Monty Python Speaks Page 8

  If They Can’t See You, They Can’t Get You

  MACNAUGHTON: This was a very strange thing because when I’d done four or five Monty Python shows which had not yet gone out, I was called to the Head of Entertainment, who said to me, “I don’t think we’ll be renewing your contract.” I had a year’s contract. So I said, “Oh, really? Why not?” He said, “Well, this Q5 show of yours was a bit of a cult success, but only on BBC2[!] And who really wants to see the Monty Pythons?” They were ready to drop me. It wasn’t that they were going to drop the Pythons; they just didn’t think that the way we were doing it—which meant me as producer and director—was what was wanted. Fortunately I think their public became of a different mind—the Pythons went out and became a cult success.

  Promotional item in the Radio Times:

  Monty Python’s Flying Circus is the new late programme on Sunday night. It’s designed “to subdue the violence in us all.”

  The first Python show broadcast on October 5, 1969, demonstrated quite clearly that the group was after something quite uncategorizable. It presented a surreal mix of violence (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hosts a program depicting famous deaths); television parodies (“We find that nine out of ten British housewives can’t tell the difference between Whizzo butter and a dead crab.” “It’s true, we can’t!”); occasions where all propriety is ripped to shreds (an interviewer proceeds to address his guest as “sugar plum” and “angel drawers”); some intellectually tainted comic bits (Picasso paints while riding a bicycle, followed by Kandinsky, Mondrian, Chagall, Miró, Dufy, Jackson Pollock “…and Bernard Buffet making a break on the outside”); and a loopy premise allowing for both some slapstick and social commentary (the tale of the World’s Funniest Joke, appropriated by the army as a weapon against the Nazis, who fail miserably at developing a counter-joke of their own). Running throughout the program were gags and animations about pigs.

  In the weeks that followed, the program became more fragmented, more surreal, more violent. Sheep nesting in trees gave way to a man playing the “Mouse Organ” (namely, some rodents trained to squeak at a certain musical pitch accompanied by a pair of heavy mallets), to a cartoon of a pram that ingests the doting women who lean too closely. Kitchen-sink melodramas were turned on their heads, as when a young coal miner returns home to his playwright father, who rants about his son’s values (“LABOURER!”). A scandal-mongering documentary examines men who choose to live as mice (“And when did you first notice these, shall we say, tendencies?”). And a confectioner is investigated for fraud in labeling his latest product, Crunchy Frog (“If we took the bones out it wouldn’t be crunchy, would it?”).

  How was the series sold originally by the BBC?

  TOOK: Well, it’s this “new wacky series, these wacky kids, these bright new Cambridge graduates and Oxford lads who delighted us for years with their merry antics, now together at last in a brand-new series.” I suppose that’s what they did. That what they do about everything else!

  GILLIAM: The BBC I think were constantly uncomfortable with us. They didn’t know quite what we were, and I think they were slightly embarrassed by it, and yet it was too successful, it was making all this noise out there. When they took us off after the fourth show (this was the first series), we were off for a couple of weeks, I think there was a serious attempt to ditch it at that point. But there was too much noise being made by us. The most wonderful thing was everybody tuning in when Python was supposed to run and it was the International Horse of the Year Show; in the middle of it, they were doing their routines to music, it was Sousa’s “Liberty Bell”—our theme music. It was like Python was even there, you couldn’t keep it down!

  But in the beginning they would put us out at all these different times, and change it, but somehow the word got out and they kept us on.

  TOOK: The BBC split up into different areas, and the option was to take the show or not to take the show, and half the regions didn’t take the first series. So if you lived in London you’d get it; if you went down to Southhampton on the south coast you wouldn’t be able to see it because they put on Herring Fishing in the North Sea or something. It was very irritating that the regions had that kind of autonomy; there was nothing you could do. But the word started to go around that this was very good and very new, and something they ought to have. So one after another came back into the fold, and by the time the second series was done, the complete network had it.

  CLEESE: I had a friend who was trying to watch the series, and he sat down in his hotel room in Newcastle and switched it on and there was this hysterical start to Monty Python about this guy wandering around being terribly boring about all the ancient monuments around Newcastle. And he watched it falling about, and said it’s real nerve to do this, it’s really terrific and what a great start to the show. And about twenty minutes in he realized it was the regional off-time.

  The nicest thing anybody ever said about Python was that they could never watch the news after it. You get in a certain frame of mind and then almost anything’s funny!

  He Wants to Sit Down and He Wants to Be Entertained

  How was the public’s response to your work different from what you’d experienced on your previous series?

  PALIN: I suppose the difference was that, partly because of its programming and the time it went out, Python clearly was seen as very much for an adult audience, which is very interesting because nowadays the spirit of Python burns on in ten-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds. So many children love Python. But at the time it was seen as an adult show. I’d never really been involved in an “adult” show, kind of X-rated comedy show, and this seemed to be the image of it.

