by John Cleese
‘Print!’
Later that day, in the car that was taking us back to London, Graham noticed enough signs of life in me to advise that I should try to eat something. Was there anything I fancied? ‘I think I could manage some cheese,’ I replied. So we started looking for food shops, but couldn’t spot one. Then we passed a chemist’s. ‘There’s a chemist’s,’ Graham said. ‘I wonder if they have any cheese,’ I mused, to which Graham replied, ‘If they did it would be medicinal cheese.’ I laughed and said, ‘There’s a sketch there.’
So when we next sat down to write, we asked ourselves why anyone would go into a chemist’s to ask for cheese. Obviously, because they’d been to a cheese shop that didn’t have any. Hence the sketch. But as it consisted merely of a customer asking for a particular cheese variety, and the cheesemonger saying that he didn’t have that one for some reason or other, I kept losing confidence in it, and asking, ‘Graham, is this really funny?’ Then he’d take his pipe out and say, ‘Yes’, and we’d go on for a bit – ‘Well, stout yeoman, four ounces of Caerphilly, if you please’, ‘Ah! It’s been on order, sir, for two weeks’ – and I’d ask again, ‘Gra, are you quite sure this is funny?’ and he’d grin affirmatively. This was repeated every time I got cold feet (‘Cheddar?’, ‘Well, we don’t get much call for it round here’), which was about six more times. So if it were not for Graham, the ‘Cheese Shop’ sketch would not exist, and I would be deprived of my happiest Python memory: reading it out for the first time and seeing Michael Palin laugh so much that he actually slid off his chair on to the ground and just lay there rolling about.
Incidentally, Graham and I never got round to the medicinal cheese idea.
Now I’ve been trying throughout this book to convey to you some kind of portrait of the extraordinary being that was Dr Graham Chapman. Having just told a tale of him at his wisest, therefore, I need to say there was another side to him that I felt was unknowable, at least to me. So here’s a tale of Gra at his oddest.
During the first series, the Pythons were on the Yorkshire Moors one hot afternoon, filming a Mike-and-Terry piece about an upper-class shooting party, various of whom return home that evening with gunshot wounds. It was not an inspired piece, just a series of sight gags involving accidents, and Graham and I had managed to secure small roles, so we spent most of the time hanging around the wardrobe truck some distance from the filming. When we’d finished the crossword – it seemed to be the only vaguely constructive thing we could do while waiting to be called to perform – we tried to devise means to stop ourselves going mad with boredom, without much success. Graham decided to practise saying the name of a radio comedienne called Betty Marsden faster than anyone had ever said it before; I tried to balance an umbrella on my chin for a whole minute.
At one point I noticed that Graham had left his pipe on a chair, and I picked it up and put it in my pocket, without his noticing and without my having any clear idea how I could squeeze some entertainment from the situation. A few moments later, in mid-umbrella balance, I sensed Graham moving close behind me. And when I turned I was surprised to see how agitated he had become.
His searching was almost frenzied, and I felt a flash of alarm, mixed with puzzlement as to why the missing pipe was causing him so much distress. I felt it was time to confess. ‘I’ve got your pipe,’ I said, taking it out of my pocket and showing it to him. He glared at me for a moment, snatched it, stepped up to me as I reflexively started to apologise, and kneed me in the groin. Although he missed the testicles, he hit the pelvic bone pretty hard, but the pain was as nothing compared with the wave of utter astonishment that broke over me. I knew this man well! What on earth was this about? By now he was shouting at me. Then he strode off . . .
I realised I was slightly in shock, so I sat down slowly and carefully, but my mind was already casting around for possible explanations. Suddenly, a Freudian one became obvious. I had not taken his pipe. I had stolen his penis.
