by David Morgan
Some of the other [demands] were things that they’d made up. They said, “You must remove the giant penis that John holds around the door.” What on earth are they talking about? Had a look at it—it was actually a severed leg that somebody had to sign in the “Curry’s Brains” sketch. It was just they weren’t looking very carefully!
GILLIAM: It was the most incredible demonstration, just shocking to see how their minds work, because they were truly sick people!
One [of their objections] was the “Wee-Wee” sketch. Eric’s offering Terry Jones some wine; he doesn’t say it’s wine, he just says, “Will you taste this?” And he drinks what appears to be white wine: “Hmm, that’s a Talbot 1963?”
“Ah no, Monsieur, that was wee-wee.”
It went on: “That’s a Chablis?”
“No, Monsieur, that too was wee-wee.” It’s just a very silly sketch—he’s been laying down wee-wee for years!
And on the list of things, “Now the scene where the man drinks menstrual urine—” What the fuck are you talking about? It was the “Wee-Wee” sketch, because one of the white wines was a very light rosé!
And it went on like this. There were six of us in the room with Duncan, poor guy, and he just became more embarrassed, I think. He just looked more and more like a fool. This [list] had clearly been prepared by somebody else, and he was the one who had to go in and slap these boys down.
JONES: Yes, the “Wee-Wee” sketch. John very much disapproved of the “Wee-Wee” sketch. We defended it as being extremely silly, and in bad taste—and we couldn’t think of anything else! We were running out of material by that time!
BARRY TOOK: They came to me and said, “They’ve got a sketch about drinking urine, what do you think?” And I went, “Oh God, that sounds awful.” They said, “What can we do?” I said, “Well, let them film it and then cut it.” Baron von Took strikes again!
On location shooting Sir Philip Sidney’s fight against Tudor pornography.
So, they let them shoot the sketch and when it got to the editing, it was cut. You can’t do that on the screen, anyway. But this was the reaching for the frontiers that had not been explored, the Terry Jones area.
CLEESE: I thought the “Wee-Wee” sketch was a deeply embarrassing piece of material; I was utterly on the side of the BBC censor on that!
I was nearly always—while they would say “conservative” I would say “realistic”—about what you could put out on the BBC. I thought the BBC were terrific. I thought that the amount they messed around with censorship was absolutely minimal, but the others would probably tell you differently—particularly Terry Gilliam, who really does have a problem with any kind of authority of any kind; he would probably see them as insensitive monsters who were constantly fucking the show up. And I think that the number of times they insisted on an edit was very, very small, and most of those occasions I agreed with. On the whole of Fawlty Towers there were only two times Bill Cotton said to me that he was worried about something, and one of them I’d already cut. So I didn’t have any problem with their censorship; I thought it was sensible and in tune with my own feeling.
MACNAUGHTON: I asked if the boss of BBC1, Paul Fox, had seen these three episodes. And they said, “Why?” And I said, “Well, I would like you to let him see them.” And they said, “All right, but you can’t see them with him.” I was very mistrusted!
So two days later came a note from Paul Fox through the Head of Comedy to me. It said, “You don’t have to cut the three episodes”—he made about four “suggestions” for small cuts. And over the Your Highness is like a dose of the clap, he wrote in his note, “I don’t much like a dose of the clap, but then, who does?”, which I think was rather a good way to put it. And so we managed to keep these three episodes, which turned out for me to be three of the funniest.
JONES: The BBC was changing—it was more sensitive to political pressure—but it felt like special attention was being paid to us because we were “naughty boys.”
Certainly by the fourth series they wanted to read the scripts before we’d actually made them. So it had all gone full circle.
TOOK: I think it frightened the BBC to death, actually: they’d given the Pythons a lot of freedom and by God they’d used it! “Won’t do that again!”
GILLIAM: One time the BBC censored something [that] was on repeats, the “Black Spot” thing. [In an animated Gilliam fairy tale in the second series, a handsome young prince discovers a spot on his face. “Foolishly he ignored it,” chimes the female narrator, “and three years later he died of cancer.” In later broadcasts the word cancer was replaced with gangrene, spoken by a male!] What is that, gangrene? But it’s extraordinary that the word cancer was so frightening to them that they had to cut the word out.
On the Derek and Clive albums, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore did one whole sketch about cancer. Everything that was going wrong, he’d say, “And then she went and it was—”
“Cancer?”
“Cancer.”
“And then the marriage broke up—”
“Cancer?”
“Cancer.” It became very, very funny.
You can talk about cancer in any news program, but with a cartoon, a comedy show, you can’t say cancer?
To try and keep up with who got in and changed things at what point was always a problem. Now we own all the stuff, so it’s all right, except in Britain where they probably show their version, I don’t know. But there was always that kind of meddling that somehow went on there.
Gilliam’s public service announcement for early detection of eaneer gangrene.
What examples of Python self-censorship are there, apart from cutting something just because you didn’t think it was funny?
