7
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING SLIGHTLY COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
So much has been written about Monty Python. There have been memoirs, diaries, books about the Pythons, books by the Pythons about the other Pythons, articles about the books about the Pythons, countless interviews, autobiographies, documentaries…so many documentaries. I honestly think there are more hours of documentary about Python than there are hours of Python. So, to the mass of mangled memories do I now add my own muddled, prejudiced, and deeply cynical account of what I think might have happened? Of course. But you, dear reader, who have already parted with far too much money on this book, can feel free to skip ahead to the dirty bits.*
George Harrison once said to me, “If we’d known we were going to be the Beatles we would have tried harder.” I think the same could be said of Monty Python. How on earth could we possibly know we would become them? At the time, we were only doing another show, and a fill-in show at that, while we waited for our big break on ITV. Who decides these things? The gods of television, or a little old lady in a cottage near Luton? Well, obviously the latter, but she’s very hard to find.
Why was Monty Python so successful? Was it really so very different? Of course it wasn’t. People seem to think that it somehow sprang full-blown from the head of some mad media Medusa, but that’s not true at all. In the mid-Sixties, there were a host of similar shows all evolving, banging into each other and disintegrating: The Frost Report; I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again; Twice a Fortnight; Broaden Your Mind; How to Irritate People; The Complete and Utter History of Britain… All of the eventual Pythons were involved with all of the eventual Goodies in one show or another. Monty Python itself was the result of a collision between Do Not Adjust Your Set and At Last the 1948 Show, when the creators of the former (me, Mike Palin, Terry Jones, and Terry Gilliam) rammed into the remnants of the latter (John Cleese and Graham Chapman).
So, of all the TV shows on air at the end of the Sixties, what made Python so successful? Well, we were young. We were ready. We had done Malcolm Gladwell’s recommended ten thousand hours of preparation. (See Outliers.) We were digital, and we were in color—only by a few months, but that was vitally important. Python began right at the start of the digital era, which meant that fifty years later the show physically still doesn’t look as dated as it would had it been shot in black and white and on film. Thanks to new technology we can polish the dots, so that visually the show looks even fresher today than it did when it was first transmitted back in the Stoned Age. Additionally, we were both the writers and the performers, though the writers were definitely in charge. Importantly, the show is encyclopedic. Python isn’t just one type of humor, it is a compendium of styles. While the cast remains the same, the writers are constantly changing, though you never notice which hand is on the tiller. So there is visual humor, verbal humor, clever humor, silliness, rudeness, sophistication, and brazen naughtiness, constantly alternating, which means there is something for everyone. I found that while people said they liked it, not everyone could agree on which particular bits they liked. Also, we were at the BBC, who opened up a new time slot for us late on Sunday nights, when the Queen normally came on-screen sitting on a horse and television closed down. They didn’t know it, but there were a whole lot of people who liked to stay up after the pubs closed. I often joke about “executive-free comedy,” but the BBC really did leave us alone, especially at the beginning, and by the time they wanted to intrude it was too late. Plus, we could be physically daunting. Six large men, three over six foot, occupying a BBC office were enough to intimidate the bravest program planner, even if we hadn’t already established on our show that we considered them foolish, ignorant, hopeless idiots, without degrees…The fact is, we scared them. We didn’t know what we were doing, and insisted on doing it.
The legendary chaotic Python first meeting with Michael Mills, the head of Light Entertainment, did take place at the BBC on May 23, 1969. We had met previously at John’s apartment in Basil Street, so we were not entirely unprepared, but we had reached no agreement on anything. That state would persist till the end. We couldn’t agree on the title of the show. We didn’t know whether there would be music (er, perhaps) or guests (er, maybe) or film (oh yes film, good idea). In the end, faced with our confident uncertainty about what might be in our show, Michael Mills finally said, “Oh just go away and make thirteen.” We could do what we liked, but what would it be? Even we had no idea.