Some months later there appeared in the Daily Mirror a rather different version of the pipe incident, one which Graham had given to their reporter. As he told it, the whole thing had taken place in the studio where we recorded the Python shows. He recalled how, after he discovered I had purloined his pipe, he chased me across the studio, rugby-tackled me, repossessed the pipe, and sat on my head. I was bemused when I read – and reread – Graham’s narrative, because it was not feasible that his version and mine could be different interpretations of the same event, Rashomon-style. Even allowing for the vagaries of memory, it was clear that one of us was, let’s say, a bit hazier about the event than the other.
To sum up, Graham was kind, intellectually gifted and very talented, but some of the time he enjoyed only a tenuous relationship with reality. Fortunately, this never seemed to affect our professional relationship, nor did it have an impact on the affection I felt for him.
And so, at the very beginning of Python, when we all went off to write, it was business as usual for Gra and me: we just continued meeting and writing, usually at Basil Street. The only difference this time was that now we were writing for Python.
After a few days we phoned around and agreed to meet and to read out what we’d written . . . to try to find out what the hell we were doing. We met at Terry Jones’s house, because it was large, and because it also gave us all a chance to see South London. It was worth the trip: there was much laughter, and we parted feeling we were heading in the right comedic direction. Roughly. So we settled into a simple routine. Every six or seven working days the five of us would get together for a read-through to assess the material, and see if we could construct a whole show from it. I say ‘the five of us’ because Terry Gilliam didn’t write for these sessions: when we assembled a show we’d indicate in the script where we wanted his animation, and whether it would be a longer or shorter piece, and this would guide him when he sat down to create his little masterpieces. We never saw these until the afternoon of the day we were recording the show, so there was no chance to make suggestions, as happened with the rest of us while we rehearsed together. I think Terry preferred it that way; and in any case no other process was possible, given the time restraints we were working to. Otherwise we were very much a team, constantly exchanging suggestions and ideas and, all this time, getting to know each other better. The read-throughs were almost always enjoyable: a lot of very funny stuff was being written, much of it quite original. Sometimes, of course, the writers of a particular sketch would be disappointed if it didn’t earn many laughs, but some of it might be salvaged in ingenious ways. In general I felt that the discussions of how to improve material by cutting or rewriting were of a very high quality. As Eric once remarked, there weren’t many other places where you could get advice of this level of comic expertise.
Various Pythons. I am standing on Terry Gilliam.
If you want to understand how the Python group operated, you need to grasp one essential fact: like Graham and I, Michael and Terry, and Eric were primarily writers, not performers. So we never argued about the casting. If we had been actors at heart, we would, of course, have been fighting for the best roles. But we never did, because once we had agreed on a sketch it was always obvious to us, as writers, who should play which part to get the best out of it. In other words, who was least likely to muck it up. One result of this was that we never wrote parts which were intended to showcase our talents, as actors would have done.
But because we were writers, our passion (please excuse this word, but my publisher’s marketing department asked that I should include it at some point) was invested in our scripts, and not in our acting. And sometimes this . . . passion . . . would lead us into very silly territory. Very silly . . .
On one occasion, for example, somebody had written a sketch that was set in a rather drab, moth-eaten dormitory. Someone else suggested that this should be lit by a magnificent Louis XIV chandelier. We liked this, but another Python said, ‘No, by a dead stuffed farm animal with a light bulb in each foot
.’ We liked this even better. Then one of us observed, ‘Obviously a sheep.’ And it was at this point that the debate started.
‘What do you mean, a sheep? It’s got to be a goat.’
‘A goat?’
‘Of course! The horns make it funnier visually.’
‘But sheep are stupid, and stupid is funny.’
‘Look, sheep are more rounded. Goats are angular.’
‘So?’
‘Well, the angularity will look more incongruous.’
‘A farm animal hanging from the bloody ceiling looks incongruous enough already, without anybody bothering about how angular it is.’
‘It’s funnier with wool, though.’
‘What’s funny about wool?’
‘Well, it’s soft and shapeless.’
‘Yes, but goats look more ridiculous, with those Marty Feldman eyes and tufts of hair sticking out all over them.’
