So, Anyway...

by John Cleese

  One moment stands out as being especially appalling. Connie and I have sat down and started doing the ‘Ones’ sketch, and I sense a stirring in the audience, just as though they have all awoken from a thousand-year sleep. A tiny flicker of hope flashes through my central nervous system. ‘Hold it!’ cries the director. Why? We aren’t told, of course. Silence. A minute passes. ‘From the beginning, please!’ So Connie and I start it again, and just as we reach the same point, the audience stirs again, we even get a tiny laugh . . . and the director intervenes. ‘Hold it, please!’ Connie and I stop and sit there for seven minutes while they relight. By the time we start a third time, we can feel the audience’s boredom and irritation . . . So I tighten up, the sketch lays a complete egg, and we have to cut it from the show.

  It’s a nightmare once comedy stops feeling funny. I remember that when we did our first Python stage shows in 1973 (on our tour of the UK), the first two performances in Southampton and Brighton went really well; but when we moved to the Bristol Hippodrome the matinee audience there proved so unresponsive that they reminded me of the story of an actor who, pausing by a fishmonger’s while doing his shopping one morning, and surveying the fish lying on the slab, with their open mouths and dead eyes, suddenly exclaims, ‘Oh my God! I’ve got a matinee today!’ You can sometimes console yourself with the thought ‘Oh, it’s just a bad house’, but the complete silent apathy of this particular Bristol audience rattled me. Maybe it was because we’d only done the show twice before, but I now started to think, ‘Oh my God. It’s not funny!’ and for the rest of that performance I stood in the wings, or listened to the PA system in my dressing room, with a sinking feeling, becoming ever more convinced that our show was a flop, and dreading the humiliating tour that still stretched ahead. That night, however, the audience laughed from the first and my fears disappeared like a rat up a drainpipe. What had I been thinking? Of course it’s funny. Listen to the audience reaction.

  Unfortunately, there was no moment during the recording of How to Irritate People when it felt funny. It was an awful experience, and I felt bad that Connie had had such a terrible television baptism. I crept back to my burrow vowing that I’d never take on such a project again. Ever.

  Chapter 15

  WHILE I LAY low and stitched my wounds, Graham and I were able to turn our attention to a wide selection of writing: our new private-detective film, which was great fun to work on, as its farce-like quality allowed us to indulge in humour at the wilder and sillier end of the spectrum; another draft of The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer; a TV special for the actress and comedienne Sheila Hancock, which Graham and I wrote with Eric Idle (we had, of course, worked alongside him on The Frost Report, but that was our first – and very harmonious – collaboration with him); and . . . an invitation, right out of the blue, to write some sketches for (fanfare of trumpets) . . . Peter Sellers.

  Peter was at this time the world’s leading comedy actor. He’d achieved this status in his anni mirabiles of 1963–4, when he created the role of Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther and played three different characters in one of the greatest comedies of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. I’d worshipped him since the days of The Goon Show, where he did the majority of the voices, and I’d seen him grow into a superb character actor in very English movies like The Ladykillers, Two-Way Stretch and The Mouse That Roared. During this time he also came up with three of the greatest comedy albums ever made, produced by George Martin, the best being Songs for Swinging Sellers; while his appearance as a trade unionist called Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack showed that he could also be a fine straight actor. It had to be admitted, though, that by the time Graham and I went to meet him in the spring of 1969, we’d heard he was getting a reputation for being difficult. (During the filming of Casino Royale in 1967, the director Joe McGrath told me, Peter had said to him that he did not want to do his close-up shots the same day that Orson Welles did his: he wanted to wait until he had seen Orson’s close-ups in rushes, so that he could work out how to ‘top’ him when he shot his own.)

