morning with tales that we all wanted to hear, because he was out there. Whenever you go into a public restaurant suddenly he’d disappear. You look around; he’d be under somebody else’s table, licking the girl’s feet while her date is there. It’s like, what the fuck is this? That was the real thing; he was genuinely mad. And it’s funny because he was really in a sense the shyest and most conservative. He pushed himself right out there all the time.
He was probably the only one who was really living at the edge in some strange way. We just played at it, we just wrote it; he lived the stuff.
In Torquay we were all in this huge dining room, and he was telling us about this guy that he’d met, this date he was really looking forward to. This monstrous buildup about this guy he’d met and he was “Oh wow,” and then I guess the waiter’d come over and said, “There’s someone waiting for you, Mr. Chapman.” He makes this long, long crossing of the dining room, long pause—eventually, longer—then he comes back in, and he’s got a really unpleasant-looking guy in a wheelchair, wheeling him in. And this is Graham’s hot new date? Because he’d been telling everybody, “This is really going to be a night!” And I thought, “What the fuck have you done now, Graham? This is really getting sick here!” And it turned out he was shocked because he had got somebody’s number mixed up—this guy who he thought was going to be his date that night with this other guy who was just a fan, a desperate guy who’s crippled and everything—I don’t know, Graham had sent him a picture or something—and he’d mixed the numbers up. And Graham just went out and had his date. He was amazing; he didn’t bat an eyelid, it was quite extraordinary. But we didn’t understand the story until the next day, so all of us were wondering what this evening was all going to be about!
Pawin from Wife of Bwian.
THE NICE ONE
Well, I’m Afraid We Don’t Get Much Call for It Around These Parts
CLEESE: Michael is immensely likable and for me the best performer. I enjoy performing with Michael more than anyone else. I loved performing with him because I thought he had the biggest range, and also he and I had a certain rapport as performers which was greater than I had with the others.
Michael’s great aim in life is to be affable. And this makes him enormously pleasant and enormously good company, but infuriating if he doesn’t want to do something, or if he disagrees with something, because it’s almost impossible for him to say so at the time. And you find out about it slowly. I used to, for example, try to put the Amnesty International shows together, and I’d ring up Mike and I’d say, “Do you think you’d be able to do it?” And he would say without any apparent hesitation in his voice, “Oh yes, yes, yes.” And I’d ring up again and say, “Are you still on?” He’d say, “Yes.” And when I’d start to get specific, then suddenly I’d get a call saying, “You know, I’ve got to do this there and that there…” and it would be much easier with Michael if he would say, “I don’t like that,” or “I disagree with that” straight off. But when he does that he risks his affability. So that’s the main problem with Michael.
Could he do that easily on a creative level, if he didn’t like material?
CLEESE: Yes, I think he could do that creatively. But we were all cowards; we all avoid confrontations about anything that wasn’t to do with the material. Those kinds of things never got spoken about; we were very English in a sense that any kind of direct confrontation about anything emotional was impossible. For example, I don’t think we ever spoke to Graham about his lateness, which was absolutely chronic. I don’t suppose Graham was on time two times in three years. I mean, he just couldn’t do it. And Michael’s joke at Graham’s memorial service was, “I’d like to think he’s with us now—well, at least he will be in twenty minutes.”
GILLIAM: Mike’s gift was his ease with dealing with things. Essentially I think Mike was the one that everybody liked, it was the one we all could agree on that we could like, because he was the easiest to work with.
JONES: I think Mike was the best performer in many ways, he was great. John is sort of the greatest comic persona and Mike as a character actor was best. And also I think Mike’s writing was terrific. He’d come up with some of the most original concepts, like “the Spanish Inquisition.”
When Mike read out “Spanish Inquisition,” I knew we had a terrific piece to work on. Mike’s writing could be so off-the-wall it was magical—it was funny, but you couldn’t see where it had come from. And occasionally it worked like that when we wrote together; for example, we had this hairdresser sketch which was funny but wasn’t going anywhere, and then the two of us suddenly came up with the “Lumberjack Song,” which we wrote in about half an hour.
Idle in The Meaning of Life.
THE CHEEKY ONE
If You’re Going to Split Hairs, I’m Going to Piss Off
PALIN: Eric was always a slightly cheeky chap. I don’t think his characters were ever very complex, but they were really superbly performed. The man who talked in anagrams and all that: “Staht sit sepreicly.” Well, I can’t imagine any of us doing that in quite that way.
