by John Cleese
Headmaster: Good morning, boys! I’d like to welcome you back to a new term, and I hope it will be a very happy and successful one for us all. Who did that?
It passed, I heard a laugh from the audience, and something about the laugh jolted me, and I made the mistake of starting to think. I thought, ‘My Auntie Vera in Plymouth is watching me AT THIS VERY MOMENT!’ This seemed such an extraordinary fact that I could think of nothing else, although the monologue was continuing without my missing a beat. Auntie Vera was actually watching me NOW! VERA! In Plymouth! This cannot be happening! I stifled the impulse to wave to her, knowing that it would not fit the sense of the words that were being said for me.
I would like to welcome four new members of the staff this term, but unfortunately I could only find two. Mr Jones, who is a grammar school man – STOP LAUGHING! – will be taking the middle school in all the subjects nobody else wants to teach, and I’m sure he will be an invaluable member of the staff. And in time, a valuable one . . .
Is she laughing? She doesn’t know much about prep schools. Perhaps Uncle Eric is explaining it. AS I SPEAK!
Next I would like to welcome to the staff Mr M’Boko. Now this is the first time that our curriculum will have included Swahili, but we hope to resume French again next term. Incidentally, you may be interested to know that until last week Mr M’Boko was Prime Minister of Chad . . .
She won’t understand that. I’m not sure he will either. I wish I’d chosen a different monologue for them.
And so on Monday mornings he will be teaching the sixth form Swahili. And on Thursday afternoons they will be teaching him English.
OH MY GOD! Is MOTHER watching? Is my HAIR TIDY? Can she see my socks? She’ll be knitting, but WILL SHE LOOK UP? Surely Dad will POINT ME OUT to her. How will I explain this to her, my being on television? She’ll think it’s a trick!
That’s all. Dismissed.
I’ll call her when I’ve finished. Oh! I have finished! For Bernard Thompson, our lovely, calm, warm, endlessly amused, utterly efficient floor manager, is leading me gently out of the way of Julie Felix’s upcoming song, and leaving me to recover my wits in the wings.
It took me so long to come to myself that when it was time for me to speak my next line, and David said the introductory phrase and the camera cut to me, I wasn’t there: there was just an empty frame. I didn’t even realise I’d missed my entrance because I was still in the wings, celebrating my survival.
Anyway, at some point the show apparently ended, because I found myself being bustled along corridors and past Frost Report personnel, all of whom seemed to think my headmaster piece had been OK. I found it hard to believe, but the fact is I know now that if you have learned your words really well, then the mechanical part of you remembers not only the words, but also the correct timing and gestures. The memory of what you have rehearsed is a memory of the whole gestalt.
The purpose of all the bustling was to get me into a waiting car, which was to take me to the BBC TV Centre to be interviewed on Late Night Line-Up, an arts-oriented discussion programme that ran for many years during the 60s. I was to be questioned by Michael Dean, who introduced me by reference to that night’s Frost Report and went on to ask me a few questions about myself. I then gave the worst performance of my life; because in this, my first ever experience of being interviewed, and interviewed live on BBC TV, on a programme well watched by bright people . . . I had no automatic to fall back on.
I can remember nothing of it, except that I sat there trying to hide in my chair, stammering out defensive half-truths and evasions, as though I had fallen into the hands of an experienced KGB interrogator. Why was I so stilted and overawed and graceless? In part, I suspect, it was because I was taking this whole new interview business absurdly seriously, feeling that everything I said was ‘on record’, and so being acutely afraid of making any remark that might not be one hundred per cent factually correct. To make matters worse, I had felt all my life that my opinions were pretty worthless as I lacked the information, the life experience and therefore the authority to pronounce on anything, whether a play or a glass of wine or an idea or even a football team’s performance, so I was not going to start making pronouncements on television. Just as critical, I now see, was the fact that there were so many areas of my emotional life where I was muddled and unresolved and therefore ripe for horrendous embarrassment that I was pointlessly guarded about everything. The lurking fear that I might accidentally give away something I did not want to reveal resulted in blanket self-censorship. I think the Late Night Line-Up people must have wondered what was wrong with me; somehow they got me safely into the taxi home.