‘But people don’t think of them as dim.’
And so on, and so on, three pro-goat and two pro-sheep, with the argument getting more heated, and also nastier, with ad hominem comments about each other’s parentage, and bizarre sexual practices, until after about twenty minutes, I managed to detach myself from the fray, regain my composure, consult a higher power, and ponder philosophically on the absurdity of it all, the utter ridiculousness of five Oxbridge graduates fighting ferociously over a simple choice between a sheep chandelier and a goat chandelier, when it was obvious to the meanest intellect that it was funnier when it was a fucking goat.
I think we cared too much about the scripts really and that’s why the arguments got so heated. Sorry! Got so passionate. When this happened the dynamic of the group became very predictable. Michael, who hated confrontation, would retire to a safe distance; Graham would say even less than usual; Eric would try to be reasonable and constructive; Terry Gilliam would side with anyone else called Terry; and Terry Jones and I would lock horns and . . . not behave well. I would become very precise and cold and tight-lipped, with suppressed impatience and irritation seeping out of my ears. Jonesy’s voice would get higher and higher and more and more insistent, and he would never, never shut up, or concede a point, or admit to a scintilla of doubt. I felt strongly about some points, and would fight for them, but Jonesy felt strongly about everything, and would go to the wire on all of them, and even if, at the end of the script meeting, the tide of opinion ran strongly against him and his opinion was overruled, the next morning, as we sat down with our coffees, he would announce, ‘You know, I was thinking this morning, and I really feel that . . .’; and we would be right back to half-past three the previous day. It seemed as though he had a fundamental belief that the merit of his argument depended on the strength of his feelings about the matter, and since he always felt uncontrollably passionate about everything, then clearly he was always right. This irrational claptrap, coming as it did from a swarthy, excitable, plump Celtic demi-dwarf, struck me not just as thoroughly impertinent but also as a noisy and ignorant attempt to undermine the most basic principles of the Enlightenment. What is more . . .
I’m sorry. I got a little carried away there . . .
Yes, Terry and I did argue regularly. But the dominant emotion was exasperation rather than anger, and I think we acted as useful counterweights to each other, enabling the group to make good comedic decisions. It was interesting in this regard that when the group was split over the merits or demerits of a particular script, the Cambridge trio often voted together, not for reasons of tribal loyalty, but because we were coincidentally more concerned with structure and logic, while the two Terrys and Michael were more interested in mood and in visual presentation. Thus they often felt constricted by our preoccupation with left-brain issues, while we were genuinely puzzled by what seemed to us an almost careless, and certainly cavalier, attitude to logical connections and clarity. The Cambridge trio, I think, believed these two qualities were essential, because no matter how wacky the premise of a sketch was, once it had been established, its rules had to be followed, or else the sketch would lose coherence and, thus, ‘believability’. It may seem bizarre to use the word ‘believability’ about a Python sketch, but in some mysterious way the audience will accept any premise, no matter how weird, and then allow it to set the rules for what is, and what is not, believable in that piece.
Take, for example, the ‘Buying a Bed’ sketch, in which an ardent and newly married young couple dash into a department store to buy a double bed. Once we know that the salesman Mr Lambert always puts a large paper bag over his head every time someone mentions the word ‘mattress’, and that he will only take it off when everyone sings a verse of ‘Jerusalem’, it’s essential that those rules are followed. If one of the characters were to say ‘mattress’ and Mr Lambert did not don the bag, then the audience would immediately become puzzled by the inconsistency, and a puzzled audience will not laugh. This happens for two reasons: firstly, because at a rational level, they suddenly do not understand this arbitrary change in the rules, and instead of laughing are thinking, ‘OK, but what are the rules now?’; and secondly, because this slight puzzlement always causes a disconnect in their emotional involvement in the sketch, which diminishes laughter just as effectively.
