6

THE ARTFUL NUDGER

David Frost had plucked John Cleese from the shipwreck of the extremely funny Cambridge Circus revue, which had foundered on Broadway thanks to a panning in The New York Times. David, although a poor performer himself, was always at pains to surround himself with funny men, and he knew the value of having good material. His unexpected call to John Cleese in New York asking him to be on The Frost Report secured John’s future in television, away from his mother’s ambitions to make him manager of a Weston-super-Mare Marks & Spencer. Grocery’s loss was comedy’s gain.

Frostie gave all of us great jobs as writers on his new BBC TV show, for which we remained highly ungrateful. Suddenly, almost straight out of college, we were all part of a big hit. The Frost Report broadcast live once a week from the BBC Television Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush. Its hilarious cast of Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Sheila Steafel, and John Cleese performed sketches on a weekly theme (education, politics, art) linked by what David rather pretentiously called CDM (Continually Developing Monologue) and which John and Graham contemptuously called OJARIL (Old Jokes And Ridiculously Irrelevant Links). Amazingly, at twenty-three I was a writer on this very funny show. Where I had been paid three guineas a minute to write for BBC Radio, now I wrote gags and sketches for BBC TV at ten guineas a minute. I had money in my pocket, a car, girls, and an agent: Roger Hancock, brother of the legendary British comedian Tony Hancock, who gave me this invaluable advice: Be available. And so, I was: for money, sex, and showbiz. I lived in a top-floor flat in Notting Hill Gate and lunched at the Sun in Splendour in the Portobello Road, listening to customers at the bar quoting my jokes from last night’s TV. I soon learned the comparative value of writing and writers. On the day of the show a taxi came for my gags; I had to go by Tube.

When The Frost Report won the Golden Rose of Montreux, it was my karate joke they showed on BBC TV News. My cup ranneth over.

David Frost now asked me, Graham Chapman, and Barry Cryer to create a TV sitcom for Ronnie Corbett called No—That’s Me Over Here! Graham had graduated from St. Barts Hospital and he now wrote professionally with John. They had recombined with Tim Brooke-Taylor in an extremely funny late-night comedy show produced by David, called At Last the 1948 Show, in which I would play small parts each week. John had asked for Marty Feldman to be in it, but David had balked about casting Marty. “What about his looks?” he asked, but John’s will prevailed. And he was right: Marty was an instant star. After two short seasons of this brilliantly funny comedy, Marty went off to the BBC to do his own series. I loved Marty. He and his wife, Lauretta, took me under their wings and, on Sundays, to live recordings of Round the Horne, England’s most popular radio series, which Marty wrote with Barry Took. I once found him and John Cleese in a street laughing their heads off. They had just come across two very attractive young ladies bent over, searching the pavement.

“What are you doing?” they asked.

“We’re looking for a screw,” said one of the ladies.

Collapse of hysterical comedians.

Legendary television scriptwriter Barry Cryer had mentored me as a young writer, along with Dick Vosburgh, on The Frost Report. He seemed to have an endless supply of gag books. Often, while Barry and I wrote for Ronnie Corbett, Graham would be absent writing the ’48 Show. One day we called and asked to speak to him because we had a plot problem we needed his thoughts on.

“But he’s with you,” said a puzzled Tim Brooke-Taylor.

“Er, no, he’s with you…”

But of course he was with neither, having sneaked off to Hampstead, where he had a boyfriend hidden. He had met David Sherlock in Ibiza, where he and John were writing a movie, and had fallen in love, secretly moved into an apartment with him in Hampstead, and concealed all this for a year. Finally, all was revealed at a coming-out party where the first person I saw was Graham’s female “fiancée” in tears.

“This is the man I’m in love with,” said Graham, introducing David to me.