  And also we became sort of the intellectuals’ darling for a bit, written up in The Observer, things like that, which was again quite different from anything I’d done before. The word “cult” was quite soon applied to Python, though we weren’t quite sure what a “cult show” is. It applies to something that is the property of only a very few select people. I’d never been interested in doing that before. Frost Report was a very popular show; Do Not Adjust Your Set was aimed at a popular audience. But Python seemed to fit into this niche of daring, irreverent, therefore only accessible to those of a certain sort of intellectual status, and that lasted for a long time.

  So much in television depends on when programs go out. The BBC labeled the program—without meaning to—by the time we put it out. We were put out so late at night and people who had to work early next morning couldn’t see it; there wasn’t videos, you couldn’t tape them and run them the next morning if they were put out late at night. Insomniacs and intellectuals were the only people up!

  MACNAUGHTON: You do know about Spike Milligan’s remark on the radio once when somebody asked him about the success of the Pythons? “Oh,” he said, “my nephews are doing very well, aren’t they?” Which is a very reasonable thing, because they loved Milligan.

  Python would not have been what it was had it not been for The Goon Show or the Q series.

  MACNAUGHTON: Precisely. But would The Goon Show have been what it was were it not for the Marx Brothers? And then would the Marx Brothers have been the way they were were it not for burlesque, and would burlesque have been the way it was were it not for music halls? And so it’s got a wonderful progression, I think.

  The trouble is, since Python I haven’t seen anything come up yet that takes its place. And I’m very pleased, because quite honestly I don’t think you can. I guess that’s one of the big pluses for Python, in that nobody can really copy their style—it doesn’t work. I mean, Morecombe and Wise can be copied. But how do you copy [these] guys? I think it would be very difficult to do it again.

  CLEESE: My experience is that critics recognize what is slightly original, but very frequently miss what is very original! And if you look back at the reviews of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, they were really not particularly noticeable—nothing remarkable about the reviews for quite a long time. I suspect yo
u would probably get to show 9 or 10 of the first series before anybody was really writing that something remarkable was happening. A few people got it right away. But critics on the whole did something that they do when they’re insecure: they describe what the show was like without really committing themselves to a value judgment.

  GILLIAM: We’d rather be making films that people are passionate about than, “Oh, that’s a nice film.” And Python’s always managed to do that; people are passionate about Python. I think that’s where we’ve always been good. That’s probably the area we should stay in. It’s like comic books; comic book artists and people who deal in comic books all feel like outsiders, they’re never given respect. There’s an amazing skill involved in making a good comic book. The artwork in comic books is brilliant, some of the writing is brilliant—comic books is a really great art form, but it’s not [considered] art. Not literature. It’s this bastard thing hanging out there. And they complain, [but] I keep saying, “No, you’re lucky that you haven’t been accepted—keep being angry and outside and doing stuff. Because if you become a Keith Haring or Basquiat or any of these people who get drawn into the Establishment, they die, they just freeze up. What’s Keith Haring? His stuff is nice and it’s sweet and it’s cute, it’s all right, but I don’t think when they look back a hundred years from now they’re going to say, “He nailed it.” Except maybe they will: that’s how infantile and silly things had got, that in fact he captured the essence of the whole thing doing just nice, sweet stick figures and nice colors. I don’t dislike his stuff at all, I think it’s nice, but I don’t think it’s Wow!!

  I think certainly with comedy, comics, and all that—comics/comedy, we’re stuck with sounding very similar!—that’s outside, and it should stay outside.

  MACNAUGHTON: They were quite surprised by the positive reaction to the Gumbys, these daft people with the handkerchiefs tied on their heads. When they walked into the studio one time, what happens but the whole front row of the audience had handkerchiefs tied around their heads! Gumby just had to appear and there was a roar of laughter.

  GILLIAM: I’m the luckiest one because I’m the least known, the least recognized. And it’s nice to be recognized occasionally. I get enough, somebody saying “Hi,” just to assuage my fading ego: That’ll keep me going for a month or two.

  And the whole thing is so ephemeral, it’s just incredible how thin the line is between being known and not known. There was one day after we’d done a chat show here after one of these series, my wife, Maggie, and I were shopping somewhere, and someone all excitedly started shouting, “Hey, hey, look who’s here!” Oh fuck. It’s this piece of meat that is being attacked by all these excitable people who had just seen you on television the night before. And then you realize, Thank God I’m not John. It’s an awful job to walk down the street and be John Cleese, because you can’t escape from it!

  CLEESE: You know when you do something and it catches on, and everybody likes it, then for the next eight years as you creep out of your house at half past eight in the morning: “Oi, do your funny walk there, John!” Just so painful!

  THE PYTHONS THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  Apart from That He’s Perfectly All Right

  I asked each of the Pythons what they thought the greatest contributions were of their fellow members to the group, and then to describe how the disparate personalities (sometimes in conflict with one another) merged to become a thriving whole which in many ways was far greater than the sum of its parts.

  Cleese, the icon.

  THE CONTROL FREAK

  It Certainly Wouldn’t Be Worth Your While Risking It Because I’m a Very Good Shot; I Practice Every Day…Well, Not Absolutely Every Day

  PALIN: Well, John’s quality, apart from just being very, very focused and disciplined as a writer, was a great economy in his writing—very funny and very tight—and that I think comes from his legal background.

