Monty Python Speaks Read online

  They were sort of a bit scared of me, and a bit scared of them because they’re a pretty high-powered bunch, as time has revealed.

  Did the BBC know what they were getting with the Pythons?

  PALIN: I think probably something like Dad’s Army was more up their street than Python, because we couldn’t tell them what we wanted to do—we didn’t know ourselves. Barry Took was very much involved in introducing us to the BBC as a group. Barry at the time was very interested in exporting British comedy to America, because Laugh-In had just come to England and made a big impression on BBC2, I think. And Barry knew George Schlatter, who was Laugh-In’s executive producer. They wanted to produce comedy shows in this country that would have that sort of effect in America. Which was ironic, because they said, “Well, we can’t show this at all” (for the first few years anyway). And the BBC were not particularly committed to Python in the sense that “We need this sort of show.” They had lots of shows going on at Light Entertainment at the time.

  So Barry just had to present us as decent, responsible young men who could produce this sort of wacky new show that we couldn’t quite describe but was going to be something very fresh.

  The BBC did have a certain amount to go on: John was a big name for them, one of their new great discoveries of the sixties, so whatever John wanted they considered that to be significant. The rest of us, I don’t think they particularly cared; we were journeymen script writers. We’d done most of our shows for independent companies: Do Not Adjust Your Set, The Complete and Utter History, and for that matter, At Last the 1948 Show were all made for ITV companies, so we hadn’t really worked for the BBC except for The Frost Report. So their attitude was [to] take a gamble, saying, “Well, you know, you could do more good than harm letting these people produce a series.”

  But the early steps were very faltering. For a start they gave us thirteen shows, which was quite a commitment, and then they immediately started trying to strangle us financially by offering pitiable money. And they regarded Gilliam as something quite unnecessary: “An animator? Who wants an animator? There’s no animators in programs, what’s an animator going to do, for God’s sake? That’s Walt Disney, we can’t afford that!” So they showed their confidence in Terry by giving him about a hundred quid a week extra to make these animations, and Terry couldn’t afford an assistant—he had to do them all himself.

  All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end.—(Miss) Anne Elk

  CLEESE: When I was working on The Frost Report I felt quite frustrated—not in a desperate, emotional sense, but held in—by the format of sketches, by the tyranny of the punchline, by the fact that more surreal things would be suggested and all the writers would laugh, and the producer/director Jimmy Gilbert (a man I liked hugely) would smile and be amused himself, and say, “Yes, but they won’t understand that in Bradford.” So we were straining against conventions.

  I do know when we sat down for Python that we were convinced we were not going to do something in a conventional format. On At Last the 1948 Show we managed to parody the format without breaking it; in other words, between sketches we would cut to this delightful girl, Aimi MacDonald, and Aimi would say with this extraordinary voice of hers—it was like someone had escaped from a cartoon and had elocution lessons—“Well! That was a funny sketch, wasn’t it?” We were already beginning to play with the form; it was definitely a step towards Python.

  I had a gut feeling that the sort of thing we were going to do on Python was all the things that made the writers laugh on The Frost Report but which we weren’t allowed to put on. But of course we didn’t know how, and if you look at Python, the first few are much more conventionally constructed (although to my taste the humor is very, very good; I think a lot of the early stuff is very odd and very funny). And what happened was the material in some cases got rather less funny, but we began to package it more skillfully as we played with the format.

  How was the format or shape of the show ultimately decided upon, as it was quite different from what had come before?

  JONES: We never really discussed it that much. John, Eric, and Graham weren’t particularly interested in the shape of the show; they were just interested in funny material, making sure the sketches were funny. I was much more concerned—and Terry and Mike also felt a bit more like I did—that we needed to find a new formula, a new format, really. Apart from the sketch material, the earliest meetings were mainly discussions about the name of the show! But I remember I really had this feeling that this was going to be an absolutely crucial time, that we had to get this one right, this is our chance.

  So I was thinking quite hard about the shape of the show, and I saw [Spike] Milligan’s Q5, and I thought, “Fuck! Milligan’s done it!” He did a show [where] one sketch would start and drift off into another sketch, things would drift into one another; he made it so clear that we’d been writing in clichés all this time, where we either did three-minute sketches with a beginning, middle, and end, or else we did thirty-second blackouts—one joke with a blackout—so it was still very much the shape of a traditional English revue. Milligan was messing around with this and doing something totally different.

  I can just remember walking upstairs at my parents’ home in Claygate and suddenly realizing that Terry Gilliam had done an animation for one of the Do Not Adjust Your Sets called Beware of Elephants. He’d been a bit diffident about it; he’d say, “Well, it’s sort of stream-of-consciousness, one thing leads to another, it’s not really about anything.” He’d done another one called Christmas Cards. And so I was going upstairs and I suddenly thought, “That’s what we could do: we can do what Milligan’s done with breaking up the sketch format and just do a whole thing that’s stream-of-consciousness, and Terry’s animations can go in and out and link things, and the whole show would just flow like that. And I phoned Mike, I suppose, and Terry G., in great excitement. [They went,] “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!”