Of course. Now it all made sense. That’s where he was! Unfortunately, Graham misread my thoughts for disapproval and wrote later that I seemed not to know what a homosexual was; hardly likely after twelve years of boarding school, three years of Cambridge, six months in rep, two years at the BBC, and currently living upstairs from Gay News in Redcliffe Square. I clearly remember my thoughts at the party. You bastard! You were up in Hampstead knobbing when you were supposed to be writing with us. Anyway, David Sherlock is a very nice man and Graham lived happily with him for the rest of his life. Marty called us all next day and said, “Don’t stop making the gay jokes.”

A few years later I got this letter about Graham:

Liverpool

Merseyside

25/10/74

To Mr. E. Idle

Dear Sir,

On the 18th July 1960, I was in St. Elizabeth’s Church, when Our Lord Jesus Christ, appeared to me. He showed me how He created us, with the middle finger of His left hand. He pointed to a white cloud of dust!

There was a man, he wouldn’t give his name but he said he was out of Monty Pythons Flying Circus, he was being interviewed on the television, and said he was a homosexual. In the Holy Bible Leviticus page 102 Paragraph 20 verse 13, God says “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.”

“Praise be to thee O Lord”

God bless you.

Mrs. B. Campbell

I wrote back.

To Mrs. B. Campbell

BBC TV Centre

Shepherds Bush

London

24/11/1974

Dear Mrs. Campbell,

Thank you very much for your letter.

We have found out who it was, and have put him to death.

Yours sincerely,

Eric Idle

Another momentous phone call from Humphrey Barclay once again changed my life. Would I like to write and perform in a kids’ sketch show on ITV? Hell, yeah. I sensibly asked if I could have Michael Palin and Terry Jones. He agreed, they agreed, and suddenly we were starring in our own TV series, with David Jason and Denise Coffey. Sure, it was only for kids, but we decided that we would not talk down to them. We would just do what we found funny. Humph brought in the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, an eccentric group of ex–art school students who performed downright weird songs with Vivian Stanshall as lead singer and Neil Innes on piano. I’m sure Python gained a surreal boost from this encounter with the Bonzos, a bizarre Dadaist orchestra. For two whole seasons, we Oxbridge boys collided with the best of British art schools, as they came in weekly from the rigors of the road to commandeer the hair dryers in the makeup room. Their mad, whimsical, wonderful music meshed perfectly with our straight-faced determination not to talk down to our kids’ audience.

Terry Jones, Denise Coffey, Michael Palin, David Jason, and me in Do Not Adjust Your Set.

One day a strange-looking American with long hair, who looked a bit like singer-songwriter John Denver, wearing a yak-skin Afghan coat, came back after a show to meet us. It was love at first sight. I loved that coat. He brought an exotic girlfriend and some sketches, both written and drawn. He had been sent to Humphrey Barclay by John Cleese, whom he’d met in New York, and he wanted to work on our show. Mike and Terry disliked him at once. What on earth did we need another writer for, and an American? Was I nuts? I don’t know why, but I was convinced he had something, and it wasn’t just his exotic coat. Luckily they listened to me, and Terry Gilliam entered our lives, soon finding his métier making short animations, including the magnificent “Christmas Cards” and a weirder one called “Elephants,” whose stream-of-consciousness flow would eventually form the basis for Monty Python.

Do Not Adjust Your Set was a big hit from the start. We began on the Rediffusion channel in black and white, winning the Prix Jeunesse in Munich, and when that company lost its license we were picked up by its successor, Thames Television, for a second series, this time in color. Our time slot of 5:25 p.m. meant that not only did we get kids, we got all the waiters in London, and a decent proportion of adults coming home from work early. Two of those who always stopped work to watch were John Cleese and Graham Chapman. They thought it was the funniest thing on television. One day in 1969 they called and asked if we’d like to join them in a show for the BBC to provide quirky alternative viewing for late-night Sunday audiences after the pubs closed. By then we had a serious offer for our own ninety-minute grown-up prime-time show on ITV, but unfortunately we had to wait eighteen months for a studio, so we decided we might as well fit in the BBC thing with John and Graham while we were waiting for our big break…

So began Monty Python.

As you see, when I started Monty Python I had a very small head.