Eric’s stuff was very popular in the sense that he could catch a tune which none of the rest of us could do at all, so musically he made a very strong contribution; but also with some of the sketches he was very [into] wordplay, very deftly performed.
I think he just did provide a source of energy coming from a slightly different direction which wasn’t present from any of the rest of us; really cheeky characters is sort of what Eric’s known for, but if you like less conservatively Establishment (which John or Graham were), less surreal than Terry or myself—somewhere in the middle ground there. I suppose something like “Nudge Nudge” (“Is your wife a goer, eh? Know what I mean? Nudge nudge?”) was a real masterpiece of a very straight sketch, in fact, very ordinary—it didn’t have Vikings swinging through on the ends of ropes or anything like that—it just goes through and is superbly well played.
And also in group discussion he was very good. Not being part of the two writing groups (Jones/Palin and Cleese/Chapman), Eric was able to look at our material in a slightly more detached way and make very good comments about what worked and what didn’t work, which was effective and important. I suppose he was more on our side, as it were, if you wanted to take sides up; more like Terry and myself than with John and Graham. He also crossed over a bit and wrote a number of things with John, for instance.
What binds Python together is a similar sense of humor, a general consensus about what is funny. If you’d written something that appealed to the group sense of humor, that would go right through the group. That’s why we worked well as a group, certainly you didn’t have to explain what was funny; there really was a unanimity deep down. And then there was that middle area where certain people thought something was funny and others didn’t, and there Eric was good, because John and Graham tended to agree with each other, and I suppose Terry and myself t
ended to agree with each other, and Eric would provide (if Gilliam wasn’t there) the third man, as it were. And he was extraordinary, very articulate and on the ball, and also extremely good at inventing solutions. I think in the way that material was moved around within the show, someone like Eric would be very good at that.
GILLIAM: Eric’s strength is sharpness, I suppose; his quickness, his ability to do one-liners, fast things. That kind of fast precision is always interesting. He should have been the manager of the group, he was the one that got things started in a sense, ideas like the books. He was a good starter, is what he was. Not a good finisher—and in the middle he wasn’t even there a lot of the time! Eric was great at starting the projects, then we need someone to take them over and finish them. But also in some weird way he was the contact to the outside world—he knew all the best people!
His chameleonlike quality is another thing. In many ways he’s the least original as far as coming up with really original things, but he could pick up on what everybody else was doing. He could style his stuff on other people’s work and be brilliant—sort of an extension of somebody else’s idea, or a sketch that somebody else had done, Eric could then do a version of that sketch that would be taking those ideas and doing it in a really slick, funny, sharp, fast way.
Not only is he the one who’s out there—“Here’s an idea, I think we ought to do a book”—he’d get an idea and he’d want to do it, and he’d start it off putting all the right kind of people together. And then all I remember is being up there doing it at the end and he was gone!
JONES: Eric developed as an actor and a performer as it went on, as it got better and better, and got more and more involved in the musical side of it, and he became our kind of musical authority.
CLEESE: Eric is much more of a loner than the rest of us, and it suited him to write on his own, although he quite justifiably used to complain that that only gave him one vote. I always thought that Eric was very good in the meetings. I thought his analysis of comedy—why a sketch worked or why it didn’t work—was always very good, and I always found him very constructive in terms of how meetings can be run in an efficient way. I sense that in terms of him just getting business done—I’m not really talking about business business, I’m talking about artistic business—that Eric was the one I could work with most easily. We could kind of agree on things and come to a compromise or negotiate and make progress more easily with Eric than anyone else.
Jones, at his most calm and complacent.
THE ZEALOUS FANATIC
I’d Like the Blow on the Head
PALIN: I think more than anybody Terry Jones kept the group together and kept it going forward, because Terry’s probably got more energy, sheer mental energy. If he commits to an idea, Terry will really follow it through. And right from the very first discussions we had about Python, Terry was always positive about what the group could do and what we could achieve. I think he was the one who worked most to get this new form, this new shape together. He was always hurrying the director in editing sessions and all that. When the television series was coming to an end, he was the one who was most keen to try and get a film together.
That was one side of Terry: he just would not let up, really concerned about getting perfection on screen (which I don’t think you can get). Terry knew how it should be, which is why he used to have clashes with John, because Terry’s commitment sometimes came across as very dogmatic, and this would rile John at the other end of the spectrum.
Was Terry most keen to continue the TV series after John had departed?
PALIN: Probably; I think both Terry and myself were quite keen and felt, as Gilliam did, we should do another one. Eric was the biggest doubter; he felt without John there it wouldn’t work.