  Apart from the superb sense of comic timing—the ability to deliver a line—John was able better than any of us (apart from perhaps Graham) to show this wonderful process of an Establishment character undermining the Establishment. The rest of us could be dismissed as being your sort of irritants, the smaller person getting in the way; or the way our characters were played could sort of be dismissed. [But] the great thing about John’s characters was he epitomized the ruling establishment of Britain; he looked like the bishop or bank manager, a man of authority. He looks just right, and to be able to undermine it as successfully as he did from that perspective was really wonderful and I think the greatest strength of John. It meant that people were really genuinely taken aback when John would be in full blow of invective. His is not just a purely comedic character; this is an archetypal English, respectable, responsible person physically attacking from within. It seemed to me that was an ability that John had, because we all felt he wasn’t acting the part, he was it. That’s the best analogy—he was a headmaster who had gone mad.

  John is a very strong, forceful character and within the group he was probably the one who would have the most obsessive desire for structure, both within the sketches and in the way we wrote, the way we worked. John would want to know when we were going to finish, what time we were going to do this, how we were going to do that. We needed that structure, so that was good, as it gave the others who were perhaps more languid something to react against.

  As well as having a great time, you had to be businesslike. Not that we were unfocused, but for instance the rest of us were far more likely to say, “Let’s stop now and go out and have a nice lunch.” And John would have to meet somebody, he’d go out and do that and be back at exactly 2:15. So in a sense John forced us to organize ourselves pretty thoroughly, which I think was a good thing, but it didn’t impinge on the comedy. There was never a sort of feeling of, “God, here he is, Mr. Bossy Boots.” I mean, he was bossy, but he delivered.

  GILLIAM: John’s a hard one. John loves manipulating and controlling; he’s only comfortable when he’s doing that. When he lets go of control and just starts hanging out, he can only do it for a short while and then the panic sets in, it really sets in. I mean, after we did Holy Grail we were in Amsterdam all together promoting it, and we went on a pub crawl one night, and we were having a great time, all of us. And we were getting drunk and speaking openly, all the things that a group can never [otherwise do] and it really was getting funny, and we were saying a lot of things that needed to be said in a really jolly, drunken way. And at a certain point John just had to pull back from it; he was relaxing, he was letting down his guard too much, and he went back off wherever he went. It was really weird. And it was a pity because we were having a good time, and John was having a good time, and he couldn’t allow himself to not try to be in control.

  After the first series, John had taken a house down in Majorca, and said, “Come on down.” There was one night we went into Palma and we were sitting there having this silly time, like two guys—“Yours isn’t so good looking,” you know, like two kids laughing, trying to pick up girls and failing miserably and all that—and we were driving back and the sun was setting, and there was this castle on the hill. I said, “Oh, shit, let’s drive up there!” VVrrmm!! Knocked on the door of the castle, it was locked, it was after hours. I said, “Let’s break in, let’s climb in.” So we went around, climbed over the wall and eventually got in. There were sheep grazing in the middle of this castle and we chased them around, it was like really, really good fun—and then John closed down again. It was like one of the few times I’ve seen him just totally relaxed. But he can only do it for a limited period, and then he’s got to get back in control.

  I think his attempt to try and control things gave a sense there was always something one could go against—his need to control [versus] our need to not be controlled, and that’s such an interesting dynamic. I don’t know if that’s exactly the best use of everybody in the group!

  But John, as I said, was the one we could all struggle against
all the time, one thing we always agreed on: “He’s going to try this.” “Oh, fuck him!”

  Did he serve as a substitute for the BBC, or a potential audience, that you had to win over?

  GILLIAM: No, it wasn’t about that he represented anything larger than himself, or that he was right or wrong. It was about him trying to get his own way. And that’s why he and Terry were at opposite ends, they both wanted their own way. They were these two poles, sort of psychic emotional poles that were at opposite ends—Terry’s passion and John’s intellectual need to control—and that set up this really weird and interesting dynamic.

  JONES: When we first started I remember John saying, “We don’t want to have personalities in this group, it’s going to be the group.” Which is why we didn’t sort of have our names and faces up at the end of the show. It was a group undertaking, and that very much came from John’s feeling, I don’t know quite why. He had just come out of At Last the 1948 Show, where somehow Marty Feldman had been perceived to be the star, and Marty had gone on to do his own series, and it was somehow some sort of reaction, against the cult of the individual kind of thing. But nonetheless I think the original offer was from the BBC to John to do a show, and then he came to us and it sort of grew up around him like that.

  John was useful to have as your front man; he could deal with the bureaucracy, though there wasn’t that much bureaucracy in those days. John’s contribution was always being kind of a rallying point, a spokesperson. He always had the authority; when it came to dealing with the BBC, we always felt they took John seriously. Partly because he was best known; it’s partly his personality as well. Everybody always feels that John’s really the prime minister in disguise.