Monty Python Speaks Read online

  I was at university, one day I was at the Round House going to see some show, and I was at the bar at the interval and the person standing next to me was John Cleese. So seizing the moment, I said, “Excuse me, can I interview you for Varsify?” which was the Cambridge University magazine. He very graciously said, “Yes, all right,” and gave me his number and I went off to interview him a few weeks later. A curious thing came out of that long conversation I had with him: he was explaining in great detail how he just had this to do and that to do and the other thing to do, and then he was really going to take a lot of time off and maybe see if he could retire. He was about thirty-two. I thought, “How interesting that he’d gotten his life that well worked out.” But subsequently I discovered that every single conversation I’ve had with him since then, another twenty-five years, has been explaining how he’s just got this to do and that to do and the other to do and then he can retire!

  Then there was a show that I had written a lot of material for in my last year at Footlights—I wasn’t actually in it, I’d just written for it—and it went on briefly in London and a lot of old Footlights people came along to see it, including Graham Chapman. And so I sort of milled around afterwards and got to chat with Graham, and it turned out that he particularly liked one or two of the sketches that I had written. So he said, could I pop around and have a drink sometime, have a chat? So I did—dropped in to see him at his house in Highgate.

  Graham was at a bit of a loose end at the time because it was around the time the Pythons were writing that last half-series, the one without John, and I think Graham probably found that particularly hard to adjust to. Graham had been either having to write stuff by himself (which I think he didn’t particularly enjoy doing), or was writing bits with other Pythons. It hadn’t been the easiest thing for him, having to adjust.

  It’s easy to underestimate Graham’s great role in Python, because he was in many ways the least distinctive in a lot of people’s minds. He found himself a real role in the films, first as Arthur and then as Brian—I think that Graham found a kind of realness in that character that had eluded him in a lot of the parts he would more normally play in Python. [But] he was the one who was least at ease in front of the camera; there was the least identity there. But his role was I think very, very important and it was [to be] essentially extremely subversive. Now given that the whole bunch of them were subversive, being the subversive one of this subversive bunch was a particularly complicated role!

  The others would all tell stories of how they’d all be suggesting this and arguing about that, and Graham would sit there puffing on his pipe and quietly, in his tweedy way, think very, very naughty thoughts, and then every now and then would just interject something completely off the wall that would catch everybody by surprise, and then substantially turn something around. There’s a much-repeated story I certainly heard from Graham, which was a sketch that John had written by himself. It was based on something that made him very, very cross, which is often where a good sketch would come from, because he’d been sold a faulty toaster and he was going to complain about it. He wrote this whole sketch about this faulty toaster, and it was a beautifully written, beautifully crafted sketch, good sort of pear shape to it, and Graham must have listened to it or read it. As the story goes John was feeling a bit cross that he’d done all this work and Graham was merely sitting there, and Graham’s only remark was, “Yes, it’s boring, why not make it a parrot instead?” Whereupon it suddenly transforms into one of the most famous sketches they ever did.

  So Graham’s the one who could just turn something and flip it, would rely in a sense on somebody else having done all the spade work, in order for him to find the nugget that was buried there. I think Graham really was the most anarchic one of them (I mean Terry Jones is a bit of an anarchist, but he’s a nice anarchist!). Whereas with Graham there was always that kind of edge, danger; his life was a dangerous life, he did live out on the edge in a peculiar kind of way. It’s odd because in one way his demeanor was so much the sort of quiet, tweedy pipe-smoking Englishman, but there were demons there, demons which obviously he spent a lot of time sousing in drink, which was very sad. I remember when they’d had the whole cellar of their house in Highgate remodeled so he got a wine cellar, but he had filled his cellar completely with bottles of gin. A gin cellar!