  And then as far as I remember, we put this to the group and they were grumbling: “Yeah, all right, well anyway, let’s get on with the sketch.”

  So the first series was very much a fight between the Oxford contingent, if you like, trying to push this stream-of-consciousness into the thing, and the Cambridge group. The Cambridge side weren’t particularly interested; they weren’t against it, but they weren’t particularly interested.

  IDLE: We had already tried something like this on Do Not Adjust Your Set and also We Have Ways of Making You Laugh with Gilliam. It was the natural way to go. We were essentially avoiding doing anything that was like the shows we had already worked on or were on the Beeb at the time. Cleese was tired of formats, Jonesy the keenest on experimentation—or at least the loudest in praise of it. But Gilliam was keen to experiment and Graham always anxious to push the envelope: “Can we make it a little madder?” he would say.

  GILLIAM: My memory of the first meetings was in John’s flat in Basil Street in Knightsbridge. I just remember sitting up in John’s room a lot and talking and arguing. I think by loosening it up as we did, it then freed us up so that we could have everybody write what they wanted to do, and then we start filtering it through the group’s reaction to the stuff.

  Director: Close Up, Zoom in on Me

  Ian MacNaughton was an actor before becoming a director at the BBC in 1961. After several years toiling in the trenches of the Drama Department, he was offered a chance by the then-Head of Comedy to direct programming for the Light Entertainment Division.

  MACNAUGHTON:I asked the Head of Comedy why did he ask me and he had a very funny answer: he had been in Studio 3, where they were doing a Light Entertainment show, and someone came to him and said, “Do look into Studio 2, where they’re doing a drama series called Dr. Finlay’s Casebook—they’re getting more laughs in there than you’re getting out here!”

  Dr. Finlay’s Casebook was a very turgid drama, it was too dramatic, and I arranged with the script editor
to write something funny, a small scene before the end in which we have a bit of funny to heighten the tragedy at the end of the piece, and so this came about that way. The Head of Comedy did look in, and the next day he asked would I like to do the funnies? And I said, “Yes, very much!”

  And so I joined the Light Entertainment branch and was immediately handed a Spike Milligan show, Q5. Now Spike Milligan is a rather eccentric comic clown, and I don’t think anybody else was very happy to work with him—he was a very undisciplined man—but we did the show and it was a reasonable success, and the Python boys had seen this show going out and they asked the BBC if they could have me direct their first series. The BBC said yes, and so that’s how we started together.

  IDLE: In fact, I hardly remember Barry Took being involved at all; the key meeting was with MacNaughton. He was directing Spike and we all liked the mad direction those shows were going in, so we met him and he seemed loony enough, so we said, “Okay.” He couldn’t do the studio direction for the first four (though he did do the exterior filming), so John Howard Davies did those. He was more in control and a bit less of a loony, and I found him very helpful on the early acting because he was an actor—indeed, he was Oliver Twist in David Lean’s movie!

  Ian’s great brilliance was that he didn’t get in the way.

  PALIN: We had a few battles over a director, because in early meetings some of us had found John Howard Davies to be completely wrong for the ethos of Python; he represented the most conventional, conservative side of BBC comedy. And there was this mad cat Ian MacNaughton, who seemed to represent the free spirit that we wanted. I remember a couple of fights over that—not fights, but sort of polite disagreements; there were some tensions over that. John Cleese was very much a John Howard Davies man; in fact, he used John Howard Davies for all of Fawlty Towers. And Cleese was guarded about Ian MacNaughton; he didn’t like Ian because he drank, he was sometimes out of control, he was a mad incomprehensible Scotsman, and Cleese saw him allying with the sort of wild, passionate [Pythons] on the other side. But in the end we got Ian MacNaughton.

  I think probably we did need somebody like that who was going to be responsive to our ideas. John Howard Davies was a nice man, and he did four shows (although Ian always directed the film sequences). Davies found that it wasn’t a natural sort of program for him to do, whereas Ian was very responsive to all our ideas, especially if we had him do something different. He would be at home with the antiauthoritarian aspect of it, which was something he liked and rather identified with, whereas I think John Howard Davies was much more identified with BBC structure as it was then. He wasn’t the kind to be taking risks; he was an organization man.

  Ian would take some risks. Ian was always somebody outside the organization, probably because of his lifestyle: he was a Scottish actor, he didn’t see himself as a metropolitan London man at all, which helped, because Python was never metropolitan. As Barry Took once pointed out (which was very acute), all of the Pythons come from the provinces and none of us were Londoners. We all saw London in a sense as slightly the enemy, a citadel to be conquered, and of course Ian was definitely from Glasgow—he had this antimetropolitan attitude, which helped us.

  Ian MacNaughton directing Palin in “The Cycling Tour.”

