by John Cleese
There’s also no doubt that the tremendous reception we were getting was partly due to the context. An audience’s response is absurdly dependent on their expectations. If you throng into a grubby little church hall and are surprised to discover something good, you feel a kinship with it, a delight that you helped descry it. If you later see the same show in a West End theatre you tend to be less impressed because you now judge it by standards that have changed, but have done so unconsciously. Thus when delightful little Edinburgh Festival shows transfer to the West End, critics often write something meaningless, like ‘The production has failed to make the necessary transition to the West End stage.’ What’s actually happened is that the production is being judged by higher standards.
When we finally boarded the coach back to London I knew I was soon going to be saying goodbye to many people I had become fond of. We all therefore avoided the subject and made the usual promises about staying in touch. In Graham’s case the promise was genuine on both our parts, though we had no idea how easily fate would facilitate this. At least, though, we had nearly completed the Times crossword – only three blank clues left after twelve hours. Chapman hung on to it.
Then God made a little joke. I got on the London Underground and immediately spotted a copy of The Times, with the crossword untouched. I idly picked it up, glanced at the corner that had been defying our efforts to solve it and immediately worked out one of the answers. I filled it in, and with the new letters was able to deal with the other two clues. I looked around and noticed that several passengers were casually watching. So I then filled out the entire crossword from memory in two minutes, tossed it aside, and looked around for something more challenging. I felt really intelligent for the first time in my life.
My middle year at Cambridge had been pleasant and reasonably productive. But if I was expecting the same when I went back for my last year I was in for a shock.
It started with the weather. In November, winter set in and produced a record-breaking cold spell: a bitter, arctic, numbing, glacial deep-freeze so brutal that even the two-minute run from my digs to the Footlights never failed to remind me of Captain Oates (along with his friend Captain Scott, another of England’s glorious failures). Soon the ground was so frozen that all sports had to be called off. I found ice in my wash basin, and for the next four months had to abandon my bedroom, sleeping instead on the sofa in front of my gas fire, swaddled in every layer I could find: bedclothes, overcoats, jackets, newspapers, shopping bags, face flannels, anything . . .
Almost as chilling was the discovery that I now had to study the two dullest subjects known even to law students: real property, and trusts and settlements. How was it possible to spark even the tiniest glimmer of curiosity in these dismal, vast accumulations of details concerning how people could give things (with exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions)? The willpower it took to plough through this detritus.
However, at least I had international law and jurisprudence to stimulate my mind. There was also the law of evidence. But although I embarked upon this readily enough, I then turned my back on it, hoping it would go away. And the reason for this was that now I went a little bit mad.
And the cause of my madness, which began to disrupt my work, my sleep, my Footlights life, indeed every corner of my daily routine, was this: I fell in love.
When I say I fell in love, I didn’t actually have much to do with it. I simply became engulfed in a storm of emotions, so unfamiliar, bewildering and overwhelming, that I basically came apart. Inside, anyway.
Because I had spent so little time around women, I had not previously experienced even the mildest of romantic twinges. I had no idea what this ‘falling in love’ business might actually feel like. So the sensations I experienced when I developed a crush on one of the tiny handful of women who attended the law lectures were actually frightening, because they had no connection with anything that I knew. The pair of us had never had so much as a proper conversation, and yet here I was developing obsessional romantic thoughts, even though she had an attractive boyfriend with whom she was obviously very involved.
You may wonder why, given the strength of my feelings, I didn’t attempt to make them known, but you have to remember that the middle-class culture I inhabited found any public suggestion of romantic attraction problematic. And as for hints of anything more physical, these would have been viewed as a vulgar lapse. In the society in which I had grown up, the most trivial remark or moment of bodily contact could be construed as embarrassingly sexual: touching became foreplay, and a cheeky remark an invitation to risk pregnancy, while everyone sensed that the words ‘I love you’ landed you at the altar. In the Victorian era, the sight of a well-turned ankle would arouse men, and some upholders of Christian virtue covered the legs of furniture, lest the sight of the naked lower half of a dining table led to Bacchanalian festivity. Thus, from my point of view, even holding a girl’s arm to guide her across the street could become carnally significant if contact was maintained for more than two seconds after the pavement was reached. So, if I ever summoned up the courage actually to make a pass at a girl, she was very unlikely to notice what I was attempting to be up to.
And because I was convinced that even a negligible advance on my part implied something much more momentous, I found myself acutely unwilling to put my foot, however gently, on the first step of the romantic process; I was fearful that I would embarrass the object of my affections by suggesting a course of action which she might experience as alarming, distasteful or downright repellent. This punctilious concern not to offend or distress was, I’m sure, the camouflage that my unconscious employed to hide from myself my deep fear of rejection. I didn’t think of myself as remotely physically attractive, and I found it extremely improbable that anyone sane would want to get close to me. Unless, that is, they could, over the course of time, come to see that I was polite, amusing and obedient enough to allow them to overcome their initial, very understandable, distaste.
