by John Cleese
With David Frost’s approval, we started looking for a director, and this led me to possibly the most embarrassing moment of my life. First we approached Denis Norden, for us the expert on comedy in the UK, but Denis simply had no desire to direct (I completely sympathised with him). Next my agent asked me if I knew a director called Jay Lewis. As it happened, I did. I’d met him on holiday and liked him immensely. My agent read me his credits (not great, but very good) and told me that Jay had looked at the script and really liked it. Would I ring him? I was about to go away for a few days but promised I would call the moment I got back, which I duly did. The phone was answered by Jay’s girlfriend, the actresss Thelma Ruby. I greeted her and told her that I was delighted to hear the news about Jay. ‘We buried him this afternoon,’ she replied. I stammered that I was not delighted that he was dead, just that I was delighted he’d liked the script before he died, but that, on the contrary . . . Then I said, ‘I’m sorry’, put the phone down and killed myself. Several times.
Now we were asked if we knew a Charles Crichton. We looked him up, and leapt about excitedly when we discovered that he had directed for the Ealing Studios, which between 1949 and 1955 had made the greatest batch of comedy films England ever produced. Charlie had made my second favourite (after The Ladykillers), The Lavender Hill Mob, so we sent our script off to him – and then recalled that our ending was a complete and deliberate steal from that very film (or, let us say, it had influenced us greatly).
Fortunately we discovered when we went to meet him that he had not noticed. Even better, we realised after about five minutes that we had stumbled across a treasure, a man who knew so much more about film than anyone we’d ever met that it was almost embarrassing. We’d pack up for the day, having left some problem unresolved, and then the next morning Charlie would push a sheet of paper towards us, rather shyly, while puffing on his pipe, and we would glance at it and realise that he had not only come up with the solution but somehow also clarified a plot point and added a good joke. Under his tutelage the script improved rapidly, to the point when in August, just before Rimmer stopped shooting, Variety carried a story that David Frost’s film company’s second film, Rentasleuth, would be ‘helmed’ by Charles Crichton (and written by Gra and me).
Sadly it never happened. David Frost quietly sold our script to a producer called Ned Sherrin who immediately refused to use Charlie, without giving us any reason why. We admired Charlie so much that we walked away from the project, followed by the rest of the cast. Sherrin then changed the film’s title to Rentadick (he had a great fondness for smut) and proceeded to produce a stinker – such a stinker, in fact, that the film critic Alexander Walker memorably described it as ‘another nail in the coffin of the British film industry’. He’d had it rewritten entirely, of course.
One way and another, it was just as well that Gra and I parted company with our script, as we swiftly came to the conclusion that Sherrin was tasteless, slimy and incompetent. Shortly afterwards he tried to cheat us financially, so we added ‘treacherous’ to the list. He had a habit of turning up for meetings with us accompanied by a different young waiter each time, who would sit patiently some distance away while we discussed the film. We shuddered to think for what purpose he was waiting. Money, we assumed. The one thing I’m grateful for is that Sherrin was still alive and kicking when Charlie won his Oscar nomination for Best Director for Wanda. (Incidentally last week Graham conveyed, by Ouija board, his endorsement of this particular paragraph.)
Perhaps this is the moment to admit that although Gra and I had two films being shot and a third confirmed, and that although it’s pretty rare for young screenwriters to have three out of three scripts actually made, the reality was that we didn’t have much idea what we were doing. We could write good jokes and funny scenes, but we didn’t know how to structure a full-length film. It’s not that hard to get the hang of writing sketches, and by now Gra and I were capable of writing a very decent TV half-hour. (In fact during this whole period the best script we did was a pilot for Humphrey Barclay based on Richard Gordon’s Doctor in the House; with Gra’s medical-student background it proved surprisingly easy to create a funny and believable programme, and it gave rise to a long-running series.) But a feature of a hundred minutes is a different kettle of fish, a bird of another feather, a different ball game and a horse of a dissimilar hue. If a half-hour sitcom is, say, seven times harder to write than a sketch, then a movie is twenty times harder than a sitcom, especially if it is a comedy (if you think this is special pleading by a comic, just write down the names of fifty great dramas and then struggle to come up with fifteen great comedies).