GILLIAM: There was the religious one where Christ ends up with a telephone linesman on the cross at Calvary. On the reruns John censored that. John really was worried about it; he was very sensitive it might be deemed to be blasphemous. And I can’t remember how he was there and nobody else was to stop him cutting it out. Python always had a veto; we vetoed things that couldn’t be used, and I suppose John could argue that that was his veto.
I’ve never talked to him about it. He probably would deny it—he denies everything!—but that’s the way it was told to me, that it was John who went in and did it. I was pretty shocked that he would have been so offended. He wasn’t offended—he was nervous or worried. It’s kind of like with Life of Brian, we cut Otto out. Even though it was his sketch, Eric was very keen to cut it out, and I think it was because he was living in Hollywood and worried about offending “Jews who run Hollywood,” or because he works in Hollywood and half his friends are Jewish. I don’t know, I thought, “This is crazy. We made a film to offend everybody! If we’re going to offend the Christians, come on!” We ended up cutting it out because both Terry and I felt dramatically it could go, but I regret cutting Otto because Otto was a really funny idea, a really funny scene—its problem is it just came at the wrong point of the film.
Satan pays a call as Jesus is put on hold, in a cartoon cut from a second series episode.
CLEESE: Well, I certainly thought we couldn’t use that Christ bit. I don’t know how [my] cutting that would have worked, because it wasn’t as though any one of us had the power of decision, you see what I mean?
IDLE: John was a very controlling bastard in those days—four years older than most. [Cutting a scene] is something he would be capable of, but sounds unlikely in this instance; more likely it’s Gilliam’s paranoia, which has increased with age, and the power of having people listen to him and take him seriously (see Film Directors and Their Dementia).
John was instrumental in cutting the “Wee-Wee” sketch, where he did collude with the BBC because he found it distasteful.
These examples are rare.
The Python veto, which exists, is largely for business purposes, to prevent a majority vote going against individual rights, and operates like the U.N. (with about the same results).
Come See the Violence Inherent in the System
In the spring of 1974, the Pythons embarked on production of their first “real” film, a jaunty but painstakingly realized vision of Arthurian Britain. The thin thread of story—the knights of Camelot searching for the Holy Grail—allowed for a joyfully irreverent mixture of comic riffs, mock heroics, and song in which bits and pieces of Arthurian mythology (along with the stale conventions of Hollywood period epics) were all targets for satire.
When appreciating Holy Grail, one might keep in mind the state of the British film industry in the mid-seventies, particularly in the area of comedy. The days of Ealing Studios (which had produced such timeless fare as The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers) had long ended; Richard Lester’s Beatles films and the few satiric standouts of the late sixties (Bedazzled with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, The Wrong Box with Michael Caine) were already in the past. Even the low-budget horror flicks from Hammer and Amicus, which were usually dependable showcases for fun thrills and even artistic ingenuity, had run dry. By the seventies, British humor (at least to movie audiences abroad) had become typified by the broad antics of the burlesque Carry On films, and little else.
With Holy Grail, the Pythons were not only able to redefine the limits of narrative structure (basically by ignoring them!), but also to take innovative and uncoventional styles of filming (as had become fashionable in television advertising through such directors as Adrian Lyne and Ridley Scott) and apply them to comedy. The smokey landscapes, muddy locations, and naturalistic lighting seem to capture accurately the Middle Ages; costumes and makeup (such as poor dental work) also reflect the concept of characters trying to eke out existence in a harsh world. This, plus the seriousness of Chapman’s performance as King Arthur (around whom the craziness circled), made the characters totally understandable to a modern audience—which made all the silly, surreal antics (such as servants clapping coconuts replacing actual horses) all the more acceptable.
Despite the moderate success of And Now for Something Completely Different in the U.K., it was not a given that the Pythons would be able to translate their humor to the cinema, especially in a format which would not be a transparent series of sketches strung together, like the TV shows. Their struggles for a workable script, for financing, and during filming and post-production belie the seeming effortlessness of the finished product, which is fresh, inventive, unashamedly violent (the menacing Black Knight has all his limbs severed but refuses to give up the fight) and pointedly anarchic (even God puts in an appearance, as an eye-rolling cartoon figure).
MARK FORSTATER, PRODUCER: The Pythons had made And Now for Something Completely Different, but they weren’t very happy with it, as an experience or as a film. They wanted to make a proper film themselves. And so they showed me the script that they had and asked me if I would be interested in trying to help them put the film together. I think they weren’t able to raise finance, because they wanted to make it themselves, and the industry was kind of scared at that idea.
My link goes back to Terry Gilliam in New York in the early sixties. We met when we both went to some film courses at the City College of New York. We shared a flat for some period of time, then we both left New York and lost touch with each other. I moved to England to go to school, and when I saw his credit for one of his cartoon animations, we made contact again.
