So, Anyway...

by John Cleese

  Graham and I led very separate social lives. We always had done, since Cambridge days. I can scarcely recall us having dinner together, except as part of the Python group, usually when we were away from home, filming. But when we wrote in those days, we nearly always went out for lunch together. Our conversation was typically male: it would not have occurred to us to talk about ‘private’ matters. Occasionally Gra would say things that seemed rather strange: for a time he would get quite angry about the ‘selfishness’ of Buddhism, where people ‘sat around’ meditating when they could be helping other people; he often expressed a strong dislike of gays who were effeminate; once he became quite insistent about the idea that touching someone’s genitals was really no different from touching their arm; sometimes he would talk interestingly about medical matters – I can remember his telling me about iatrogenic diseases (illnesses caused by doctors). But mostly it was politics, TV, comedy and suchlike. My abiding memory of those times is that when we were not chatting (but often when we were writing) he could drift off into a reverie, stroking his sideburns while peering at his watch.

  Sometimes I couldn’t resist taking advantage of this tendency to daydream. Once, when we were strolling together through a Knightsbridge arcade and he was miles away, I stopped him, grasped him firmly by the shoulders, turned him ninety degrees to the right, and shoved him very firmly into a posh jewellery shop. At first he was so inattentive that he offered no resistance. Then, realising what was happening, he tried to decelerate. Instead he tripped as he passed through the doorway of the shop, picked up speed and, with arms outstretched to soften the blow, ran full-tilt into the counter. The salesman standing right behind jumped backwards and fell over. Gra now behaved with impeccable politeness, explaining to the poor cowering man why he had sprinted at him, and pointing outside at a man who was laughing so much that passers-by had stopped to watch and figure out what that individual was laughing at.

  On another occasion I had booked a table at one of our favourite restaurants, the German Food Centre, in the 1948 Show-style name of Mr Hyaena-Explosion. It had taken some time to re-pronounce and spell it on the phone, since the German Food Centre took these matters seriously, but eventually the reservation was agreed. When we arrived there at one o’clock I made sure Gra was alongside me as I approached the maître d’. ‘Mr Hyaena-Explosion!’ I announced loudly. The maître d’s face lit up. Something that had clearly been on his mind all morning was now satisfactorily resolved. Alles in Ordnung! Beaming, he replied, ‘Of course! Zis vay please . . .’ I strode after him, and then turned back to see Gra simply standing there with his mouth open. It took a lot to get his attention at times.

  Gra was always mildly irritated by any display of decorum, or good taste, if he felt it was a direct challenge to his deepest beliefs. When I mentioned once that Connie and I had guests coming to dinner that evening who were a bit formal and stuck-up, he carefully cut out some very small pieces of paper, wrote an obscenity on each one, and then hid them round our flat in all the rooms our guests were likely to visit. Connie found one of these just ten minutes before they were due to arrive: a moment of pure panic that set off a frenzied paperchase, as we raced around the apartment trying to find them all before the doorbell rang. We missed one, which he had placed on the basin in the visitors’ loo. It simply read, ‘Anus’. I’ve always wondered whether our guests speculated why we might have put it there.

  Our enjoyment of practical jokes – and our slowly growing reputation as writers – came together one day when we were phoned by a Hollywood director called Sidney Salkow, who was visiting London and wanted to meet us. The day of our rendezvous we checked him out and found he had a string of films to his credit, every one of which sounded distinctly ‘B-movie’. We therefore decided that the room in which we were to meet should be decorated in a manner that would honour the importance of the occasion. I have always had an extensive collection of soft toys (I buy them pretending they are for children), so now we raided this, placing the animals all round the room, partly hidden, with each one looking at the chair Mr Salkow would be sitting in: a squirrel behind that lamp, a leopard up on the curtain rail, a raccoon under this chair, an ostrich behind the television, a warthog on the windowsill, two badgers peering from the filing cabinet, an asp on the anglepoise, a tiny lemur peeping out of a tissue box, a giraffe hiding at the top of the curtains, a crocodile outside the window (Sellotaped to the ledge), looking in at Mr Salkow’s chair three feet away, two zebras watching from a waste-paper basket, monkeys in the light shades, all concealed as best we could, so that our Hollywood director would spot them only one at a time. Our hope was that a slow, gradual realisation that he had an audience of fauna would rattle him more than one huge, simultaneous zoological revelation.

