by John Cleese
After the exam was over, I hurried off to a telephone box to call my parents. Mother answered. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘I just wanted to tell you I’ve taken my final exam and I know I passed, so that means I’ve got my Cambridge degree!’ There was a pause. Then she said, ‘You remember the greeny-brown pullover you took back at the beginning of term . . . ?’ I thought of this years later when the screenwriter William Goldman told me about taking his mother to the premiere of his Oscar-winning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. At the end he turned to her and said, ‘Well, Mom, what do you think?’ ‘Weren’t the horses beautiful?’ was her response.
As for our revue, which went under the unlikely title of A Clump of Plinths, the opening night was a great success and the ovation at the end for both Bill and Tim deafening: they were outstandingly the stars of the show. We all gathered in the clubroom afterwards and celebrated. For my part, I was surprised and slightly hurt that my best pieces did not attract much comment. It meant a lot to me when Chapman, who’d come up from St Bart’s Hospital, told me he thought they were the funniest things in the show.
So, mission accomplished. Exams passed, two weeks of the show at Cambridge, summer break, then on to Freshfields to begin my law career.
Except that a couple of nights later, two men in suits appeared in the clubroom after the show, invited me for a drink, said how much they liked the material I’d written, and asked me whether I would like to come and work in the BBC Radio Light Entertainment Department. I would be a trainee producer-writer, at £30 per week. Just like that. Humphrey and David Hatch received similar offers.
The extraordinary thing about the prospect of this complete volte-face was that it didn’t feel at all dramatic or momentous. I just chatted quietly and sensibly with these two producers, Peter Titheradge and Ted Taylor, and in the course of our conversation it became quite obvious that the completely rational decision was to give up the law (for ever!) and join the BBC. After all, I’d discovered that I thoroughly enjoyed writing comedy and that I had a talent for it, and I thought I’d be much more at home in the relaxed, informal world of the arts than I ever would be in a law firm in the City. And I’d never really wanted to be a lawyer in any case. Besides, the BBC was offering me £30 a week to Freshfields’ £12 (‘How had I ever imagined I could survive on that?’ I asked myself).
I made my mind up on the spot, but then asked for two days to pretend to think it over. I told my parents, who took the news surprisingly well: their view was that having a job at the BBC was like joining the civil service, with a pension and everything. After that I wrote to Freshfields. They responded with an exceedingly pleasant and courteous letter, wishing me luck. I remember thinking, ‘They must reckon that I’m mad.’
Chapter 8
JUST DAYS AFTER I accepted my job with BBC Radio, an even larger apple dropped into my lap – or, rather, into our Footlights laps. One night after the show we were invited to sit down with a rueful, delightful, rather crumpled young man who told us that his name was Michael White, that he was a London impresario, that he thought our show was wonderful, and . . . that he wanted to put it on in the West End.
The West End?!
Michael had a theatre in mind called the Arts Theatre, just off Leicester Square. It was small – just 350 seats – but if we were successful he would transfer us to a larger one. The theatre wasn’t free for a month so we would have to take a break – and we all felt we needed one – then we’d appear for a week at an arts festival in York to polish the show before opening in London. Oh, and A Clump of Plinths wasn’t a good title for a London run. Cambridge Circus was better.
Nobody argued.
Before York we spent a week relaxing, and then got together to review the show, a process which proved unbelievably productive. Not being in performance mode every night helped to loosen us up; aspects of the acting that had become too automatic now seemed freer and more spontaneous. And we were in such a great mood that we became very playful and started to invent new ‘business’.