But Terry always saw the potential. He was always very positive about what Python could achieve. I always say Terry was like the conscience of Python. He was always pushing us to do something better, or get this right. Terry always saw it as a battle to be won, against the BBC or directors or editors or whatever.
Did he have a more personal stake in the success of the group?
PALIN: I don’t know. I think Terry felt very concerned about and personally identified with Python. How the show looked was very, very important to him, where, again, I don’t think John or Graham were quite as interested in that. The whole thing did mean something to Terry, yes. And I think he enjoyed very much working in a team, much more so than, say, John did.
Because he would not let things go, Terry had a doggedness which sometimes was very useful and sometimes could be an irritant to other members of the group, because I think in the dynamics of the group it’s counterproductive. Terry argued for too long; I think he’s probably aware of that himself. [There’s] a certain point where your own view has to be compromised for the unity of the group, and if you’re not prepared to do that, then I think very often the reaction against you is much stronger than it would be if you’d compromised in the first place—you actually lose more ground. I think that’s true of all the members of the group at certain points, but I suppose Terry was the most dogged, the one who least accepted compromise. But then the strengths of that bring out something like Mr. Creosote in Meaning of Life—just the conception of that was wonderful—and the “Sperm Song,” which Terry directed. That’s the work of somebody who is determined to make this special and not compromise, to get it the way he wants it to be.
He fulfilled a role which always—day in, day out, day and night—seemed to be concerned at the whole.
And Terry made those Pepperpots, the women he played, his own; he was superb at those.
CLEESE: Terry Jones and I were the most powerful personalities, or the most argumentative, or the most stroppy—you could put it lots of different ways, positively or negatively. On the one hand it probably did come out of a bit excessive caring about the script, and the other side probably came out from the fact that we were the two most naturally argumentative. I mean, I enjoy arguing, not in an angry sense, but I love to test the strength of arguments. Because if someone can tell me something that I didn’t know—an argument I hadn’t thought of, or a piece of information I didn’t have—I love it. And people sometimes interpret that—my wife does!—as that I’m bullying people. And that’s not what I think I’m doing. What I think I’m doing is testing the argument, because if someone can give me a good argument, I have no problem about taking it on board.
It’s also that I need to understand. I get very frustrated when I don’t understand something. When somebody knows something and I want to understand what it is they know and they can’t explain it in a way which I can take in (which would be my fault), I get very frustrated.
So what I’ve discovered with Jones was that we very frequently argued before we really understood what the other one was on about. I then found that by asking more questions I could get a better idea in my head of what Jones was on about. And then I would frequently find that I liked it. But because we were such different character types, and he was all about feelings and I in those days was all about intellect, it was very easy for us to get into these confrontations. But they were artistic confrontations rather than basic personal ones.
The hardest thing was that sometimes something would be resolved and Terry was taking an enormously long time to be persuaded out of something. It would take a very long time to argue Terry out of something, and then the next morning he would come in, “You know, I was thinking about it and I really feel…” and we’d be off again. It was as though he really couldn’t separate from some ideas. I used to say to him sometimes, “Terry, look, Eric doesn’t think that’s right, Graham doesn’t think that’s right, I don’t think that’s right…” He’d say, “No, but I really feel…” What I found with Terry—and I say this with great affection—is that he would sometimes sit down with me and would listen with great care and real attention to what I had to say, and would then almost invariably do the opposite!
Yes, we
were very different temperamentally. We’re good friends, but we will never be great friends because we’re just too different.
I’m a great admirer of Jonesy if you look at the breadth of what he’s done—on the one hand a program about the Crusades, on the other hand directing the movies, and on the other hand writing children’s books and writing an academic book about Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale. He’s got the widest spread of all of us. But I think that Jonesy’s problem was that for a number of years he was quite insecure outside the group. He along with Graham accused me of—what was the word they used, “betrayal” or “treachery,” when I didn’t want to go on with the group. And I said to them, “I joined you to work, I didn’t marry you!”
But Terry and Graham’s animus towards me for not wanting to continue with the TV series was that they didn’t think they could function properly outside the group—they felt very inscure that they would achieve anything outside Python. For Graham it was pretty much the case, he didn’t really achieve anything very good after that—the films Odd Job and Yellowbeard, pretty terrible—he was way, way over his head. But Jonesey didn’t have any problem at all, that was just a confidence problem. And I remember somebody saying around about the time that he directed Personal Services how he had relaxed, and he seemed much less tense than he used to, and what a good director he had become. That was just a confidence thing; he felt that he was always going to do his best work within Python. And he didn’t have any need to feel that.