Of course, film scripts are hard to get right in any case. My friend William Goldman, whom I regard as one of the greatest of all screenwriters (and author of the best book about Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade), once told me that he found them more difficult than novels or plays. The need to keep the plot moving all the time is a hugely demanding one – the slightest moment of stagnation and a cinema audience is immediately bored (although a lot of explosions do help to sustain their attention). Add to that the following difficulty in comedy: you cannot make an audience laugh continuously for a hundred minutes – human psychology and physiology will not allow it – so you have to plan a sequence of alternating peaks and troughs in the laughter, while ensuring that you engage the audience’s attention fully during the passages that are not trying to be funny. In Fawlty Towers Connie and I were able to build the tension and the laughs continuously, but if you try this for more than about thirty-five minutes some kind of ennui infects the audience. I don’t know why exactly, but it does. Sir Henry Irving was asked on his deathbed whether dying was hard. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘dying is easy. Comedy is hard.’
You will now understand why I have managed to write only one really good film script in fifty years (though I contributed to Life of Brian, too).
While Graham and I were happily writing our three films, we knew to some extent that we didn’t know what we were doing; we just didn’t fully grasp the depth of our ignorance. Fortunately the people around were generally as clueless as we were, which is why the films got financed. But they all failed, by quite a comfortable margin, Rentadick (producer Ned Sherrin) being by far the direst.
So it was probably a good thing that Gra and I at this point got involved in something we were good at. And it was all because every Thursday afternoon we’d taken to the habit of stopping work early in order to watch a children’s programme. It was called Do Not Adjust Your Set, it featured Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and, latterly, some of Terry Gilliam’s earliest animations, and it just happened to be the funniest thing on British television, morning, noon or night. After one particularly brilliant show I said to Graham, ‘Why don’t I give them a call and see if they want to do a show with us?’ Graham agreed, I rang Michael, we met a few days later and came to the conclusion that it felt like a good idea, and we then approached Barry Took, Marty Feldman’s old writing partner, whom we knew quite well from The Frost Report and who was some kind of consultant with the BBC. Barry in turn arranged for us to see Michael Mills, the head of BBC Comedy.
On the appointed day we trooped into Michael’s office. He greeted us and said he’d heard we wanted to do a comedy series, and we said, ‘That’s right’, and he said, ‘Well, tell me what you’ve got in mind’ – and, of course, we couldn’t. I know it seems incredible but we had had no proper discussion at all about what kind of show we were going to do. We just wanted to do one. Michael was obviously expecting some kind of presentation, so as the silence grew ever more embarrassing he began prompting us. ‘Will you have guest stars?’ We looked at each other. ‘Probably . . . not.’ ‘Music?’ ‘Er . . . maybe some . . . not a lot.’ ‘Film?’ ‘Yes! Definitely some film, yes!’ The six of us sat there looking clueless and unprofessional in front of the most important man in British television comedy. It was humiliating. And I was about to suggest that we should go away
and discuss what sort of show we did intend to do, and then come back in a couple of months, or years, when Michael suddenly shrugged and in a resigned tone said, ‘OK, go away and make thirteen programmes.’
He didn’t even ask for a pilot . . .
As we thanked Michael and left his office, happy and excited, we had no idea just how lucky we had been – for the world of television would soon start to change and make a decision of the kind Michael had just made inconceivable.