For some time, therefore, I wandered around in a mooncalf dream, falling further and further behind in my work, scared, frozen and wonderfully unhappy. Then Alan wandered into my room one day and said, ‘Come on, what’s going on?’ And for the first time in my life, at the age of twenty-three, I found myself talking about ‘feelings’. I made a huge discovery: by being able to talk about them I could alleviate my sense of bewilderment. As Alan and I chatted, I began to realise that I wasn’t losing my mind, I was just experiencing one of the world’s most clichéd situations; that the romantic agony was ridiculous; and that the best short-term tactic was to see a lot of my friends. Thank God they were just around the corner. So off to the Footlights I went every day, and slowly began to feel ever so slightly more normal. I had a lot of good friends there now and getting involved in the next Smoker helped to distract me from the pangs of unrequited (or, rather, unnoticed) love.
One Saturday evening, someone insisted that we gather round our television set to watch the first episode of a new satirical series called That Was The Week That Was. We were astounded by it. It was unlike any television programme we had ever seen before: funny, raucous, and deliberately rough in style. But what took our breath away was its impudence and its brashness, and above all its complete disrespect for all the traditional figures of authority. It was a huge and irreversible cultural tidal wave. What Beyond the Fringe had done for London, TW3 (as it was popularly known) now did for the whole of Britain. Retired colonels throughout the land bewailed the End of Civilisation as they knew it, and the programme made David Frost, who presented it, an overnight star. Suddenly, he was everywhere. Most astonishingly . . . he was in our clubroom, getting permission to use some of our best material for TW3. We were startled how little impressed he seemed by what had happened to him. It was as though he thought it the most natural thing in the world. In a rather endearing way I don’t think David was ever at all surprised by his success.
Fro
m then on we had the thrill of sitting in the clubroom every Saturday night, clustered round the set in the hope of seeing one of our sketches being performed in the hit show on national television.
That winter of 1962–3 proved to be one of the coldest on record, and the arctic weather continued into the New Year. So, to an extent, did my romantic agonies. I was, however, coping slightly better now in that I felt miserable rather than insane. This was definitely a step up. I started writing more, and my ideas seemed to be getting quirkier. For example, I wrote a sketch about a recruit being interviewed by the head of the Secret Service (played by me) which started to release a vein of comic insanity that I must previously have been holding in check. I also did a parody of one of those tight-lipped Somerset Maugham scenes where a colonial officer and his wife are having dramatic realisations about the state of their marriage. What I liked about my version was that neither of them actually ever finished a sentence. It was all dramatic pauses and ‘You don’t mean . . . ?’ and ‘Oh God . . .’ and ‘But I thought . . .’ But more ambitious still was a long, ten-minute court sketch involving a series of witnesses being cross-examined by a manic, triumphant, incompetent barrister, again played by me. I wrote it for a Smoker I was producing and the laughter that greeted it was the loudest I’d ever heard in the clubroom. By the end, I knew we had the big closing number for the 1963 revue.
Part of the programme for a typical Footlights Smoker.
My one problem at the time – apart from a sense of general misery – was that I was badly behind in my work. I hoped that my genuine enthusiasm for international law and jurisprudence could get me through those papers, despite the depression that made it so hard to focus. But real property and trusts and settlements seemed very real threats. Could I summon up enough energy in the ten weeks that remained before finals to catch up and scrape a pass in these monstrous assaults on one’s will to live?
And then I remembered another subject . . . evidence!
Aaaarrghh!!
I was dead. Stone dead. I had simply forgotten about evidence. My heart froze in horror. No pass in the evidence paper = no Cambridge law degree = no profession. QED.
Then . . . a moment of inspired madness. I’d heard that criminology was a relatively undemanding subject, and that the new Cambridge Criminology Department was short of students. So I hurried over to see the professor, explained that I felt I was wasting my time on evidence when I could be helping to get the crucial insights of criminology into the prison system, and that I was fired with enthusiasm. But was it too late to make the change, I asked?
I was expecting, ‘Of course it is. You’re more than two-thirds of the way through the academic year. Are you out of your mind?’
Instead I heard, ‘It’s late, yes, but not too late. Provided you can make up the visits to the prisons this vacation. And then there’s the exam at the end of the summer, of course.’ At that moment, in an act of great kindness, he handed me a textbook and said, ‘If you learn what’s in this book, you’ll pass.’ I opened it. It was 254 pages long. The feeling of relief! I was in with a chance! ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I’d like to do criminology.’
‘OK,’ he replied.
With criminology in the bag I began my final term at Cambridge with one vital question consuming me: Should I do the revue this year, or should I save that time for studying?
It’s shocking to think that my future career really was hanging on my answer to this. But it was a completely sensible question. I’d been interviewed and accepted by Freshfields (solicitors to the Bank of England, no less) at a salary of £12 per week for the first two and a half years provided, it went without saying, that I got my degree. So why would I bother to do another revue when I desperately needed the time to try to make sure I passed my exams? I dithered.