  But Mr Sidney Salkow was not the rattleable type. He entered the room like a typhoon, pumping our hands, exclaiming with great enthusiasm, congratulating us on all things British, and generally establishing his credentials as a high-end extrovert. And within seconds he was perched in his chair, gesticulating wildly as he launched into a description of the opening scene of the movie he was so excited about us writing.

  Sidney Salkow: There’s this huge castle in the middle of a plain, and it’s got a huge front gate.

  John & Graham (variously): Where is this, Sidney?

  SS: Er . . . doesn’t matter! And a huge army is besieging this castle, right?

  J & G: Yes. Who . . . ?

  SS: It’s been besieging this castle for months, right?

  J & G: Right. Who . . . ?

  SS: And the front gate of the castle bursts open (SS claps his hands) and these three hogs run out! What an image! Wow!

  J & G: Hogs?

  SS: Yeah! How about that?

  J & G: You mean big pigs?

  SS: Huge! The biggest you’ve ever seen! Three of them!

  J & G: Sidney . . . Why . . . ?

  SS: And strapped to the first hog is Ernest Borgnine!

  J & G: Ernest Borgnine?

  SS: Ernie and I go way back. He’s committed to the movie. He’s huge.

  J & G: Why is he . . . ?

  SS: And strapped to the second hog is . . . Guess!

  J & G: Sir Laurence Olivier?

  SS: No! Charlton Heston! And guess who’s strapped to the third hog.

  J & G: Sean Connery?

  SS: No! Sophia Loren! She’s huge!

  J & G: But why . . . ?

  SS: And the hogs run out towards the army—

  J & G: Sidney, Sidney!

  SS: What?

  J & G: Why are they strapped to the pigs?

  SS: Hogs! Because it’s a siege.

  J & G: . . . And . . . ?

  SS: They’re showing the army how much food they’ve got left.

  J & G: What?

  SS: They’ve got so much they don’t even need three hogs!

  J & G: OK, but why have Ernest Borgnine, Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren been strapped to them?

  By this time, our minds were reeling. But I promise you, this is a pretty damn accurate account of what happened when we met our first Hollywood director.

  As for our animals . . . we’d both assumed he’d missed them. But as we shook hands when we parted:

  SS: Anyway, boys, think about it, OK!

  J & G: Yes! Yes, we will, Sidney.

  SS: Great! And by the way . . . nice animals!

  Maybe the joke was on us. I just wish I could remember why Sophia Loren was going to be fastened to a pig.

  One way and another Graham and I wrote together almost full-time from the How to Irritate People recording in May 1968 to the taping of the first Monty Python show on 30 August 1969. The only interruptions were the handful of days I spent in front of the camera in tiny roles dignified by the courtesy title of ‘cameo’. The first of these was on one of my favourite TV shows, The Avengers, with the third Emma Peel, Linda Thorson, in which I played a man who registered the copyright of the unique make-up of every single circus clow
n by painting it on to a real hen’s egg (this, believe me, is how it really used to be done). I was duly surrounded by multiple racks of these eggs, and of course the pay-off was that I ended up knocking them all over. Since by now I fancied myself at physical comedy, I told the director I thought I could floor every egg in one take, which would have helped as this was the last shot of the day and everyone wanted to go home. It turned out, however, that I couldn’t. So the whole crew had to spend the next two hours putting the eggs back on the racks and trying to hide the bits that were cracked. Under massive pressure, I got it right second time.