  Anyway, the thing about Graham was he was a dangerous person. I mean he always courted that sense of danger, sense of outrage, sense of how can you really twist the knife? It was that in many ways that gave Python its real edge, because otherwise I think it could have been a much safer show than it was. I think it’s not in John’s instinct to be that way at all. But it took somebody like Graham to see there was that wildness in John to get at; if he could just push that button, he could dig it out.

  Help Me? Yeah, I’ll Say You Can Help Me

  Now Graham invited me—it wasn’t a sort of formal collaboration—and said, “Well, since you’ve come over, there’s a sketch I meant to be sorting out for this script, do you want to give me a hand with it after lunch?” So I said, “All right.” I can’t even remember what it was, actually, something to do with a doctor, and a man stabbed in the doctor’s waiting room. Really my contribution such as it was would have been probably, literally two lines or something. But nevertheless, a source of immense pride and self-importance to me! But it’s rather like being a passing taxi driver who’s asked to be the tambourine on a Beatles record.

  There was one other thing I contributed that actually had to do with Python. They were doing the record album of Holy Grail and the Pythons had decided in their sort of Pythony way that they really didn’t want to put much of the actual movie on the record, so they wanted to record a lot of other stuff. There was a sketch of mine that Graham had seen that he quite liked, about a film director announcing he was making a new movie with Marilyn Monroe, which meant digging her up. I think it was one I’d already written and rewritten for one or two other people, and then I rewrote it with Graham, and then I think Mike and Terry rewrote it again, by which time it was a shadow of its former self. So that was one other contribution to Python.

  How unusual was it that the Pythons would collaborate with others at that time?

  ADAMS: I think there had been odd things here and there, not so much that somebody’d been brought in but one of the members of the team happened to be writing something with somebody else and it ended up being in a Python sketch. Ian Davidson’s name you’ll see from time to time, and every now and then he played a little part, so it wasn’t completely unheard of, but it was pretty unusual.

  One of the things I do want to make absolutely clear is how absolutely minimal is my connection with Python as such. It became a bit of a problem for me at one point, because when Hitchhiker started, there was nothing for journalists to write about me at all because I hadn’t done anything. The fact that there was even this faint connection with Python was always made a big thing of, which was extremely embarrassing to me, and I suspect probably annoyed one or two of the Pythons. I kept saying, “I’m sorry, it’s not me.” It would get to the point where I would say to journalists, “Look, I just want to say before I say anything that I have nothing to do with Python.” In fact, what made it bad was that I had written about half a dozen lines that appeared here and there in Python, but I would say I didn’t write for Python.

  They’d say, “What, you mean Monty Python?”

  ‘Yes, I didn’t write for them.”

  And they’d say, “What was that like?”

  I’d then read the account of the interview: “Douglas Adams, one of the major writers on Monty Python…” And I kept on saying to the Pythons, “I’m sorry, I did not say this.” It wears a bit thin!

  How did your relationship with Graham continue beyond Python?

  ADAMS: Graham was quite pleased with the couple of hours’ work, whatever it was we’d done. He wanted to create his own sketch show. There were one or two other people he regularly work
ed with. One was Barry Cryer. I think Barry’s a really old-school professional comedy writer, and Graham’s slightly more anarchic feel could work together [with that] quite well. Then John and Graham had pioneered the Doctor in the House series on television; John and Graham had written a number of those, and Graham had written one or two others with a man called Bernard McKenna, who was a belligerent Scotsman who had also come to write a lot of the Doctors by himself. So Graham was groping: maybe Barry, and maybe me as well, to see how that would go, very much the sort of fresh-faced new boy inexperienced unknown quantity. On the other hand, I was extremely available. So we worked on that for a while. It became Out of the Trees. I think only one ever got made, but we did two or maybe three scripts and it was mostly me and Graham. I wasn’t performing at all. It had some good bits, but it wasn’t really that good.

  How similar was it in style to Python?

  ADAMS: I would say too similar, to be honest.