For example, we started to elaborate one very simple gag in the courtroom sketch. In the original version the barrister I played called for ‘Exhibit A’, and Tim, dressed as a fairly elderly usher, brought on a bassinet and stand, set it up and left. I then asked Tony Buffery as the witness, ‘Have you ever seen this before?’ A pause followed; then Tony said, ‘No’; I said, ‘Thank you, m’lord’; and Tim came back, picked up the exhibit and took it away. It got a very fair laugh. But in York Tim played the usher ever older and more doddery each night, ageing from 65 to 115 during the week (he told me later he was just trying to make David Hatch, who played the judge, laugh). Milking his outrageous senile shaking for all it was worth, he took an age to set the bassinet on the stand, accidentally knocked it off, put it back on again, and only then picked it up and exited, quite genuinely exhausted by his exertions. What had originally been a fifteen-second piece now took about forty seconds. And the audience loved it. They roared. On the last night, David – out of pure naughtiness, knowing how knackered Tim was at that point – tapped his gavel and said, ‘Could I see that again, please?’ Repeat performance, and hysteria all round. Just fooling around we’d stumbled on another sixty seconds of laughs for the London show.
Soon we were in London, doing technical rehearsals at the Arts Theatre. This is always an edgy experience for actors. The big night is coming up, you have to repeat everything umpteen times for the technicians, and soon you’re not getting so much as a giggle from them. Then you start thinking, ‘This doesn’t feel very funny,’ and your confidence can very easily waver. However, Michael was ahead of us.
He had arranged two ‘previews’ before opening night, just so that we could get a real feeling for the London audience and for the theatre itself – not only the size of it, but its shape and ‘the pitch of the hall’. And the first preview was good: a few little mistakes, but we knew that these could easily be corrected. The important thing was that the audience response was very warm; we were encouraged.
The second night’s audience, by contrast, was the weirdest I’d ever played. They were abnormal from the very start, and when we found that we were not getting the laughs we were accustomed to, that threw us. Then some of the audience started laughing at things no one had ever previously laughed at. Once they roared at the set-up of a joke and then received the punchline in complete silence. We were bewildered, but struggled on desperately towards the final curtain, and when it came down we went into collective shock, trying to understand what had gone wrong. Michael was soon there with the explanation. Every ticket for that performance had been bought for the attendees of a conference that was being held in London. A conference of psychiatrists. There had been a shrink in every seat.
But, of course, by this time we had the reassurance of having done over thirty performances, and from the beginning of our first night the reception proved to be so warm and enthusiastic that we produced one of our best ever shows. The reviews were mixed, but sprinkled among them were some complimentary ones. The Times, for example, hailed it as ‘the funniest show to emerge from Cambridge for a long time’ and picked out several of the sketches, including the final courtroom one, for particular praise.
One thing all the reviews told me: whatever this star quality was that Tim and Bill had, I certainly didn’t. I’d already suspected this was the case.
As the show bedded down, we found ourselves playing to full houses in the evenings (despite our complete lack of any fashionable satirical content, as one paper pointed out). And we enjoyed their enjoyment. During the courtroom sketch, for example, there were a wonderful couple of minutes where I had no lines and so could just watch the audience reaction as they finally realised that the witness box they had assumed to be empty actually concealed a dwarf. It was glorious to observe their delight. One night, though, I noticed a young teenager in a rather grand party in the third row laughing so helplessly that his father leant across, tapped his arm and shook his head (‘People of our cl
ass don’t laugh like that’). I felt great sadness for the young fellow.
We also took delight in ‘corpsing’ – laughing on stage when we weren’t supposed to. And as we became completely relaxed and occasionally bored (usually at matinees) this turned into an ever more common occurrence. I was much the worst culprit. I knew it was unprofessional, but then there is an extraordinary sweetness to forbidden laughter, which we all remember from the classroom, church, pompous ceremonies and, of course, funerals. It’s as though you get all the usual amount of pleasure from laughing, and then something indefinably special as an extra. I’ve never figured out why suppressing laughter makes it more joyful. What I do know is that I got a bit addicted, and had to be told off a few times by the production manager.