I took a look at the exam schedule and discovered the criminology exam was scheduled four whole days after all the others had finished. That was it! I would work like a fiend on the other papers, and then give myself ninety-six hours to cram up on the criminology textbook (which I’d skimmed and found very intelligible – a mixture of psychology and statistics, which I could do) . . . and I would do the revue.
For a cautious creature like me, it was a liberating moment.
To my delight Humphrey Barclay had been appointed director of the 1963 revue. I liked him enormously: he emanated an air of good-natured, avuncular authority, which must have had something to do with the fact that he had been head boy at Harrow. He also seemed more organised and grown up than the rest of us. And if he was a bit bossy, well, directors are supposed to be bossy. What’s more, having been with the Footlights for three years he was very familiar with the material from the Smokers, since he’d performed in all of them.
Tim Brooke-Taylor was clearly our strongest performer, because he could do any kind of comedy we needed: music-hall comedians, grande dames, silly-ass Englishmen, pompous twerps. He was also outstandingly good at physical comedy, using very precise movements but with tremendous energy and gusto. I loved working with him because we both enjoyed rehearsing, running sketches again and again. We also wrote some material together – the previous year, Chapman, he and I had written some fifteen minutes of the show – and we continued to do so for some years. But what was great about Tim above all was that he adored performing: he would really go for it – especially important on opening nights, when I was freezing up with nerves and having to fight my way through.
Bill Oddie was another natural star. He was a clown rather than a comic actor, but he wrote and sang some clever, funny and catchy pieces that gave our show a brightness and a variety far superior to the usual Footlights ‘point numbers’. At the beginning of the year he was not a major figure at the clubroom. Then he suddenly exploded creatively and ended up contributing eighteen pieces to the show. He could be prickly, and slightly competitive – something that was otherwise absent from our group – but he was mostly jolly, energetic and a terrific natural singer.
Of the rest of the cast, I thought that the most interesting chap was a psychology postgraduate student called Anthony Buffery who was doing research on the memory of baboons. He was very bright, and I managed to learn quite a lot of academic psychology from our chats. He couldn’t act for toffee, but he did weird solo acts that were extraordinarily original, and that he always invented on his own. His appearance helped his eccentricity: he was very tall and strong and upright, with a long, very pale face, huge eyes and a permanently surprised expression. An example of his work: he did a mime of a javelin thrower at an ancient battle who takes a long time before he actually launches his javelin . . . and then has nothing else to contribute to the occasion. Variations on embarrassment played a large part in Anthony’s humour.
Chris Stuart-Clark, who was Tim’s great pal, specialised in rather self-satisfied vicars and headmasters, and had an excellent turn of phrase; David Hatch could play anything from pompous to camp to sarcastic to cowardly, always straight-faced, but somehow conveying under that a mysterious silliness; and Jo Kendall, that year’s Footlights ‘girl’, was a delight: fun, relaxed, very experienced (she’d been in a lot of the big drama productions) and probably the first young woman with whom I felt (almost) at ease. I enjoyed rehearsing the Somerset Maugham take-off with her. As there was not a completed sentence in the whole scene, the timing was difficult, but we kept at it and parts of it began to feel really funny. Bill came up with a great idea: that now and again, during the continual anguished pauses, I should kill some dangerous tropical creature – a snake, a deadly spider and, at one point, a leopard. So Jo would ask me something . . . long pause . . . I would shout, ‘Look out’ and beat a cobra to death with a stick . . . pause again . . . and then I would reply, ‘No.’ Jo also invented a great gag. At one point, she suddenly slapped me in the face . . . long pause . . . I slowly picked off my cheek the mosquito she had just killed and said, ‘Thank you.’
I was coming to love the rehearsal process, and I knew it was having a
positive effect on me. The previous year I had been a new boy, totally inexperienced, perhaps a little overawed, and consequently just trying to fit in and ‘get things right’. This year, in the wonderfully warm and supportive atmosphere that the 1963 cast created, I started really to let go and be much more adventurous and inventive, developing personas that people would later recognise as characteristic of my work. And judging from the rehearsal-room reaction, I was getting a lot funnier.
Perhaps some of that extra sense of fun about rehearsals was that they were the only break we got from the heavy grind of studying for finals. When the exams eventually came round, I felt I did all right on the first few papers, so, following the plan I had devised, I then disappeared for four days with my criminology textbook for the most intense cramming session of my life. On the morning of the exam I walked over to the Law School, sat down, took a deep breath and looked at the paper. Three seconds later I knew I had passed! They’d asked all the questions that I was hoping for! I had to hide the tears of joy and relief that welled up. After that I just sat there grinning. Then I felt a huge twinge of annoyance that I actually had to write the bloody answers down.
Two years later, I was told that I had got an upper second for that paper, and that the Criminology Department, realising how little time I had had to study for it, had been forced to hush the whole matter up. If law students ever found out that four days’ work was enough to get a 2:1, you wouldn’t have been able to get into the criminology building.