Monty Python Speaks Read online

  MONTY PYTHON SPEAKS!

  The Complete Oral History of Monty Python, as Told by the Founding Members and a Few of Their Many Friends and Collaborators

  David Morgan

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Having covered the work of one Python or another over the years, it was a pleasure to finally have the opportunity to write on their work as a team. For that I wish to thank Tom Dupree of Avon Books, who believed in the value of taking a (somewhat) serious approach to examining a (somewhat) silly group.

  My heartfelt thanks for the generosity of the Pythons: To John Cleese for his thoughtfulness; Terry Gilliam for his enthusiasm; Terry Jones and family for their hospitality; Michael Palin for his charm; and Eric Idle for the battery drain on his laptop.

  My great appreciation extends to Douglas Adams, Howard Atherton, Terry Bedford, Carol Cleveland, Julian Doyle, Mark Forstater, John Goldstone, Ian MacNaughton, David Sherlock, and Barry Took, and a big thank-you to Nancy Lewis and Simon Jones for their generosity.

  I would like to thank the consistent help of Roger Saunders and Jessica Tipping of Python (Monty) Pictures, Amanda Montgomerie, Roanne Moore, Kirsten Whiting, Lisa Brody, Sophie Astin, Peter Becker and Sean Wright Anderson at the Criterion Collection, Cathy McDonnell at HBO, and Bobbie Mitchell of the BBC Photo Archives, each of whom smoothed the process considerably.

  For guidance and wisdom unleashed by their hearts and intellect, I wish to thank Martha Kaplan, Lucille Rhodes, Deborah Cabaniss, and Richard Spitaleri.

  And finally, loving thanks to my wife Tessa Wardlaw, who is muse, collaborator, and editor all in one.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Interviewees

  Introduction

  Pre-Python

  Birth

  Take-Off

  The Pythons Through the Looking Glass

  The Control Freak

  Splunge!

  The Nice One

  The Cheeky One

  The Zealous Fanatic

  The Monosyllabic Minnesota Farm Boy

  The Group Dynamic

  And Now for Something Completely…the Same?

  Fear and Loathing at the BBC

  Monty Python and the Holy Grail

  The U.S. Invasion Begins

  The Fourth (and Final) Sortie

  Caught in Python’s Orbit

  Life of Brian

  Flying Solo

  The Meaning of Life

  Le Morte d’Arthur

  The “If You Could Save Only One Thing You’ve Produced” Chapter

  21st-Century Python

  The Python Oeuvre

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTERVIEWEES

  THE PYTHONS

  John Cleese

  Cleese escaped a projected career in law when he accepted a job writing jokes for the BBC. His talent made him a valued presence in The Frost Report and At Last the 1948 Show before Python, and in Fawlty Towers, Silverado, A Fish Called Wanda, The World is Not Enough, and a frighteningly long list of commercials after.

  Terry Gilliam

  Born and raised in Minnesota and Los Angeles, Gilliam’s early careers as a magazine illustrator and advertising agency copywriter somehow pointed him towards creating animations for British television. As a director his films away from Python include Time Bandits, Brazil, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

  Eric Idle

  A razor-sharp wit with a poison pen, Idle professes to shun acting for writing and yet has probably acted in more non-Python projects (Nuns on the Run, Casper, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, The Quest for Camelot) than the others. He has recently penned a novel, The Road to Mars; a Grammy-nominated children’s story; and “The Seussical,” a musical based on the stories of Dr. Seuss.

  Terry Jones

  Most likely of the Pythons to appear in drag, Jones is a noted history buff who has written on Chaucer and hosted the documentaries Ancient Inventions and The Crusades. He also directed Personal Services, Erik the Viking, and The Wind in the Willows, and has written several fanciful children’s books.

  Michael Palin

  The most innocent-looking of the group (and consequently able to play some of the most subversive parts), Palin starred in The Missionary and A Private Function. He has since become a trusty guide for armchair travelers with his globetrotting series Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, and Full Circle.

  CO-CONSPIRATORS

  Barry Took

  A veteran television producer and writer, Took’s credits on radio and television include Round the Home, The Frost Report, and The Marty Show (with Marty Feldman). It was Took who proposed the teaming of the six members that made up Python to the BBC. He did duty in Los Angeles as a producer of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, but soon returned to the U.K. to work as a programming executive, columnist, and comedy writer.

  Ian MacNaughton

  A veteran of the BBC’s drama department before being absconded by Light Entertainment and Spike Milligan, MacNaughton was the producer of all of Python’s TV output and director of all but a handful of their shows, as well as the feature And Now for Something Completely Different. He has since worked as a television, stage, and opera director out of his home base in Germany.

  David Sherlock

  A drama teacher and writer, Sherlock was Graham Chapman’s companion of twenty-three years, and witnessed the birth of Python. He also collaborated with Chapman on several projects, including Yellowbeard.