But being nascent Pythons, we still delayed figuring out what it was we were going to do. We were given a production schedule, and Gilliam convinced various BBC financial folk that he really could produce animation at the tiny cost he claimed was possible, but otherwise there was no progress at all, because we were all heavily involved in other projects, and even when we did manage to meet, all our efforts went into coming up with a title for the show, which the BBC was now obsessively demanding. Each time we thought we had come up with one, we would then panic the next morning and cancel it, and so we worked our way through A Horse, a Spoon and a Bucket; Owl-Stretching Time; Bunn, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot; The Toad-Elevating Moment; and You Can’t Call a Show ‘Betty’. Eventually the BBC gave up on us and started referring to it as Barry Took’s Flying Circus. We liked the Flying Circus bit and nearly attributed its ownership to Gwen Dibley (Michael Palin’s suggestion). Finally one evening somebody suggested Python (a great name for an untrustworthy impresario, I thought), someone else added Monty, which had connotations of our greatest Second World War general, there was hysteria, and history was made.
A few nights later I happened to watch a new Spike Milligan comedy show called Q5. I was dismayed: it was brilliant. I rang Terry Jones. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve just seen it, too.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘I thought that’s what we were going to do.’ ‘So did I,’ he replied.
Still, we now had to create Python, and we debated for some time what kind of style the show should adopt. Michael and Terry Jones, inspired by Terry Gilliam’s animation, suggested a stream-of-consciousness approach. For our part Graham and I felt we needed to get rid of a lot of the conventions of TV comedy (without being absolutely sure of what they all were). When we actually met to plan the first programme, though, we floundered around, playing with a few ideas that nobody was excited by. Then we realised that nothing was going to happen until we all went home and started to write . . .
So the next morning Chapman and I sat down and stared into the distance for a bit, before, as usual, I picked up Roget’s Thesaurus and started reading words out at random.
‘Buttercup. Filter. Catastrophe. Glee. Plummet.’
‘Ah,’ said Gra. ‘I like plummet.’
A couple of minutes passed.
‘A sheep would plummet, wouldn’t it?’ one of us said.
‘If it tried to fly, you mean?’ said the other.
(I should explain that when you’ve written a piece with someone you can never remember afterwards who exactly contributed what.)
‘But why would it want to fly?’
‘To escape?’
A couple of months later the ‘Flying Sheep’ became the first Monty Python skit to be recorded. I still vividly recall the moment, about two minutes before taping started, when I stood in the wings with Michael Palin, watching as the moment approached for Terry Jones to walk up to Graham to begin the dialogue. ‘Michael,’ I said, ‘do you realise, we could be the first people in history to record a comedy show to complete silence?’ There was a pause, and then Michael responded, ‘I was having the same thought.’
We had no idea at all whether people would think Python was funny. It really felt that risky.
But the sketch started . . . Michael and I strained our ears . . . a giggle . . . a small laugh . . . another giggle . . . a big laugh!
And we looked at each other and I thought, ‘Maybe it’s going to be all right.’
Chapter 16
WHEN I COMPLETED the last line of the previous chapter, I thought to myself, ‘What a neat way to end this book.’
But as you will have realised by now, dear reader, it was not to be, because since I wrote that artful cliff-hanger, unforeseen Pythonic activity has taken place: namely the reunion show at London’s O2 arena. To ignore that might be perceived as skimping. So . . .
What a huge success it was – although I say so, who shouldn’t. I refuse to be modest. Ten audiences of 16,000 loved it and gave us ten great warm, happy standing ovations, and I’ve only heard three snotty comments altogether (apart from the Daily Mail, who panned the show, claiming we had ‘mixed reviews’ – they were about as mixed as Hitler’s reviews at Nuremberg, a reference which the Mail, as a formerly pro-Nazi paper, should easily get).
The funny thing about it all was . . . it happened by accident. Back in November 2013 the five surviving Pythons had had to convene a meeting to discuss a disastrous law case: one of the producers of our 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail had claimed a share of some of the profits of Spamalot equal to that which each of the Pythons was getting, and we’d ended up with legal costs in the area of £800,000. Our meeting, then, was not for the happiest of reasons, but despite this we all felt it was great to be back together: enjoying each other’s company, laughing a lot, and horsing around like sixty-year-olds. And then someone said, ‘Let’s do a show to pay our costs!’ Within five minutes it was a done deal.