On Do Not Adjust Your Set, Terry Gilliam had created highly surreal animations in a free-flowing style that inspired Terry Jones to proclaim that this was how our new BBC show should be. These arresting animations bookmarked the Python show, and added a stylish Victorian framework that provided apparent connections between completely disparate sketch material. No punch lines, everything would just flow. This, and our attempts to link skits by ideas, theme, and content, made Monty Python something slightly completely different from the start. Even though we didn’t know what we wanted, we knew absolutely what we didn’t want. We were determined not to make the usual kind of BBC light entertainment show where someone said, “And now for something completely different” and some prick sang. In fact, so determined were we not to do that, we co-opted their very slogan and used it as a catchphrase. We were the antithesis of the satire boom of the previous generation. Nothing was topical (so it could last) and the comedy was generic: types not individuals. But it was our attitude that came across. Python was in your face, challenging, and very silly. It was not immediately popular, there were complaints, the executives hated it, but it filled a hole in their schedule and the BBC wisely ignored the disapproval. So, Owl Stretching Time began. So, A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin started. So, Whither Canada? commenced. So, The Toad Elevating Moment came into being. So, You Can’t Call a Show Cornflakes appeared. We still had no title for the show. The BBC were going nuts. In their contracts, they called it Barry Took’s Flying Circus, because he had set up the fatal meeting. But each of our scripts that came in had a different, and to their minds worse, title. Finally, in late July, with the series already filming, they presented us with an ultimatum. They had to print tickets for the audience. They must have a title.
We all liked Flying Circus, but we couldn’t agree on whose Circus it should be. Michael wanted to surprise a little old lady in Suffolk called Gwen Dibley by naming the show after her, but while that was funny, there were legal issues. In the end John suggested Python, and I suggested Monty after a chap with a mustache and bow tie in my local pub, the Dog Inn, Mappleborough Green. Monty had echoes of the great British general Montgomery, who, at El Alamein, was the first to defeat the Nazis; as well as sounding like a sleazy Soho theatrical agent. So, Monty Python it was. But what was the show to be? We still hadn’t a clue.
We tried discussing what it should be about, but failed hopelessly. So we just went ahead and wrote what we felt like and then came together at Jonesy’s house in Camberwell and read out our sketches. If we laughed it was in, and if we didn’t we sold it to The Two Ronnies. Fortunately, I had written one sketch for Ronnie Barker that had been turned down. If you read it silently it obviously has no jokes. “Is your wife a goer, know what I mean, nudge nudge, say no more, say no more, say no more, know what I mean, nudge nudge.” Where’s the comedy in that? But when I read it aloud in character they all hooted, and it was almost the first thing accepted by us.
We became fairly good at editing our material. “That sketch was really funny until page three and then it just went on and on.” Honesty from people you trust is very useful, and often we would swap sketches around and let someone else have a go at finishing a piece. When it came to voting, I was always outnumbered. Mike and Terry were a team and John and Graham another, and when they read out their sketches they always had a partner to smile and laugh along. I faced five people. But then on the other hand I’m still with me. Terry Gilliam came in and out of the writing sessions and was a very useful free-floating radical. Early on we stopped him reading out his cartoon ideas, which consisted of a lot of bangs, and booms, and biffs, and told him to just go away and make them.
We never cast the shows until we had finished the writing, so we could not be influenced by any acting preferences. It was usually obvious who would play what, and the authors of the piece would get first dibs. John and Graham had settled into a kind of classic sketch form begun in The Frost Report, where John would be the aggressive protagonist responding to interruptions from a very silly man. (Marty played these roles in the ’48 Show, but in Python Michael made a superb foil for him.) Graham played authoritarian but hopelessly weak figures responding helplessly to exterior chaotic forces (colonels, King Arthur, Brian, etc.). Terry Jones specialized in aggressively noisy, frumpy women, and Terry Gilliam was given anything that involved long and heavy makeup, so it was no surprise when he married Maggie Weston, our makeup lady. The rest of the characters, often a whole raft of them, were designated Mike or Eric, and then the authorship would decide who played what: Nudge for Eric, Ken Shabby for Mike.
Significantly, Monty Python was not released in America until 1974, after we had finished on U.K. TV, so we were not seduced by personal fame. We didn’t have to cope with the hot blast of instant celebrity that the Saturday Night Live cast faced. With the exception of John Cleese, who was famous from The Frost Report, no one had a clue who was who. Looking back, it is amazing that John even wanted to be in another gang show, his fourth since leaving Cambridge—I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again; The Frost Report; the ’48 Show; and now Monty Python. In fact, he soon tired of Python, and no wonder: he had been writing and performing sketches on TV and radio since 1965.