So I went back to the Logan Mews flat, turned the lights on, and sat quietly, trying to review the events of the past few hours – definitely the most stressful episode of my life since my travails in Mother’s birth canal. One thing I knew for sure: my life seemed to be spinning off in an unfamiliar direction, and I sensed I was beginning to lose control of parts of it, although it took me years to realise the whole spectrum of effects that celebrity has on one’s existence.
Chapter 12
I WAS NOW able to settle into a regular, if anxious, routine where many kind and comedically experienced people seemed to be happy to reassure me that my most recent performance had been ‘all right’. On Fridays, the day after the show, Graham would get time off from St Bart’s and we would write a sketch for the show after next, feeling very complimented that our effort would almost always be included in the script. On Saturday mornings there would be a big read-through at the Baker Street church hall, with all the performers and many of the writers, when we would discover what material Jimmy Gilbert and David had chosen for next week’s show. At the end of the reading, we would start to ‘put it on its feet’, that is, Jimmy and the cast would work out the right positions and moves for the performers, and start running the sketches, scripts in hand. Sunday was a Frost-free day, but I would set off mid-morning for the studio where we were going to record ISIRTA, and spend the day with David, Tim, Graeme, Bill, Jo, Humphrey and Peter Titheradge. Here there was always a pretty relaxed, matey atmosphere, and after the show was over, we would adjourn to the pub, although I usually had to leave early because I had lines to learn for the Frost rehearsals on Monday. I looked forward to these because they were a priceless opportunity to study the two Ronnies at work. Ronnie B appeared to be able to switch character and accent at the press of a button, but he made it all seem so effortless that I couldn’t see what I could learn from him; however, I watched Ronnie C like a sparrowhawk, because he played with his timing, sometimes taking risks by extending pauses longer than I would ever have dared, and I noticed how, by waiting this fraction more, he would build the tension just before he triggered his line, and get a bigger laugh as a result (just watch what he does in the famous ‘Class’ sketch when Ronnie B has said, ‘I look up to him [Cleese] because he is upper class, but I look down on him [Corbett] because he is lower class’, and Ronnie C has to follow with ‘I know my place’).
On Tuesdays I was usually picked up and driven either to the BBC’s Ealing Studios, to film ‘quickies’ that were too ambitious to be done live at Shepherd’s Bush, or to a location to shoot longer outdoors sketches, which, I began to notice, were usually written by a couple of young Oxford guys, whom I had met briefly in the past and were now regulars at the Saturday morning script read-through: Michael Palin and Terry Jones. Wednesday mornings brought a second day of rehearsal, which was all we needed, because although it was a half-hour show, a large proportion of it – David’s CDM, songs from Julie Felix and Tom Lehrer, the filmed items and the opening and closing titles – did not require input from the performers on the day of transmission. We only had to do the ‘quickies’, which required minimal rehearsal, and two or sometimes three sketches. Not a lot, when people like the two Ronnies were involved.
Not a lot, but this did little to ameliorate the Fear Factor. And the second week of the series actually turn
ed out to be more terrifying than the first. Graham and I had written another monologue, which by default I was chosen to perform. It was a good piece, I thought, in which we created the image of a charabanc hurtling through Europe on one of those ‘See Twenty-two European Capitals in Eight Days’ tours while I stood beside the driver shouting instructions to the cowering passengers:
Courier: Now then . . . in twenty minutes we will be leaving Italy and entering Switzerland, which is a different country. So finish your spaghetti, throw the cans out of the window, and put the Primus stoves back under your seats. You may now open your souvenir plastic bags marked ‘Not to be opened till Italy’. You’ll find a small green plastic replica of the Tower of Pisa . . . don’t try and stand it up, it’s made that way. Right, now in half a minute we’ll be crossing the border. You don’t need your passports yet, we’ve got a special arrangement: they just stamp the coach. We’re in Switzerland . . . now! Switzerland is famous for its mountains, cheese, clocks and chocolate. Nothing else. Open your plastic bags marked ‘Switzerland’. You’ll find a small piece of chocolate . . . eat it up quickly, we’re not here long, it’s a small country.