  Graham and I ended up doing a couple of jobs for Ringo Starr. An American television channel was interested in Ringo doing a one-hour special, so he got us—well, when I say he got me and Graham, he got Graham, and me because I was part of the package at the time.

  Ringo had just done a record album called Goodnight Vienna, and the record sleeve was a pastiche of a scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still, he as Michael Rennie, and then there’s the big robot next to him. And Ringo wanted us to write this script to somehow take off from the sleeve cover. So Graham and I wrote this show in which this giant robot came to Earth to find Ringo, who (in some strange case of mistaken identity) was working as a very menial office worker somewhere, and take him off to join his ancestral race in the stars. I had a couple of things I’d done, a show opening at Cambridge, that had science fictiony elements in the comedy, and doing this just fitted very, very neatly with my particular bent. It didn’t get made, but it kind of stuck with me.

  The other thing was something that only a rock star would ask you to do. He and Harry Nilsson had made a movie called Son of Dracula for which Harry Nilsson played the son of Dracula and Ringo played the Van Helsing character, and Harry had done some songs for it. It had been released very briefly and I think not unsuccessfully, but then they had pulled it back in again because they weren’t happy with it. It sat on the shelves at Apple for a year or two gathering dust, and they thought, “We better do something with it—we need to make it funny!” So they set up in Graham’s house one of those big Steenbeck things, gave us the film, and said, “Okay, go through the film and write new dialogue for it.”

  “What, you mean over what the characters were saying?”

  “Yeah, different dialogue to go with what their lips were doing.”

  We said it’s not necessary because the movie is not bad, actually, it’s actually quite good, and this is the way to really destroy the movie—this is an exercise that can’t possibly work. They said, “Well, never mind, here’s some money, do it.” So we did it, and it didn’t work very well, so they said, “Thank you very much” and put it back on the shelves. That’s what you get for working with rock stars!

  How did you witness the effects of Graham’s alcoholism?

  ADAMS: I guess most of the year working with him, he was basically drinking a couple of quarts of gin a day. So it wasn’t the best possible atmosphere for doing the best possible work. You basically entered Graham’s house at ten o’clock in the morning and everybody drank all day, so by the end of the day everybody was completely pissed, or Graham was pretty pissed. I was basically too young and inexperienced; I didn’t know how barmy this all was, or to know what to do about it being that barmy. I mean the Pythons all had a long history with him, I’m sure they loved him dearly, but I also think the others had got to the point of finding Graham to be terribly hard to deal with. I don’t want to paint too negative a picture because he’s an extraordinary man, obviously an enormous talent in writing, even if he became a bit undisciplined or self-indulgent. He was somebody who commanded an enormous amount of real affection and loyalty, from a very wide and eclectic bunch of people who just thought he was wonderful, strange—and exasperating

  He basically took up residence in the bar, the Angel up in Highgate. He would quite often end up really behaving quite abominably. The landlord was obviously of two minds: on the one hand, Graham was a terrific customer, and brought a lot of people and created quite a lot of atmosphere in the pub, and it became quite well known for that; but on the other hand there were times when it really got seriously out of order.

  When he wasn’t drinking there would usually be a period of DTs, so he’d be very wobbly. When that happened, I always got the feeling not that one’s gone somewhere safer, but that you are somewhere really unsafe now. I don’t know what it was, and who can tell what it is, that devours people.

  It was a terrible waste of a person. I mean, you are what you are, you do what you do, but it must have been to the other Pythons kind of difficult and strange that this person who they knew so well and had worked with so much, shared so much with, had descended into this sort of drink hell. Of course Graham would say it wasn’t a drink hell, it was tremendous fun! Up to a point.

  When he was drinking, did he ever think he was being funny when—to the outside world—he clearly wasn’t, he was just being drunk?

  ADAMS: He would never try to be funny as such. It’s more that he would amuse himself by being outrageous and belligerent, so it would amuse him, but it wasn’t actually intended to amuse other people.