But if Michael and Terry sometimes certainly felt that Graham and I adhered too strongly to our demand that every sketch should have a tight internal logic, that didn’t matter, because disagreement within a team, and the expression of diverse opinions, is creatively invaluable. All the research shows that teams whose members share the same attitudes will enjoy the experience of working together, will have good opinions of the others in the team, and be keen to repeat the experience; but creatively they will produce bugger-all. By contrast, teams whose members view things differently from one another will argue, but this creative conflict produces innovation. You want creative conflict: what you don’t want is personal conflict, because that will complicate proceedings and can result all too often in deadlock. The Python team was very diverse – just look at the entirely separate directions our careers went in after our time together – but despite our disagreements, creatively we worked very well together. We all had shortcomings, but these were balanced by the others’ different strengths.
Oddly enough, despite our sometimes heated disputes in the script meetings, there was extraordinarily little friction when we actually came to rehearse. Once a script was accepted, acting it out was a very straightforward process; and since any lurking weaknesses become obvious after a few run-throughs, brainstorming to find improvements in either text or performance was a relaxed and enjoyable experience. Over the years I had come to the conclusion that every single time I rehearsed something, it got better, and I always felt that when I worked on Python. The others didn’t always feel the same way and rarely wanted to practise sketches as much as I did, but they usually indulged me.
I was always surprised when fans asked whether we ad-libbed because, as writers, we weren’t interested in improvisation, which is, after all, much more a performance activity. But I suppose that technically what Gra and I were doing while writing was improvising different lines (until we found a combination that worked); and, obviously, if we thought of a new line during rehearsal, we’d try it. However, there was another reason we never ad-libbed during the actual recording of the shows. There simply wasn’t enough time. We taped the show in front of an audience of roughly 300 – there was our unwritten rule that an audience of fewer than 200 wouldn’t laugh properly – and they would be let into the studio at 7.30 p.m. Once they were in their seats, there was a warm-up, the cast were introduced, we began recording at 8, and we finished at 10 on the dot. We were never allowed to go past 10 p.m. – for reasons I never understood – so we had exactly two hours to get everything done and that meant that, what with all the changes of sets and costumes and the retakes when we or the technical crew made mistakes, we were constantly under time pressure. If the performance of a sketch was adequate but not excellent, we would
proceed with the next sketch, hoping that there would be enough time at the end to go back and do it again. So every moment was valuable and we could never afford to take the risk of trying something that had not been tested in rehearsal.
As I sit here, trying to convey to you how the Flying Circus shows were put together, a wonderful irony strikes me. Everything I am writing about the TV series is the polar opposite of our experience at the O2.
To start with the obvious, there we all were in the studio, in 1969, wondering how this new kind of humour would go down with an audience of 300, all of whom, as the Aussies say, didn’t know us from a bar of soap. In 2014 we were performing live, in a huge arena seating 16,000 people, the vast majority of whom were dedicated fans. No one at the O2 had bought tickets because they couldn’t stand Python.
Next, I’ve emphasised the teamwork of the TV series. Well, nothing like that happened at the O2. The day after we decided to do the show, we realised that four of us had absurdly busy schedules. Eric was the only one with any time on his hands. So he volunteered to come up with a running order, based on the sketches that had worked for us when we’d done the stage shows between 1973 and 1980.
When we had a read-through a couple of days later, there was an encouraging development: we all liked the running order Eric had come up with, and after we’d agreed some changes to the beginning of the second half, we asked him if he would take on the production of the whole show. Thank God he agreed, because the rest of us were about to depart in different directions: Michael was off on his travels, recording every moment of his exciting existence in exquisite detail, either on film or in his diary, or – usually – both; Jonesy was about to go into pre-production of his aliens movie (the one incorrectly described as ‘a Python reunion’ by the British press for the past four years); Terry G had found a film to direct in Bucharest and was eagerly anticipating spending the arctic depths of the middle European winter there; and I was flying to sunny Sydney, where I was to spend four months at the splendid Four Seasons hotel, writing 45,000 or so words of this book.