My original assumption was that we’d have sufficient die-hard fans to justify staging two or three shows, but we were all staggered when tickets for the first show were sold out in forty-four seconds, and a further four shows within a few hours. We were literally world news after our first press conference. Our breaths were taken away and not handed back for some time (the show’s producer, Phil McIntyre, told us, ‘You’ve unleashed a monster’). Naturally, we were tickled pink: Python had been ‘old news’ for thirty-five years and the media had certainly treated me as ‘passé’ for decades, so it was so lovely suddenly to discover that there was this reservoir of affection and appreciation still out there. However, we soon realised we had no idea how the actual show might be received. There was much nervousness and uncertainty and, indeed, foreboding among the more gutless of the Pythons.
Months later, though, I was able to stand on the O2 stage and feel how satisfactory everything had been. And then it struck me that Graham should have been there to enjoy it with us.
He died of cancer in 1989, at the age of only forty-eight, and although he never enjoyed a major success outside Python, within it he played an absolutely crucial part in every aspect of its creation. It goes without saying that he was a very fine performer indeed (until alcoholism shackled him), but to my mind it was as a writer that he injected his unique contribution to the show: humour of a kind none of the rest of us could have provided – the inspired, off-the-wall line (or idea) that helped lurch a sketch into new, more fertile territory. Frequently, if I was getting bogged down in too much logical and predictable stuff, he would come up with some lunatic suggestion that would liberate us. And, as I’ve said before, it helped enormously that we shared such a similar sense of humour. We may have been different in many other ways, but what he hooted at made me howl: when I split a gut, his intestines opened in the same place.
In addition, he had a priceless, quite uncanny knack of knowing what the audience was going to laugh at. I trusted his judgement of this so implicitly that I never bothered to develop an idea that he didn’t like. The other side of this was that sometimes his encouragement kept me working away at something in which I’d lost confidence. A good example from the Python era is the ‘Cheese Shop’.
The genesis of this sketch was particularly odd. A few days before we wrote it we travelled down to the south coast to shoot a Mike-and-Terry piece set on a boat. It was a stormy day, and since I have a propensity to be seasick, I was apprehensive. However, when we arrived we were assured that things would be all right, as we were going to shoot inside the harbour. I was playing the p
art of a Python Pepperpot, and all I had to do was to come up on deck and screech some inanity or other. Easy, I thought, because the whole take couldn’t last more than about six seconds. But the moment I stepped on to the boat, I knew things were not going to be ‘all right’. I was conscious of a distinct rocking motion, and as the shot was set up I began to feel worse . . . and worse. Then our director, Ian McNaughton, said, ‘Right then, let’s shoot’, and I climbed down on to the lower deck to await my cue. I stood there long enough to recall that during the Second World War some British sailors on the ships taking supplies to Murmansk had actually died of seasickness, and reflected what a happy release that must have been. Then I heard Ian shout, ‘Action’, and I clambered up on the deck, faced the camera, opened my mouth – and vomited over the camera. I’d heard of projectile vomiting before, but I’d never actually seen it, let alone done it.
‘Cut!’
Costume and make-up raced over to clean me up and reapply lipstick, while the camera crew wiped the lens and removed small pieces of carrot from the operator’s hair. The boat continued to rock. ‘Are you all right, then?’ Ian asked. ‘Yes,’ I lied, and climbed back down the steps, thinking about all those lucky sailors.
‘Action!’
I steeled myself, raced up the steps, forgot my line – and threw up again. ‘Fuck!’ shouted the operator. There was less actual sick this time, but unfortunately it was better directed, so the cleaning-up operation took longer. Eventually, though, the make-up girls were satisfied, the camera glistened, the operator had found a sou’wester, and I was invited to slink down below for a third attempt.
‘Action!’
I stumbled up the stairs and this time all went comparatively well, as I got the whole line out before the vomit.