  Carol Cleveland

  Born in the U.K., Cleveland was raised in the United States but pursued acting (both comedic and dramatic) in England. Aside from her Python roles, she has appeared in numerous television series (including The Avengers, The Persuaders, and Are You Being Served?), films (The Return of the Pink Panther), and stage shows (“The Glass Menagerie,” “Dial ‘M’ for Murder”), as well as her own one-woman show, “Carol Cleveland Reveals All.”

  John Goldstone

  The executive producer of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Goldstone was producer of Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life; he has also produced quasi-Python projects such as Terry Jones’ The Wind in the Willows.

  Mark Forstater

  A flatmate of Terry Gilliam’s in New York City in the 1960s, he served as producer of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Forstater’s other film and TV credits include The Odd Job, The Fantasist, and Grushko.

  Julian Doyle

  Doyle’s duties as production manager on Holy Grail included staging the Black Knight sequence in East London, locating a Polish engineer in the wilds of Scotland to fashion a cog for a broken camera, and transporting a dead sheep in his van at five o’clock in the morning. He took the more sedate job of editor for Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. He has also edited Brazil and The Wind in the Willows.

  Terry Bedford

  Director of photography for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Bedford also served as DP for Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky. He has since become a director for television and commercials, and helmed the feature Slayground.

  Howard Atherton

  A fellow alumnus of the London International Film School with Bedford, Doyle, and Forstater, Atherton was camera operator on Holy Grail. He has served as director of photography for such directors as Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction and Lolita) and Michael Bay (Bad Boys).

  Nancy Lewis

  Python’s New York-based publicist and, later, personal manager during the seventies and eighties.

  Douglas Adams

  Not a Python, but an incredible simulation. Before creating The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams col
laborated with Graham Chapman in the mid-seventies, and even contributed a few morsels to Python, which (to his chagrin) the press elevated into a full-blooded partnership. Here he sets the record straight.

  INTRODUCTION

  This revolution was televised.

  When the six members of Monty Python embarked on their unique collaboration thirty years ago, they were reacting against what they saw as the staid, predictable formats of other comedy programs. What they brought to their audience was writing that was both highly intelligent and silly. The shows contained visual humor with a quirky style, and boisterous performances that seemed to celebrate the group’s creative freedom. But what made Monty Python extraordinary from the very beginning was their total lack of predictability, reveling in a stream-of-consciousness display of nonsense, satire, sex, and violence. Throughout their careers they were uncompromising in their work, and consequently made a mark on popular culture—and the pop culture industry—which is still being felt today.

  Two of the more revolutionary concepts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (the BBC Television series which premiered in Britain in 1969 and in the United States five years later) were the lack of a “star” personality (around whom a show might have been constructed), and the absence of a specific formula. Typically, the most popular or influential comic artists in film or television were those who had shaped a powerful persona, either of themselves or of an archetypal character. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Bob Hope, Woody Allen, and Richard Pryor all worked within a formula in which the comedy would be built around a recognizable character. And while a few experimented with the conventions of motion pictures (such as Alvy Singer breaking the fourth wall while standing in a cinema line in Annie Hall), it was still in support of a comic personality.

  Television (and radio) also perpetuated the situation comedy, in which narrative possibilities were limited by being subordinate to the conventions of already-accepted characters, with no deviation allowed. Even Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which was heralded in its time for its fast, free-wheeling format, nonetheless had a format, in addition to recurring characters and situations.

  Python would have none of that. Apart from a few repeated characterizations such as the Gumbys (irrepressible idiots, which were themselves pretty vaguely drawn), the series’ forty-five episodes marked a constant reinvention. Each production had its own shape, with only rare reminders of what other Python shows were about. There might be a theme to a particular episode’s contents, but even that was a pretty loose excuse for linking sketches together. It was that fluidity of style that made the Pythons seem like a rugby team which kept changing the ground rules and moving the goal posts, and still played a smashing good game—one could barely keep up with them. And even as audiences became more familiar with each Python’s on-screen personality, the six writer/performers were so adaptable and chameleonic that no one ever stood out as the star of the group—the cast was as fluid as the material.

  This very flow of action and ideas was the most potent source of humor for Python. The comedy had an inner logic (or illogic) that was not contingent upon generally accepted notions of drama: there was no narrative drive, no three-act structure, and no character development (and in fact, often anti-character development, as when the camera turns away from a couple deemed “the sort of people to whom nothing extraordinary ever happened”).

  As the series progressed, the troupe experimented with doing longer and longer sketches, or (as in “Dennis Moore”) creating characters or situations which would reappear at different points throughout the show. By the end, a couple of episodes (“The Cycling Tour,” “Mr. Neutron”) were in effect half-hour skits, though their lack of dramatic arc pointed to the fact that separate, disparate sketches were in effect draped over a specific character serving as a linking device.

  Monty Python’s Flying Circus never had the tight adherence to form or place that John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers had, and never really told a story, as the Michael Palin and Terry Jones series Ripping Yarns did. What it did have were odd and surreal juxtapositions, a penchant for twisted violence, and a belief that the human condition is, on the whole, pretty absurd.