It was a riot at the read-through. Everybody loved it. All I had to do was . . . remember it. And the big problem was that it had to be delivered at breakneck speed. Doing your lines very fast is ten times more difficult than delivering them at a normal pace; there is no time to think what the next line is – it just has to come out right (and in front of 14 million people, live, in my case). So I learned the words even more diligently than usual, and practised them at speeds even greater than I was intending to deliver them. By the time I went to bed the night before the show, I felt I had mastered them, and I ran through the lines twice before I fell asleep. After a couple of hours, I woke up, turned over, ran the lines again and suddenly realised I wasn’t sure whether it was ‘Next, as advertised in the brochure, the midnight bathe in the crystal clear waters of the Swiss lake, so get your swimming costumes on now’ or ‘Next, the midnight bathe in the crystal clear waters of the Swiss lake as advertised in the brochure, so get your swimming costumes on now.’ This bothered me, so after a time I got out of bed, checked the script, and found it was actually ‘Next, the midnight bathe in the crystal clear waters of the Swiss lake as advertised in the brochure. The coach will be passing through the lake in thirty seconds. So get your swimming costumes on now.’ I then got back into bed, did the lines once more and then one final time, just to make sure, and made a mistake where I’d never gone wrong before. This was a shock, and it made me nervous. Now as I repeated the lines to reassure myself, I made new errors, fluffed lines, and then went blank. I had not yet learned that the main cause of forgetting your words is starting to think that you may, in fact, forget them. And I was, indeed, soon believing that I was almost certainly destined to ‘dry’ in front of Auntie Vera, Uncle Eric, Dad and Mum, Mr Bartlett, Mr Tolson, Mrs Tolson, the entire casts of Cambridge Circus and ISIRTA, Billy Williams, every TV critic in Britain, possibly the Queen, and 13,999,961 other people. After all, if I couldn’t get my performance right now, in the security of my own bed, what chance did I have tomorrow, addressing an unfamiliar camera machine, in front of 14 million people?
I scarcely slept. Whenever I woke I immediately started rerunning the lines, and getting something wrong. Eventually I was forced to crawl out of bed and dress; I somehow sleep-walked through the day in the studio, smiling bravely and pretending I was still alive, until the dreaded moment came when I stood in front of the huge forbidding camera-dinosaur-THING . . . waited until the little red light went on . . . and did my big monologue really well. Correction! I stood there without fainting and my automatic pilot did the ‘Courier’ sketch really well for me. Big laughs!
The show ended, people congratulated me, and I came to the half-stunned realisation that I had done all right, that I had not let everyone down. There was no hint of triumph on my part, just a profound liberating sense of relief, and a recognition that my life could now go forward. It was a little like a last-minute reprieve, except that I had done something that was definitely good enough. To put it bluntly: I had not been a failure.
As the series progressed, my fear diminished a little, at the rate of about one per cent per show. This was helped by the fact that Graham and I never again wrote a monologue for me. I don’t remember this being intentional, but I suspect that the largely unconscious part of me that had performed the monologues also played a major part in the decision not to risk any more of them.
It’s odd to recall that up until The Frost Report, Graham and I, though we thought of ourselves as a writing partnership, had in fact produced very little together. Apart from co-scripting (with Tim) four sketches for the 1962 Footlights revue, I cannot remember writing anything with Graham until I returned to London at the end of 1965, at which point we gravitated towards each other at great speed, starting a regular collaboration that lasted, on and off, for twenty-seven years, until the Pythons’ last film, The Meaning of Life, in 1982. He was now in his fourth year of study at St Bartholomew’s Hospital – three months to go – but on that one day each week he was able to escape and come over to Logan Mews, to write our three- or four-minute sketch. Most of what we came up with was pretty good, but very conventional and not terribly funny.