  The Peter that Graham and I met, however, couldn’t have been friendlier. We showed him some of our sketches and, to our delight, he laughed a lot. And when he laughed he really bust a gut: he fell about and hooted. You could see him suddenly become animated by a joyous comic energy, of the kind that possessed Graham and me when we discovered a great comic idea. (It was never a single great line that set us all off – it was always the first perception of a great comic potential, prior to it being worked through.) It seemed to me that when Peter experienced this glee, he became for a moment a bigger person than his normal, sociable, lower-key self.

  His first job for us was to come up with some sketches for an American ‘special’. I can only remember one of the pieces, where Peter played an enterprising Scottish cloth manufacturer who had discovered some hitherto neglected tartans to sell to Americans: ones from clans such as the McRoosevelts, the McJPMorgans and the McGoldbergs. He was pleased with the way the sketches were received, and, to our amazement, immediately promoted us: he invited us to write a new draft of a screenplay based on Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian. Gra and I therefore now found ourselves writing three movies.

  Peter started by explaining that there had been several drafts of the script up to that point, and he showed us the most recent – the fourteenth draft, which contained quite the most exquisite stage directions I’d ever read: in the very first scene, an ornate clock on the mantelpiece was dwelt on in extraordinary detail. It was only when we read further, in search of dialogue, character and plot that the ghastly truth emerged: the script was just terrible. Graham and I were astounded. We yearned to ask one question: how could the writer of this material ever have been hired?

  However, the screenplay’s bottomless ineptitude was very liberating in that it left us with nothing to defer to, so we went back to the Southern novel and found it a talented, if lazy, mess, with a great premise: an immensely rich but principled man, Sir Guy Grand, plays large-scale practical jokes on people for the sole purpose of revealing to them, and to others, the baseness of their real motives. It may sound a bit prissy, but its mood wasn’t: more satirical than didactic. Gra and I had a wonderful time inventing new pranks, including a sky-writing plane that left very rude words above the crowds at Ascot, forcing the authorities to send up another sky-writer to bowdlerise the vulgarities, resulting in a sky filled with words like ‘ARSENAL’, ‘THE PENIS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD’, ‘SCUNTHORPE’, ‘PRICKLY’ and ‘MISHIT’. We came up with one other absurdly expensive idea: on the huge cruise liner which Sir Guy has hired to host and ridicule his most powerful victims, there is a very expensive restaurant where, if you want a steak, you are escorted to a huge below-decks paddock where you can choose your own cut from a large, heavily bandaged herd of steers.

  Each morning we would arrive at Peter’s flat at ten o’clock and give him the pages we had written the previous day, and he would say, ‘Less of this’ or ‘More of that’. It was all remarkably relaxed, the temperature in the room rising only if Britt Ekland walked through in her dressing gown (I think even Graham enjoyed this). After a time we began to socialise with Peter on an occasional basis. He took us to Hair, where I felt too shy to go up on stage with him to dance with everyone (typical!). He sent us to the theatre, to see There’s a Girl in My Soup by Terence Frisby, to advise him whether he should do the film of it. (Snotty young know-it-alls that we were, we advised against it – sorry, Terry – but he ignored us, thank God, and made a very successful adaptation with Goldie Hawn.) And a lot of the time we just sat around while he told wonderfully funny stories of his music-hall days, and of his time with the Goons. Of course, we already knew he was a truly great ‘voice-man’, but we marvelled privately at his ability to ‘do’ people, effortlessly. He only needed to listen to someone for a few minutes to be able to impersonate them perfectly. Indeed, many of his most famous ‘voices’ were inspired by entirely chance encounters
.