  Then the wondrous Denis Norden (one of the half-dozen people I would choose to join me on a desert island) somehow finagled me into appearing in two films he had written. The first, The Bliss of Mrs Blossom, had me playing a clerk in a post office, supporting Freddie Jones and the great comic and cartoonist Willie Rushton. It was a fairly unremarkable experience, though I remember being struck by the care with which the director arranged an amusing sticker on a noticeboard behind me: perhaps it was there in case the audience got bored watching us act.

  The other Norden gift, though, was rather more memorable because it gave me my first experience of filming with a big Hollywood star. George Sanders was a super-suave English actor who, along with James Mason, had cornered the market in elegant-British-swine roles. Our scene together required me to play the manager of a tea plantation in the Far East having dinner with my employer during a ‘native uprising’, and the humour stemmed from our very different reactions as the plantation villa was attacked: Sanders sitting there quite unconcerned, drinking his soup, while bullets whizzed everywhere, hitting the candlesticks and crockery; me frozen and terrified, vacillating between trying to mimic his calm, and diving for cover (and instant dismissal from my job). In those days before CGI, the action was for real: crockery and cutlery were sent flying about, propelled into the air by jets of compressed air, and I had to hold a (wax) drinking glass full of red wine steady as it was shot out of my hand by a stunt man with a .22 rifle resting on the back of a chair, just out of view. (I was, however, allowed to hold the glass at its base.) I was touched when, at one moment, George Sanders actually stopped them shooting my close-up as it was becoming too dangerous for me. I was also impressed a little later when he insisted that some water that was to be thrown on him should be really cold, to help make his reaction to it as genuine as possible. We all watched him surreptitiously throughout the day as he gave the crew a masterclass in languid elegance. Some years later I learned that he had committed suicide because he was ‘bored’. I admire insouciance greatly; this, however, seemed to be taking it a bit too far.

  It was Peter Sellers who was responsible for my next cameo appearance. At the end of one of our script sessions, he mentioned that Thames Television had decided to make a radio-style recording of a famous old Goon show, Tales of Men’s Shirts, as a TV special, and then casually asked me whether I would like to play the announcer (the part originally played by Wallace Greenslade) when they recorded the show the following week. My mind reeled, but I said as languidly as I could that I thought I could fit it in (I’d been watching Mr Sanders very carefully); then I made Peter laugh by saying that I needed to agree the fee, as I wasn’t sure I could afford to pay it (an old joke, but a very appropriate one).

  What was wonderful about performing the Wallace Greenslade role was that there was no pressure on me to get more than the odd smile; what was even more wonderful was that as the programme was being shot as a radio show, and we all therefore had scripts in front of us, there was no possibility of my forgetting any lines. So I was able to stand next to the trio I had worshipped since the age of fourteen, occasionally reading a paragraph when the red light blinked, and feeling both thrilled and slightly numb. I didn’t screw up; it all went very smoothly; and suddenly it was over and there I was, back home on the sofa, trying to decide whether it had really happened. I checked the next day, and it had.

  Meanwhile Graham and I were steaming ahead with our three film scripts. Our second draft of The Magic Christian (the film’s sixteenth so far) was deemed good enough to secure financing for the enterprise; but to our disappointment Terry Southern was then invited to do the final draft, and proceeded lovingly to reinstate the mess we had first been presented with. We both hated the end result (you’d expect that, if you knew writers as well as I do). Graham wondered whether a Mr Jack Daniels should have been credited as Southern’s co-writer. Even so, it was hard to resist when Peter Sellers offered me a small part opposite him in a rather good scene where Sir Guy Grand purchases a ‘School of Rembrandt’ portrait and then cuts out the nose of it with a knife, explaining to my character (a snotty young art dealer) that he only collects noses. I, of course, have to react with horror, and I exclaim ‘Shit!’ This was quite a naughty word in 1968 – so naughty, in fact, that when, some months later, my scene was shown on television to promote the movie I became, as far as I know, the first person ever to say ‘shit’ on British television. (This, incidentally, is one of my three claims to fame: the others are that I have a species of lemur named after me, and that I was once French-kissed – on camera – by Tim Curry.)