Now that I was performing eight times a week, I really had the opportunity to learn more about the rules of comedy, which, of course, are nothing more than the rules of audience psychology. When you are doing only a small number of performances, unless you have had weeks of rehearsal, your attention is primarily directed at remembering what you have to do: not just the words and the movements, obviously, but the emphases, the pauses, the pace, the volume, and then the gestures, the looks, the reactions, and so on. And to the extent that your mind is partially focused on all this remembering, you have less attention available to be ‘in the moment’. But as the externals of your performance become more automatic, you can go beyond simply ‘trying to get it right’, and relax into a greater awareness of yourself, the other actors and your situation, and that gives your acting an extra degree of freshness and spontaneity. And, of course, it also gives you a greater awareness of the audience’s laughter. As I’ve said before, the laughter element is what can often make comedy trickier to perform than straight drama. If you’re playing Macbeth you don’t have to worry about treading on the laughs.fn1 But in comedy it’s all too easy to get your timing wrong; listening to the audience enables you to pace your performance correctly.
The other function of laughter is, of course, to be the total arbiter of what is funny. It’s so simple: if they don’t laugh, there’s something wrong, and you’ve got to fix it.
But just occasionally it’s not quite as simple as that, which is why I found Tony Buffery’s solos so fascinating to watch. At one moment in the show we pretended something had gone wrong: there was an awkward pause, and then Tony would be pushed on to the stage and would stand there looking embarrassed and confused. He was wonderful at this, as he had an astonishing range of distressed expressions, intensified by his alarmingly pale complexion. He now explained to the audience that he had been asked to ‘fill in’ and that he would do so by performing some farmyard impressions. Then he did his impersonations of a cow, a cockerel and a sheep – and they were all absolutely awful. He apologised, but explained that those were the only ones he did. By this point the audience would be confused and uneasy. Tony now announced he would tell a joke. And he did. And again it was terrible. He apologised again, said he would try to do better and told another one – this time a fairly good one, and the audience laughed, partly out of relief. When they did, Tony jumped up and down with excitement and called to the wings, ‘They laughed! They laughed!’ Then he thanked them for laughing, and said that as they had liked the joke so much, he’d tell it again. So he told it again, exactly the same way. Silence. Tony looked crestfallen. He looked at the audience, paused, and then said, ‘Please laugh.’ I have never felt such discomfort in the theatre. Then Tony confided in the audience, ‘Please laugh. My mother’s in the audience tonight.’ By now, some people were trying to hide under their seats. Tony scanned the balcony for some time, looking for his mother, and then smiled sadly and said, ‘It’s all right, she’s gone now.’
I thought it was wonderful, but only a small part of the audience agreed, and it used to take a while to cheer the rest of them up after Tony had finished. This just goes to show how much tastes in comedy vary. When members of the cast talked about the show, for example, we all felt that about twenty per cent was comparatively weak, but there was constant disagreement about which twenty per cent that was. At the time this puzzled and frustrated me, and it took me many years before I understood just how subjective each person’s sense of humour is. Because laughter is infectious people tend to laugh together, but when they view the same production separately their opinions vary more widely than one would ever think possible. Even watching an audience view a film clip, as I do sometimes from the stage, reveals a range of reaction that is quite surprising, and absolutely at odds with one’s assumptions that something is either funny or not funny. Another lesson I learned at the time came from watching a Marx Brothers festival at the Baker Street Classic cinema and realising just how much dross there was among all the brilliance: even the greatest comics, I concluded, frequently fail.
However much views of the individual sketches in our show varied, though, there was no doubt that it was working, because now Michael called us together to tell us that we would be reopening at a much larger theatre, the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue. With the move came a change in personnel. Tony Buffery went back to his academic career with baboons, and Chris Stuart-Clark took up his vocation, which was teaching (he eventually ran the Dragon School in Oxford, and then became a housemaster at Eton). In came Graham Chapman, who had been lined up from the start to replace Tony. He brought some of his best material with him, including a sensational series of mimes, where he became an espresso machine and a carrot and was finally dragged from the stage by a human magnet in the wings. He was also a very strong sketch performer, with an ultra-serious intensity that elevated the humour in whatever he did. Chris was replaced by Johnny Lynn, who had started with us on opening night in Cambridge as the drummer in the band. He was round and jolly and fitted in perfectly, especially as he already knew the show by heart.