  He told us, for example, that once at the end of a theatre show, he had been accosted by a very boring fan, a scoutmaster in full gear, and was about to flee when he heard the man speak. He immediately invited him back to his dressing room, gave him a drink and kept him talking. Peter had found the perfect voice for the wonderful Goon Show character Bluebottle. When Stanley Kubrick asked him to play Clare Quilty in Lolita, he was wondering how he would speak the role until he bumped into an American with an unusual style of speech. Peter then chatted to him for twenty minutes, after which he had the guy off pat. But the best story came from George Martin. While he had been producing the Songs for Swinging Sellers album, he’d fallen in love with one of the tracks in which a heartless agent is talking on the phone while auditioning an elderly Shakespearean actor who is trying to remember (unsuccessfully) a monologue from Richard III. To hear the poor old fool bumbling in the background while the agent chats up a girlfriend was absolutely hilarious, if somewhat cruel. When he played the edited album to Peter, George asked, ‘The sketch about that bastard agent. I know his voice from somewhere. Whose is it?’ Peter replied, ‘It’s yours.’

  Then, one day, we both got a first-hand insight into this extraordinary ability. We arrived at Peter’s flat, to be greeted by his heart-of-gold chauffeur Bert. ‘He’s overslept, boys. I’ll make you coffee. He won’t be long.’ So we sat there, reading through our ‘pages’, and soon Peter appeared in his dressing gown, apologising for keeping us but doing so in a quite unfamiliar voice, which a few seconds later became a rather plummy upper-class accent, before lapsing into recognisable cockney. When he sat down on the sofa opposite, he morphed into a rather odd Eastern European dialect for about ten seconds, before he finally reverted to speaking in his usual manner. Gra and I pretended not to notice, but when we compared notes later we both realised that each morning Peter Sellers had to find his own voice.

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that the greatest impersonators often have strangely colourless personalities. Perhaps their very lack of a strong identity means they have little of themselves to get in the way when they try to assume someone else’s personality. I’m a poor mimic because I can’t drop my own characteristics much, so when I impersonate someone, it sounds like them trying to impersonate me. As it happens, I greatly admire first-class mimics’ super-sensitive powers of observation, the extraordinary accuracy with which they observe vocal production, inflexions, rhythms of speech, facial expressions and body language, all those tiny, unique traits which they can then reproduce so precisely. But I also can’t help wondering whether they are, unconsciously, observing others closely in the hope they can find something there that they can ‘borrow’ and incorporate into their own personality structure, to strengthen their sense of self. Perhaps it’s an extreme form of the desire most people display early in their lives to find role models. Of course, once impersonators have developed this ability, they are rewarded by the delight they produce in an audience, whether they are at a party with friends, or earning a living on television, so they have no reason to stop, even though its original purpose has never really been accomplished. One thing is for sure. In Peter’s case, his weak sense of his own identity did not lead to a very stable existence. Graham told me once that he had been talking to Peter, when he was summoned to an important phone call. A few minutes later, Graham glanced up as someone else entered the room, and it took him some time to realise that this someone else was, in fact, Peter. He had been so altered as a result of the (obviously very difficult) phone conversation that Graham had not recognised him.

  That said, Peter’s behaviour towards us was invariably kind and generous. He was a delight to work for, and though I’m aware he had a darker side, I never glimpsed it. He and David Frost – our two main employers – worked at opposite ends of the producer spectrum. Peter discussed our work, criticised it and offered suggestions every time we had new scenes to show him, which was most weekdays; we loved this as it’s always a thrill to work with someone who’s better than you are (an experience I repeated twenty years later with Charlie Crichton on Wanda). David, by contrast, would discuss the general theme of the film a couple of times, and we’d see him again when we had finished the first draft a few weeks later, but essentially he left things to us, trusting our talent. This is a rare quality. Most film executives believe that because they have been given an office with a big desk, they must simultaneously have received, by some mystical process, an understanding of comedy which its practitioners often find it takes twenty years to acquire. So they interfere all the time, not because they have anything useful to say, as Peter did, but because they are very anxious. A few years ago, at Disney, a producer who had never written, performed or directed any comedy was telling me how to make my screenplay worse, and I remember thinking that their office was the only place on earth where such a person could manage to sustain an illusion of expertise.

  So Graham and I revelled in our good fortune in working for two great bosses on three screenplays: The Magic Christian, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer and Rentasleuth. We were to work on these for most of the next year, with very few diversions. We had become, by choice, full-time writers, and we loved it.