  So he was trying to push other people’s buttons to get a response?

  ADAMS: Yeah. And there’s also that drunk thing of “the rest of the world just not being up to understanding this.” It’s interesting because he was capable of random acts of great kindness, almost a touchstone of his personality, but he was also capable of extreme unpleasantness as well. He also got it handed back to him in a very, very unpleasant thing that Keith Moon once did to him. Because Graham was kind of living hand-to-mouth, he always imagined there was more more money around than there actually was. He was a celebrated person, a successful person, but the movies—they were successful, but they were not exactly Jurassic Park! And remember it’s all being divided six ways. I don’t know how much money the movies made. We knew when any money had come in because suddenly there’d be lots of chauffer-driven Mercedes around for a bit, but he was often quite hard up.

  I remember being told about one night he and Keith Moon were out at the pub, and Keith Moon was not the kind of friend that somebody’s who already drunk necessarily needs. Apparently on the way back from the pub, they passed some really filthy full dustbin, and Keith pulled out of his pocket some money—I don’t know how much, couple of thousand pounds—he said, “Here, Graham, it’s yours,” and stuffed it right into the bottom of the dustbin, and Graham had to then dig it all out.

  How did Graham change when he stopped drinking?

  ADAMS: Well, that was quite a long time after he and I had stopped [collaborating]. When we went our separate ways we had a row, I can’t quite remember even what it was about, but we were definitely on bad terms for a few weeks or months or something. Though we repaired relations after that, we were never that close again.

  Once he stopped drinking, he lost a lot of weight and was trying to get himself fit, and at the same time I don’t feel this really marked a major reengagement with reality, I have to say. Whenever you saw him, he always had lots of projects that were terribly exciting, but none ever seemed to come to anything. And then he fell in with these people from the Dangerous Sports Club who were complete lunatics, I mean dangerously mad people, in my estimation. One of them used to come around here every now and then to try to sell us on involvement in one mad scheme or another.

  They never got you to slide down a mountain on a grand piano?

  ADAMS: No, no. My wife has enough difficulty trying to get me to slide down a mountain on a pair of skis!

  Was Graham subversive because he needed something to
react to, and would only be comfortable in that role?

  ADAMS: He’d started actually before Python as a young, keen diligent writer, had been very proactive, and then had found himself a position in Python where he was able to be reactive, and that oddly enough had brought him his greatest success and renown. His life had really changed because it had been easier for him as part of the group, [and] becoming proactive again was more difficult for him. He was happy to throw in his moments of really great inspiration and expect that somehow somebody else would make it work out; in this case it would have been me, and I really didn’t have the experience or discipline or self-knowledge to be able to do that.

  What qualities did he bring to a writing relationship outside of the Pythons?

  ADAMS: Well, I think our writing relationship certainly had the seeds of some pretty good stuff in it. Again very much in our work he was the subversive one, but instead of subverting a group of his peers, he was a lot of time giving me a hard time, as the sort of wet-behind-the-ears guy who didn’t know anything.

  So he was being a mentor and a tormentor?

  ADAMS: Yes, that’s quite true. Glib, but true! I think if I had had more experience at that time and was better able to stand up to him, or to know for sure what to stand up to him about—in other words, if I had had more grip on my own craft at that point—then I think I could have fared better and we could have fared better. But in the end it was a marriage not of equals. He was a big, celebrated, successful star, a member of Monty Python and so on, but kind of in danger of losing it with the drink problems and so on; and I was young, naive, inexperienced, wet-behind-the-ears, but terribly excited to have this wonderful opportunity to write with one of the Pythons. There was a lot wrong with that model, really.

  He was a very, very funny man. Very, very perceptive, extremely perceptive. And it was that perceptiveness that enabled him both to be capable of gigantic acts of random kindness and gigantic acts of massive unpleasantness. He knew when to stroke and also when to stick in the knife. Very, very complicated man.