In the meantime, I got married. I had fallen in love with a beautiful Australian actress called Lyn Ashley, whose painted breasts I first saw on a poster outside my local cinema advertising the Michael Winner film I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname, in which she starred with Oliver Reed. Some friends had set us up on a blind date for a weekend, in a wincingly cold Elizabethan mansion in Suffolk. The wind howled through it. The kitchen with its Aga stove seemed to be the only warm spot, and the house was infested by kids. We found the hostess was fighting with her husband, had taken to her bed, and refused to emerge from her bedroom. I enticed her out with a bottle of champagne. Some kind of order was restored. Lyn and I found a warm spot in the guest wing and became acquainted, while I fought off the blocking moves of her mother’s poodle. We soon moved into my apartment in Redcliffe Square, flew off to Mihas in Spain, where I bought a ring, and one year later, in July 1969, when Monty Python commenced filming, I managed to wangle the first week off to get married. We were married in the Kensington and Chelsea Registry Office and my new mother-in-law, Madge Ryan, threw a huge party at Adrienne Corri’s house in St. John’s Wood. (Both actresses had appeared together in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.) Then off we all went to the seaside. The Pythons to Devon, me to Nice. While the others took the bus to Torquay, I flew with my new bride to Cap d’Antibes, where Lauretta and Marty Feldman had invited us to join them.
Sixties Wedding Day, July 7, 1969. Matching Ossie Clark outfits.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus began broadcasting on BBC1 at 10:55 p.m. on Sunday, October 5, 1969, with the second show we had recorded, subtitled Whither Canada? The original audience consisted largely of little old ladies who had been bused in to the BBC Television Centre thinking they were going to see some kind of a circus. Neither they nor we had a clue what they were in for. While there were some very funny sketches, there were also some very odd moments, like Terry Gilliam popping up in the middle of a sketch dressed as a Viking with a ferret through his head, saying “However.” I think these were attempts by us to flex our muscles and experience the joys of this newfound freedom. We did them because we could. As if to keep us in our place, the BBC would unexpectedly take our show off the air from time to time and replace it with an episode of The Horse of the Year Show. Occasionally, different BBC regions put out their own local show instead. This led to some confusion amongst our audience, a confusion we were keen to exploit. We began to shoot false openings, in one case ten minutes of a totally fictitious pirate film before the buccaneers passed John Cleese at a table, who announced blandly, “And now for something completely different.” It didn’t matter. No one was watching. We could do it to make ourselves happy.
This sense of being apart, in a different TV world from the comforting domain of light entertainment, was very liberating, and oddly we began to attract a following. After the first season the BBC made us do a record, which was a disaster since they recorded it in front of a dead audience live on a Sunday morning in Camden Town Hall. None of us liked it, after which we simply made our own albums. The finest example of this was a three-sided record, The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief, where we ingeniously cut double grooves on Side Two, to create two shorter, parallel sides. Which track played depended on where the needle dropped. There was no announcement or warning. To further puzzle listeners, we started both of these mini sides with the same bad gag—“And now a massage from the Swedish Prime Minister”—so they couldn’t even try to find the side they wanted. Confusion was good.
We were still “outsiders” and rebellious. We took exception to BBC Light Entertainment inviting us to their Christmas party because the invitation said Black Tie. The first year we simply didn’t attend, but the second year John Cleese and I determined to make a protest. We decided to go overdressed. We turned up at the BBC in top hats, white tie, and tails, complete with gloves and canes. Our arrival at the party caused quite a stir. Eric Morecambe came over to me and said, “John Cleese just bit me on the neck and flew out the window.”
We all agreed that our show would never play in America. They just wouldn’t understand it. And besides, with its nudity and its naughtiness it would never be allowed on TV there. So when some serious American TV producers approached us, we laughed. It appeared they wanted us to make our show for America. We laughed more. Alright then, could they buy our format? Now we really laughed.
“We don’t have a format.”
“Then let’s not sell it to them.”
We laughed even harder.
John’s friend Victor Lownes, who ran the London Playboy Club, commissioned a movie from us of highlights from the first two seasons, because he felt there was an audience for Python in colleges and it should be a film. We shot And Now for Something Completely Different in an old dairy in Hendon for eighty thousand pounds. Our TV director, the wild Scotsman Ian MacNaughton, was appointed director. Ian had begun as an actor but had joined the BBC, where he became involved directing shows with Spike Milligan. This is what attracted him to us. He wasn’t available for our first four TV recordings, and John Howard Davies had stepped in. As a young boy, Davies had played Oliver in David Lean’s classic movie Oliver Twist.