  CLEESE: Well, I suspect my view on this is rather different from the others’, because I thought John Howard Davies was very good. But he wasn’t as skillful with his cameras as Ian was; Ian was a very visual director. John was a very, very good judge of comedy. He wasn’t a tremendously verbal person, but his instincts were extraordinarily good, and he was very good at casting. So I had a lot of respect for him to do comedy, but I know that the more visually oriented people felt that the show took a big step forward (from the point of view of form as opposed to content) when Ian took over. And I thought Ian was pretty good, but I never thought he was particularly expert in the direction of comedy. He was always more bothered by how he was going to shoot it than he was about whether the sketch was really working or not, whereas John Howard Davies’ focus on just those first four shows he directed was more toward the content, even if he didn’t actually shoot it so well.

  GILLIAM: Ian had worked with Spike Milligan, that’s why we liked the idea of Ian coming in. He wasn’t forced upon us; we lucked out. Ian worked, because he put up with things. Everybody pushed him around. I like Ian a lot, I mean just his personality.

  Ian held it together, but we would be constantly going, “Shit, why is the camera on that?” But I think anybody would have been beaten up by us in the same way. He trotted on, he did it. If it had been left up to us, we couldn’t have done it, there’s just no way. We thought we could, but I’m sure we couldn’t have!

  TAKE-OFF

  Let’s Get the Bacon Delivered

  As the group prepared for the first series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (which began recording in August 1969), the notion of applying a stream-of-consciousness style to the show’s content and execution was accepted.

  PALIN: Certainly Terry Gilliam provided an example of how you could do stream-of-consciousness comedy in his animations, which he’d done on Do Not Adjust Your Set. We thought those were remarkable and a real breakthrough; there was nothing like that being done on British television. We loved the way the ideas flowed one into another.

  Terry Jones was very interested in the form of the show, wanting it to be different from any other—not only should we write better material than anybody else, but we should write in a different shape from any other comedy show. And probably Terry Jones and myself saw (or were easily persuaded) that Gilliam’s way of doing animation maybe held a clue to how we could do it. It didn’t matter if sketches didn’t have a beginning or end, we could just have some bits here or there, we could do it more like a sort of collage effect. I remember that everyone was quite enthusiastic about this, but it would have almost certainly came from Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and myself.

  GILLIAM: I think it was more like saying “No” to certain things, and the first thing was “No” to punchlines, which is a really critical thing. We’d seen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore doing so many really great sketches where they traditionally had to end with a zinger, and the zinger was never as good as the sketch. The sketch was about two characters, so in a sense it was more character-driven than plot-driven, [but] time and time again you’d see these really great sketches that would die at the end—they wouldn’t die, but they just wouldn’t end better [than] or as well as the middle bits. So very early on we made a decision to get rid of punchlines. And then Terry Jones was besotted with this cartoon I had done, Beware of Elephants [in which] things flowed in a much more stream-of-consciousness way. Terry thought that was the shape that we should be playing with.

  Spike Milligan had been doing some amazing things just before; his Q series in a sense really freed it up, playing with the medium of television, admitting to it being television, and commenting on that. We just continued to do even more of that than he had done, but once we agreed on the idea of not having to end sketches, and having things linked and flowing, it allowed us to get out of a sketch when it was at its peak, when it was really still good; we would laugh when it was funny and it would move on when it wasn’t funny. That also immediately made a place for me; it sat me in the middle, connecting things.

  IDLE: We were young, and doing a show we would be in charge of for the first time. There were no executives. This freedom allowed us to experiment without having to say what we were trying to do—indeed, we didn’t have a clue what we were trying to do except please ourselves. This was the leitmotiv: If it made us laugh, it was in; if it didn’t, we sold it to other shows.

  This Year Our Members Have Put More Things on Top of Other Things Than Ever Before

  JONES: The way we went and did the shows is, first of all we’d meet and talk about ideas. And then we’d all go off for like two weeks and each write individually or in our pairs. Mike and I tended to write separately and then get together, r
ead out material to each other, and then swap over and mess around like that. So at the end of two weeks we’d all meet together, quite often downstairs in my front room or dining room, and we’d read out the stuff. That was the best time of Python, the most exciting time, when you knew you were going to hear new stuff and they were going to make you laugh.

  GILLIAM: And so you get a sketch where John and Graham had written something and it got that far and it was really good, but then it just started dribbling; well, either you stop there, or maybe Mike and Terry would take it over with some ideas to patch it up. I always liked the fact that there was just a pile of material to start with all the time, because everybody would go their separate ways, come back, and there would be the stuff, [sorted into] piles: we all liked that pile of stuff, [we were] mixed on that one, we didn’t like that one.

  You had to jockey for position about when and where a sketch was going to be read out, which time of the day; if it came in too early it was going to bomb. And you knew that if Mike and Terry or John and Graham had something they wanted to do, they wouldn’t laugh as much [at the others’ material]. And I was in a funny position, because I was kind of the apolitical laugh; I was the one guy who had nothing at stake because my stuff was outside of theirs.

  IDLE: It seems to me since all comedians seek control we were a group of potential controllers. Obviously some are more manipulative than others, or cleverer at getting their own way. Cleese is the most canny, but everyone had their ways. Mike would charm himself into things. Terry J. would simply not listen to anyone else, and Gilliam stayed home and did his own thing since we soon got tired of listening to him trying to explain in words what he was doing.