  I think it was a very happy time for both of us. Now that Graham had come out, David Sherlock was properly integrated into his social life. And he was finding writing a lot more fun than endless medical studies. He had always been very serious about becoming a doctor, and did eventually qualify, but I suspect that this was the year when he realised that comedy was his real passion.

  As for me, I was more content and relaxed than I had been at any time since I had left New York. I was, after all, married to Connie, and although I remained extraordinarily naive about the psychology of women, we loved each other’s company, and enjoyed endless visits to restaurants, the cinema (there were lots of great films in those days for people over twenty-five) and, best of all, the theatre. It was a golden age of British playwrights. When I was not struggling to understand Pinter (even with Connie’s help) I was discovering Peter Nichols, Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckbourn and Michael Frayn, all of whom for several decades to come were to provide some of the greatest theatrical comedy ever written: that was in addition to some Feydeau farces at the National which transported me to a brand-new level of bliss. It was now that I realised that farce – acted with real seriousness – was my first love.

  I was also much more at ease now that I was free of the nerves I had experienced whenever I had to stand in front of an audience. The rhythms of a writer’s life were congenial to me. If I was anxious about anything at this time, it was an absurd (but at that time ineradicable) worry that I ought to be soaking up information about everything on the planet so that I would be as well informed as Leonardo da Vinci or John Stuart Mill or Mr Bartlett. I was always in a state of awe when I found myself among highly informed people. Consequently, even when I was enjoying writing with Graham, there would be a part of me that wanted to finish as soon as possible, so that I could resume reading about ancient Egypt, or precious stones, or the history of anaesthetics, even though I knew that I read slowly (a hangover from studying science and law) and had a distinctly average memory. The only thing you learn when doing comedy is how to do comedy, so I always experienced a sinking feeling late on Sunday afternoons as I reluctantly put my books aside and started focusing on the work week ahead. I called it ‘putting on my blinkers’ (in the USA, ‘blinders’).

  That’s not to say that I didn’t greatly enjoy writing with Graham. It was always quite difficult for us to get down to work in the morning, and we developed many strategies to postpone doing so; but as someone said to me recently, ‘It’s hard to start writing, but it’s hard to stop.’ Once I’d become absorbed, the desire to get the damn thing right conflicted with my other desire to settle down to that book about the Syrian Orthodox Church. Perfectionism is a good trait professionally, if unhelpful to the quality of your private life.

 
Graham and I no longer worried so much when we had an unproductive session: we were experienced enough to be confident that we would soon be compensated by a fertile one. Our average rate was about four minutes of screen time a day, which may not sound much, but if sustained would theoretically have given us a movie script every six weeks. When we started Python, our average dropped a little as we had no overall story to guide us each day – every morning we had to come up with a fresh idea, not just continue on from yesterday. Even so, we could still produce at least fifteen minutes of sketch material each week, which, with fifteen from Mike and Terry Jones, and eight from Eric, plus Terry Gilliam’s animations and opening and closing titles, meant we could edit all the weaker stuff out and still have enough material for one show (and often a bit to spare for the next).

  The great joy was the laughing. There would be a moment when a really funny, wild or zany idea popped into our heads and we would both erupt. David Sherlock tells how there would suddenly be shrieking and howling and ‘the drumming of feet like a child having a tantrum, only this was the sheer delight of the lunacy of the idea’ and how the screaming and howling with laughter would go on for some time before we actually settled again to write it down. I think Gra and I, more than the other Pythons, would suddenly be possessed by this bolt of gleeful energy, and in such huge quantities that we could fully discharge it not through plain laughter but through physical pyrotechnics: we would howl and hoot and drum. Some years later when I was being briefed to write a Video Arts film on some aspect of selling, an expert salesman told me that closing a sale was, for him, the next best thing to an orgasm. Clearly, he’d never written comedy.