Graham and I often had wilder and funnier ideas, but we soon realised that they were never going to make it into the show. If ‘wacky’ ideas were suggested at the table readings, the other writers would usually laugh and so would Jimmy Gilbert, but he would then say, with a rueful smile, ‘Very funny, boys, but they won’t get it in Bradford.’ We never argued. We were very well treated, but we also knew that we were right at the bottom of the batting order, decision-wise. Nevertheless, there was a wonderful camaraderie in the room, and I took particular pleasure in the company of the writers there, several of whom were to become great friends.
One who particularly intrigued me was Tony Jay, a charming and utterly non-snotty intellectual, who had done Classics and then philology at Cambridge (and got a first in both), before joining the BBC as a humble researcher. He swiftly ascended the ranks to become the producer of Tonight, the hugely loved and respected early-evening magazine programme that offered a wonderful fresh mixture of the serious and the light-hearted. He’d ended up as head of the Talks department before going freelance. David spotted his talents immediately, the greatest being originality of thought, clarity of expression and wit, and he asked Tony to write a point-of-view piece on the theme of each week’s show, solely to guide the writers. Graham and I read them, enjoyed them, and ignored them, as did the others, so far as we could judge. But I loved chatting to Tony and I was flattered that someone as bright and distinguished should take an interest in my thoughts – perhaps he was intrigued by my ability to make people laugh. Some five years later he invited me to become one of the founder members of Video Arts, and we went on to write a score of training films together, before, in 1980, he embarked on Yes Minister and then Yes, Prime Minister, both witty masterpieces of clever plotting which he co-wrote with Jonathan Lynn. These programmes famously became Margaret Thatcher’s favourite entertainment – a rather dubious or back-handed compliment, if you ever saw her attempt to reprise the ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch at the 1990 Tory Party Conference, with reference to the Lib Dems (her foreign-policy advisor Sir Charles Powell told me that rehearsing the Iron Lady for this speech had been a fairly slow process).
The other person at the Frost Report table to whom I was drawn was one Marty Feldman. I hasten to add that my interest in him was platonic: in fact when I first met him, I was rather shocked by his physical appearance. Dressed only in black, heavily suntanned and very fit, he looked like an Armani gargoyle. This was the script editor? Then I discovered his writing credits: The Army Game, Bootsie and Snudge (one of the very few top-class ITV comedies) and then several years of Beyond Our Ken, the nation’s favourite radio half-hour. I found him instantly likeable: a little anxious, tenta
tive and over-eager to please, perhaps, but brimming with ideas and immensely quick and funny, as he puffed on Gitanes and blinked a lot. We swiftly became friends and I discovered that his looks were not the only exotic thing about him. He’d been born in the East End of London to a Ukrainian Jewish couple, had left school at fifteen and had gone straight into show business as a stooge to an Indian fakir who performed on Margate Pier. Apparently, and for reasons I never entirely understood, Marty’s role was to fire (blunt) arrows into the fakir’s stomach. He seemed a lot older than me (even though there were only five years between us), because he’d been a successful writer for years, knew his way round London, went to jazz clubs and fancy restaurants, had exotic holidays and generally seemed like a real grown-up. Moreover, he was married – to a woman called Lauretta, an attractive, dark-haired protector with a wonderful husky voice and nicotine-infused chuckle who exuded goodwill and stability and fun. I started spending a lot of time with them, learning cockney rhyming slang and back-slang, discussing life and comedy, and laughing a lot; and later that year I invited them to stay with Graham and me in a holiday villa in Ibiza that the two of us had decided to rent for a couple of months.
The fact that Graham and I were now able to contemplate living on this rather grand scale was entirely due to the patronage of David Frost. We ourselves were not adult enough to plan ahead: we simply reacted to offers; and that meant that David effectively planned for us. He had come up with the idea of a film in which an intelligent but unscrupulous pollster uses his professional skills to become Prime Minister, and now he suggested that the two of us write the script of what was to become The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer. This was miles more ambitious than anything we had attempted but we jumped at it, not least because David offered us an enormous fee: £2,000.