There was a point where the Pythons wanted to do some shorts, comedies sponsored by (I think) a shampoo company. Terry introduced me to the other Pythons [during] this period, and they asked me and my partner at the time, Julian Doyle, to make [the] shorts for them. These were really nonbroadcast, kind of nontheatrical, corporate-sponsored films—industrials.
JULIAN DOYLE, PRODUCTION MANAGER: They were little five-minute internal promotional films for conferences: one was Anita Gibbs, who made toothpaste and hair products and pharmaceutical products, and the other one was Harmony Hairspray. The Pythons were trying to get away from the BBC and start up their own stuff, and the first time they tried to do these short films, they went to a company and ended up with no money. They’d budgeted the thing and gone out of budget and it wasn’t any good, and they asked us to come in and cut it. And we came in, cut it for them, and Mark did the production side of it. Terry Jones directed.
The glamour of filmmaking; Chapman on location in soggy Scotland.
FORSTATER: Their film project I think was called Arthur King, and it had a lot of elements that eventually got written out of the script. They had a contemporary character called Arthur King who was a kind of nebbish, a loser. I can’t remember whether it was actually King Arthur or whether it was just King Arthur’s relative in the present day. And so there were a lot of contemporary comic scenes with this Arthur King. But that didn’t seem to go anywhere; the period scenes seemed to have much more going for them.
The Knights of the Round Table.
After I’d read the script, I met with them and talked about what was working and what wasn’t, and so they started a whole new script process.
JONES: Originally the script went between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century, and ended with him finding the Holy Grail in Harrods. I was very much into the Middle Ages with my Chaucer stuff, and I had not been very keen on the twentieth-century stuff. Mike had come up with this horse and coconut thing at one stage, and so I suppose in a group meeting I said, “Why don’t we do it all Middle Ages?” And everybody seemed to agree. Maybe it was the perception that the modern material wasn’t stronger, and also I said it would be more interesting, less like the TV shows, if it’s all set in one period.
PALIN: Terry and I were both interested in history—Terry because he read medieval English and was very interested in Chaucer and all that, and me because I’d done three years of a history degree at Oxford. I was brim-full of all this useless information! We were looking around for the possibility of a film after we’d made And Now for Something Completely Different. There was this Arthurian start about swallows and the people at the battlements which caught people’s eye, and from then on, yes, the idea of the knights seemed promising. A sort of hiccup from Complete and Utter History!
I was more keen on keeping the narrative in the Arthurian world than making jokes about Harrods. I was interested in creating this world and making the convention, the background setting, so convincing that you don’t have to defuse it, you don’t have to apologize for it, you don’t want to leave it!
So when we wrote, we found that within these characters we could write material that did not need modern references necessarily but would be modern attitudes—all the stuff about the peasants discussing modern constitutions and how governmental bodies should be. Now that’s a modern idea, a sixties, seventies concept that you could stay in costume and do it in a field; you didn’t have to cut to people around a discussion table. And so once that had been sort of agreed, we were forced to invent things that could happen then and there, lovely things like Tim the Enchanter: that was fine, it didn’t need Tim to be a modern character at all.
So in the end maybe those of us who believed you could keep it consistent—do it with comedy but set it in medieval times—won the day.
That use of a surreal device of somebody not really on a horse: I always felt that if you were going to have coconuts instead of horses, what one had to do was keep this conceit going throughout; there was no point in giggling about it. You had to be absolutely serious, so whenever you saw someone doing that [pantomimes prancing-about behavior] they were on horseback and everybody was very serious about it. It’s a ridiculous thing to do, but then again beautifully played by John and Graham; you absolutely believed that they believed that they were on horses. That was much funnier than giggling about it, saying, “Yeah, they’re not really.” That went throughout that joke, and it was much the stronger for it.
Cleese as Tim the Enchanter.
Again, dress people properly, shoot them agai
nst beautiful Scottish backgrounds, with smoke drifting and all that, it makes it so much funnier.
Plus you save money on horses.
PALIN: Yes, of course, plus the days you spend learning to ride, getting the horses to come back, and doing it all again. That must have been one of those very liberating decisions we had one day.
I don’t think anyone else but John and Graham could have written the “Black Knight” sequence, hacking legs off. That’s very Graham-ish, because Graham’s a doctor and loved all sorts of visceral ideas like the human body being ripped apart. He and Gilliam love that sort of stuff. And Terry and myself started off writing the peasants in the field—“I’m only thirty-seven”—and then John and Graham took it on and did all the stuff about “moistened bints lying in lakes lobbing swords was no basis for a system of government.” That was theirs at their verbal best. They beefed an idea which we had, which was that people answered back to the king and it was terribly hard for him to be Arthurian!
In a Very Real and Legally Binding Sense
JOHN GOLDSTONE, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: I had known the Pythons individually [from] about the time when their first television series was being done. When they were looking for money for Holy Grail, they approached me with the problem that they were not able to raise the money for the film by any normal means. They had gone to the two major sources of finance in England, Rank and EMI, and neither of them was prepared to take the leap of faith they wanted to make from a television series to this film.