“Please, sir, can I have some more?”
He would go on to direct Fawlty Towers for John Cleese, and Ian directed all our subsequent Python shows. It was Davies who brought Carol Cleveland into our show, when we needed a real woman to play the sex scene in my “Marriage Guidance Counselor” sketch. The gag just didn’t work with a guy in drag, and Carol would remain a fixture whenever we wanted a real female. She was a jolly good sport and came on the road with us on our tours. And Now for Something Completely Different was the first of the movies she did for us.
MacNaughty, as we called him, was definitely “a Scottish loony” with a penchant for whiskey. John pilloried him mercilessly as a drunken director in “Scott of the Sahara,” and then claimed it wasn’t him at all but Joseph McGrath, another hard-drinking Scots director. Ian would be fine until lunchtime, when he could never resist going into the pub and then would have to go and lie down afterwards, so usually one of the Terrys took over. We weren’t in charge of the final cut, none of us liked it, and it was memorable only for a controversy about a fart, when the American producer said:
“Keep the fart, you’ll lose Disneyland.”
We kept the fart.
Columbia ended up releasing the movie, and eventually Victor Lownes’s boss Hugh Hefner bought it, so it had its uses getting us into the Playboy Mansion in the Eighties, when that seemed like a good idea.
In 1971, we tackled the publishing world when I took on the editing of Monty Python’s Big Red Book, which naturally was blue, and then The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok (1973), whose cover deliberately contained grubby finger marks, so that people kept returning them to the booksellers. Terry Gilliam refused to have anything to do with the first book, snorting disdainfully, “Comic books don’t sell.” I suppose his experiences with Harvey Kurtzman’s Help magazine in New York, where he drew cartoons and shot fumetti, had clouded his judgment. His assistant Katy Hepburn was helping me design the book and I had to get her to break into his studio and steal bits of his artwork. Fortunately, Terry was wrong, as that first Python book flew off the shelves, into massive reprints, inventing the Christmas comedy book market.
Books, records, films, TV shows, slowly the Python tentacles wound around the neck of an unsuspecting public. I persuaded the Pythons to do a live stage show for three nights at midnight at the Lanchester Arts Festival in Coventry, selecting the sketches and putting together a show that we briefly rehearsed. The audiences went nuts. I think it was the first time they found that other people liked our show too. The BBC didn’t pay us much, but after Coventry, Tony Smith and Harvey Goldsmith offered us a ton of money to tour the U.K., so we set off on the road. It was a fairly disastrous start, thanks to a stoner sound engineer who was in charge of our radio mikes. He hadn’t a clue which of us was which, so you could clearly hear Graham in his dressing room but nobody onstage at all. We finally persuaded the management to dispose of him before we were forced to kill him, and the show soon got into a groove.
Graham’s drinking, at first a secret, now came to the fore. Often he would be late onstage for his sketches, particularly with poor Mike waiting around to start Ken Shabby. Once, John and I heard the ominous silence from the audience and both leapt onstage at the same time from opposite sides. Then, as if we had rehearsed it, we fell in behind each other and played Graham’s part in tandem, to the hilarity of Mike, who giggled helplessly. Finally, Graham came lurching on as the Colonel, seemed not to notice, and launched into the beginning of the sketch again. After the show, he was furious and accused me of upstaging him.
“But Graham,” I said, “you weren’t on stage.”
He never said a word of complaint to John. The only time I ever saw him lose it was when John hid his pipe as a prank and Graham went totally berserk. (Yes, we know, Dr. Freud.) He was a very mild and patient man but the alcohol turned him into a beast. He would go crawling round the floor at parties, putting his hands up ladies’ skirts and barking like a dog. It was great when he finally managed to conquer his alcoholism. John would occasionally bait Jonesy until he exploded in a fit of temper, but on the whole we got on very well for a group of six outsiders. Just look at the work we managed to achieve in the fourteen years between 1969 and 1983. Five movies, forty-five TV shows, five stage shows, five books, and countless records, including a hit single. So yes, we did okay, but fame still beckoned.
* Fat chance. There aren’t any.