  The films that followed—Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and The Meaning of Life—demonstrated quite vividly that this stream-of-consciousness approach could be transferred to feature-length films, but the Pythons also showed that they could (when they wanted to) have the discipline to tell an actual story. Brian is a fast-moving, fully formed tale whose comic asides never distract from the central figure’s tale. More importantly, the filmmakers offer some serious social commentary mixed in with the humor, without ever seeming pedantic or boring—a very rare talent.

  Python was not about jokes; it was really about a state of mind. It was a way of looking at the world as a place where walking like a contortionist is not only considered normal but is rewarded with government funding; where people speak in anagrams; where highwaymen redistribute wealth in floral currencies; and where BBC newsreaders use arcane hand signals when delivering the day’s events. And as long as the world itself is accepted as being an absurd place, Python will seem right at home. That is why the shows and films remain funny to audiences thirty years after their premiere, even after the routines have been memorized.

  Monty Python Speaks explores the world of the Pythons, who describe in their own words their coming together, their collaboration, their struggles to maintain artistic control over their work, and their efforts to expand themselves creatively in other media. It also documents the stamp they have made on humor; the passion of their fans; and the lasting appeal of their television and film work, books, recordings, and stage shows, in Britain and around the world. It also reveals what is perhaps the definitive meaning of “Splunge!”

  And now, “It’s…”

  PRE-PYTHON

  In the Old Days We Used to Make Our Own Fun

  If there is a progenitor to credit (or blame!) for Monty Python, the innovative and surreal comedy group that turned the BBC and cinema screens on their ends, one need look no further than a tall, undisciplined, manic-depressive Irishman, born and raised in India, who spent his young adulthood playing the trumpet for British troops in North Africa, before wrestling his fervent notions of humor onto paper in the back of a London pub.

  Spike Milligan, author of such pithy memoirs as Adolf Hitler—My Part in His Downfall, created the revolutionary BBC Radio series The Goon Show, which was to radio comedy what Picasso was to postcards. Aired between 1951 and 1960, and featuring Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and (briefly) Michael Bentine, The Goon Show was a marvelously anarchic mixture of nonsensical characters, banterish wordplay and weird sound effects all pitched at high speed. The surreal plots (such as they were) might concern climbing to the summit of Mt. Everest from the inside, drinking the contents of Loch Lomond to recover a sunken treasure, or flying the Albert Memorial to the moon.

  Milligan’s deft use of language and sound effects to create surreal mindscapes showed how the medium of radio could be used to tell stories that did not rely on straightforward plots or punchlines; it was the illogic of the character’s actions bordering on the fantastic (i.e., the hero being turned into a liquid and drunken) which moved the show along. It was a modern, dramatized version of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear—fast-paced and hip, its language a bit blue around the edges.

  The artistic and popular success of The Goon Show inspired many humorists who followed. Although its surreal nature could not really be matched, its fast-paced celebration of illogic and its penchant for satire opened the doors for some of the edgier comedy that came to light in Britain in the sixties, such as “Beyond the Fringe” (an internationally successful cabaret featuring Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, and Dudley Moore), and the television series That Was the Week That Was and The Frost Report.

  But while The Goon Show demonstrated how broadcast comedy could bend conven
tion, it was the passionate satire of the rising talents from university revues that forced satire—typically a literary exercise—into the vernacular of the day. If a map were to be drawn of the comedy universe in the late fifties and early sixties, its center would assuredly comprise the halls of Cambridge and Oxford; between them, they produced a flood of talented writers and performers who were to raise the comedy standard, extending from stage to recordings, magazines, television, and film.

  Among the many illustrious figures who began their careers in Cambridge Footlights or in revues at Oxford were Humphrey Barclay, David Frost, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, Jo Kendall, David Hatch, Jonathan Lynn, Tony Hendra, and Trevor Nunn. Also from this rich training ground came five writer/performers of deft talent: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin—five-sixths of what would become the most successful comedy group in film and television, Monty Python.

  Leading up to their first collaboration as Python in the spring of 1969, these five Cambridge/Oxford university grads were working separately or in teams for several radio and TV shows at the BBC and at independent television (ITV) companies. They soon recognized similar tastes or aesthetics about how comedy should be written and performed. It was partly magnetism and partly luck which brought the group together, and the result was a program that reinvented television comedy, launched a successful string of films, books, and recordings, and turned dead parrots and Spam into cherished comic icons.

  I Mean, They Think Well, Don’t They

  TERRY JONES: Mike and I had done a little bit of work together when we’d been at Oxford. I first saw Mike doing cabaret with Robert Hewison, who later became a theatre critic. Mike and I and Robert all worked together on a thing called “Hang Down Your Head and Die.” It was in the style of Joan Littlewood’s “Oh, What a Lovely War,” and it was a show against capital punishment, which we still had in this country at that time. That was the first time Mike and I worked together. And then we did an Oxford revue called “Loitering Within Tent”—it was a revue done in a tent—and he and I worked out a sequence called the “Slapstick Sequence” [in which a professor introduces demonstrations of various laugh-inducing pratfalls]. As far as I remember that was the first real writing collaboration we did, and in fact that sketch was later done in the Python stage show.