The cast of Cambridge Circus: (standing) from left to right, David, Jo, Graham, Bill, Chris, real policeman, (lying) me, (hiding face from real policeman) Tim.
We moved to the Lyric on 14 August and, despite the changes to the cast, the transition proved unexpectedly easy. I noticed only two major differences. First the Lyric was much bigger and so required more energy, and much louder voice projection as, in those days, there were no microphones. Since none of us had ever had formal dramatic training, we had to figure out for ourselves how to be noisier.
The second change was the money. Since we’d moved to London, we’d all been getting £30 a week as performers and a small amount in royalties for contributions to the script. Now, with the big houses at the Lyric, my performance fee remained the same but my royalty payments shot up to £100 a week, three times what Dad had ever earned. It had not really occurred to me that this could happen, but it certainly transformed my fortunes. At Cambridge I had been living on about £400 a year (with the Bristol Education Authority contributing half of that), so by the time I came to London, I was about £600 in the red. But by October I had completely cleared the debt, had gone well into the black, and was also beginning to collect a salary at the BBC. For the first time in my life, at the age of twenty-four, I was able to buy clothes, eat in posh restaurants, take German lessons (at Berlitz, I learned more German in two weeks than in two years at Clifton) and look for proper accommodation (for four months I’d been living in a room that Graham had found me at the St Bartholomew’s Hospital student hostel; I kept a low profile at first, but after a time the staff assumed I was just another medical student). Soon afterwards Graham, Tim and I found a very workable flat off the top of Baker Street, about a hundred yards from Sherlock Holmes’s old establishment.
We had a fourth flatmate, a delightful Hong Kong Chinese guy, who was one of Graham’s medical-student pals from Bart’s Hospital. Despite his impeccable manners, he rather upset us by being far more English than we were: he invariably wore an expensive and beautiful suit, complete with a waistcoat, smoked a pipe, spoke immaculate upper-class English with a slight Oxford drawl and knew much more about Englan
d than we did. He and Graham kept strange medical-student hours, and Tim and I didn’t see much of them. In retrospect, though, one thing seems significant. I noticed that Graham, who had always been a very amiable, easy-going companion, would sometimes become strangely aggressive if he got home late after spending an evening drinking with his Bart’s rugby teammates. I began to wonder if he was incapable of being assertive unless he’d had alcohol . . .
I was not really used to communal living, but only once did I annoy my flatmates. The first time it was my turn to do the shopping, I overindulged my growing taste for exotic food with a bagful of goodies like smoked elk’s liver and chocolate-covered ants and mackerel-and-prune soup and curried walrus testicles. I’d sort of forgotten about the milk and the bread and the eggs. I was never allowed to shop again.
One of the huge advantages of our flat was that it was a mere thirteen minutes’ walk from the BBC Radio Light Entertainment offices in New Bond Street. I had started there in September, in a beautiful old building with a marble entrance hall, and an atmosphere that reminded me of a prep-school common room: lots of pleasant, gentle people going quietly about work which they enjoyed, with a complete absence of anxiety, competition or any talk of audience figures. But I was also discovering the excitement of living in London. Like most of my generation, I had developed a very strong, highly emotional patriotism about my country, so the idea of being in its capital thrilled me. I was proud of what we had done in the war; I was aware of our long history and our centuries of empire. I was also confident of what I felt to be the basic decency and fair-mindedness of our culture, and wherever I went in London I would see a building or perhaps just a name inscribed somewhere that would remind me that I was a part of this deeply impressive civilisation. It may sound naive, but it brought a kind of significance to my life. Of course, I was embedded in a very particular middle-class culture: it was fundamentally well educated, well mannered and orderly. And as I slowly learned more about all its various faults – its sexism, its racism, its bottomless class-consciousness – I also felt an optimism that things would inevitably and inexorably improve.