  While The Magic Christian was trundling along, David Frost managed to secure financial backing for the Rimmer film. We all agreed that Peter Cook would be great as the brilliant pollster who manipulates the results so that he ends up as Prime Minister, and I was delighted when I heard that Kevin Billington was to be the director: I’d been hugely impressed by his clarity and bright, enthusiastic energy when I’d worked with him on Interlude. Since he and Peter were so much better informed about the British political scene than Graham and I, it seemed the perfect plan for the four of us now to work together on the script until we started shooting at the end of June. And since Gra and I knew nothing about the actual process of putting a film together it was a relief to have someone like Kevin to explain how it all unfolded, and what had to be decided when. For his part I think that Kevin found Gra slightly disconcerting. During our first week working together, the four of us were walking up to a Polish restaurant we frequented when Kevin dropped his voice and asked me, ‘Does Graham always say as little as this when he’s writing?’ The funny thing is that I was surprised: I’d got so used to Gra that his behaviour no longer struck me as odd.

  Our meetings were held at Peter’s house in Church Row, Hampstead, and the collaboration became a very happy one. A few weeks before, I had briefly appeared (both as Robin Hood and as a butler) in a show that Peter and Dudley were putting together, but as it hadn’t involved individual scenes with either of them I hadn’t got to know Peter particularly well. Now, though, I saw him regularly, and while at first I felt like a new boy in his presence, I soon relaxed: he was so welcoming, cheery and easy to write with. And he was effortlessly, brilliantly funny all the time. We’d be sitting there discussing some aspect of the plot and he’d slide into a five-minute monologue that he could easily have bestowed on a West End audience. As Frank Muir once said, ‘He could saw it off by the yard.’ His excellent biographer Harry Thompson relates that after Peter had been staggeringly funny one evening, he quietly lamented to a friend that none of it had been written down. It was lost for ever.

  Later, though, I began to see that there was a downside to Peter’s superb talent: it flowed so easily for him that he never had to learn to grind it out like the rest of us. Consequently, when inspiration did eventually begin to fail him, he lacked a writer’s cussed determination to keep at it until things began to flow again (and he really was the only genius I have ever worked with, except for the American TV director Jimmy Burrows of Cheers and Frasier fame). Not that this was remotely a problem when we were working on Rimmer: our sessions were always productive and enormous fun. By the spring of 1969 everyone was happy with the script, Kevin was able to start casting, and shooting began at the end of June. I had a small part, as a man called Ferret who is learning the tango.

  With Rimmer well on its way
, Graham and I were able to switch our focus to the Rentasleuth screenplay. Whereas Rimmer was a satire, albeit not a very sophisticated one, this was an out-and-out comedy, and we thought some of it was really funny. There was a great scene where the Ronnie Corbett character has trapped a bullion van and is trying to force the Ronnie Barker character to unlock the doors by filling up the driver’s cab with water from a hose. In another scene Marty Feldman steals an invalid carriage (which turns out not to be very fast) and Tim Brooke-Taylor hijacks an ice-cream van (similarly handicapped) to pursue him, so that during their furious race they are passed on either side by cars, bicycles and, eventually, joggers. And finally, in an extended sequence, Graham and I feed doctored meat to a couple of Dobermann pinscher guard dogs to render them unconscious: the meat fails to have any effect, so we have to ply them with more and more until after a time they become so friendly they let us in anyway, following us everywhere, wagging their tails and demanding more meat while we burgle the place; of course when the supply of meat runs out, the dogs turn nasty. This was the kind of material Gra and I loved writing best: one foot in a crime drama where the consequences were theoretically serious, the other foot in extreme silliness but with all the behaviour kept just believable – in other words, more farcical than the usual heist movie. And the most exciting thing was that we had lined up a cast that could do what the very best comedians can manage: they can go ‘over the top’ while taking the audience with them; that is, they can make people accept absurdity where many good comedy actors would fail.