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EDIT NEWS: Monty Python - Holy Grail Press 1974 |
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Sounds, 27th April 1974, page 8
[With two great pictures of hippy Palin, long sideburns
and polka-dotted tie over a floral shirt]
STAPLING MACHINE, MR. PALIN
Svelte Steve Peacock in a life and death struggle with the giant bull Python
It was a perfectly ordinary day in the SOUNDS office.
There was no dismembered typewriter, but Mr. Mackie greeted me with his usual "Stapling machine, Mr. Peacock", and it was impossible to ignore Pete Erskine attempting another starting variation of the Silly Walk on the far side of the room. OK... we know he can't help it, but don't ruin the story.
The editor was beseeching yet another secretary to place her tongue in her mouth: "I've got your knickers off, haven't I?". Pete Makowski was indicating by a series of involved semaphore signals that the paper clips had arrived that very morning. Jerry Gilbert had his ear pressed to a telephone, earnestly enquiring as to the whereabouts of Vic, and Ray Telford was quietly nodding off in the teapot... wait a minute, how did Lewis Carroll get in here?
I sank onto a jolly comfortable Chesterfield, cleverly fashioned from the torsos of publishing overlords Jack Hutton and Alan Walsh (they'd lost the will to live, and now as you can see...), and as the evening sun sank behind the portals of Holloway Prison. Martin Hayman dragged himself in for breakfast. He sits quietly behind a typewriter chanting his daily mantra: "Einsteen, Einstern, Einstoon, Enstain, Einst..." We really must get him fixed. From the subs desk came an incessant muttering: "Rule one, no pooftahs, rule two..."
There were no tell tale bloodstains, no dismembered body of a man in his late fifties, no...
I'm terribly sorry... I don't know what came over me. Must have been something I didn't eat. Anyway, I think we're about ready to take our first call now, but first can I remind you that because of the election laws we ask caller to confine their questions to the subject of the agrarian revolution. Now, Mr. Palin.
Mr. Palin? Hello? Is there a Mr. Palin on the line? "Hullo... yes, sorry about the background noise, but I've been to this Punch lunch and I'm in Moss Bros. getting a morning suit and I'll only be about ten minutes..."
I think we'd better have a quick bit of animation here - as Michael Palin explains, when those Pythons get themselves into a situation that would be too expensive to resolve or they can't decide how to do it, they slap in a spot of animation. I'm sorry, we can't afford an artist, so if you'd just imagine someone exploding here? Thank you.
Catch phrases: quite apart from their other achievements, Monty Python has the distinction of being the first TV comedy show to really enter the nation's vocabulary in a big way. Yes, you do indeed find people walking around pretending to be Mr. Gumby, or telling each other how their brains hurt, or greeting each other with "stapling machine". At least I think you do... we're not that peculiar in Holloway, are we?
It used to happen with steam radio shows like the Goons and "Round The Horne", but apart perhaps from the odd line from "Steptoe" or "Til Death Us Do Part", telly had never inspired that kind of lunacy. Curiously enough, Michael Palin - yes, he's here now, looking very smart in a natty suit and tie - says they didn't actually intend to set themselves up as a source of catch phrases, and in fact very few of the things that've caught on appeared in the shows more than once.
"I remember that question came up fairly early on when we were planning what sort of thing we wanted Python to be, and we decided against having running jokes. I think it's just that television had been dominated by situation comedy, which doesn't really have that effect - people remember the situations but not the lines.
"Python was a very free thing, and it just happened that people found the same things funny as we did. Some running jokes were forced on us in a way - like the Gumby thing. But that's easy - anyone can do a Gumby. You just put a knotted handkerchief over your head and shout: it's very good therapy. I expect Edward Heath could do a better Gumby than I can."
Now there's a thought. Of course, with various bits of the telly shows being repeated, and books and records and films and stage shows all tending to feature a high old-joke count, it is hardly surprising that some of the best loved Python jokes should take on the aspect of a string of hit singles. The stage shows at Drury Lane pointed that up.
"I felt a bit embarrassed to be going on and doing the dead parrot sketch again, but people definitely seem to like seeing things they know again." I suppose it isn't exactly creative to have people cheering the first lines of your jokes, but it's certainly entertainment: and the Python boys devised ways of keeping themselves amused during a four-week run... mainly centred round trying to make each other laugh in the wrong places.
But what the world needs now is new Python, and coincidentally that's what the world is about to get. This week they start work on the first custom built Monty Python film "Monty Python And The Search For The Holy Grail", and after that they'll be working on a new TV series for the Autumn. The film will include John Cleese as Sir Lancelot, but Cleese has said he doesn't want to know about the next TV series.
He feels he's done enough TV, doesn't need to do it financially, and anyway is involved in his own company making films for industry. What? "Oh you know, sort of training things to show salesmen how to sell things better," explains Michael. Like the things he takes the piss out of in Monty Python shows? "I suppose so."
This new rush of creative activity follows a year in which Python seemed from the outside at least to be in something approaching stagnation: we were still laughing, but there was an uneasy feeling that the lads came together when they needed to build up the coffers a bit, reluctantly dragging themselves away from things they were really interested in to do it. True?
"Pretty much so. See in the first two or three years there was a tremendous amount of creative activity in a comparatively short time - we were all really enthusiastic about Python and didn't think about much else. But then after it was successful we all inevitably achieved a greater degree of financial security and we found we didn't have to work so hard, so all of us - John especially - wanted to ease back a bit.
"The remarkable thing is that we're still all friends - it nearly got nasty last year while we were in Canada and John didn't want to do the TV series and the rest of us did, but we worked that out and we're going ahead without John now, so everything's all right.
"I don't think it'll ever be like it was at the beginning again - you'll never get that total concentration, but we'll just take it project by project and only do the things we really want to do."
Did he feel it might be hard without John? "No - it would be nice if he could do the series but it doesn't worry me particularly that he won't be there. It won't be a case of someone having to do the John Cleese part or anything - there just won't be a Cleese part there.
"I think we'll have to sit down again like we did at the beginning, and we'd have had to have done it whether John was there or not, and find a different way of doing things that'll be just as free. You can't keep on using the same formula all the time."
The first stirrings of this new approach will be seen in the film. Rather than having a sequence of unconnected events, there will be story line - "this bunch of upper class twits in shining armour riding around the country on their chargers looking for adventure but not wanted to get too dirty while there's plague and destruction and people getting beaten to death by nuns all around them" [*] - on which to hang all the sequences.
They were going to try flashing between the days of King Arthur and the present day, parallels between knights and chartered accountants, but they decided that was getting too close to what we know and love of Python.
"We just decided to hell with the old sketches."
Stapling machine, Mr. Palin.
[*] "People getting beaten to death by nuns". Could this be
a description of the photo on page nine of the pressbook that
is missing from the film?
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Daily Record, 8th May 1974
[Large picture of Cleese as Lancelot captioned
"LION-HEARTED... or one of Europe's leading fearties"]
IT'S ARTHUR'S FLYING CIRCUS
By STANLEY SHIVAS
John Cleese, even in chain mail, still looks inescapably like a man from Whitehall...
Someone who will draw himself up to full bowler-hatted dignity and announce that he is the Under-secretary for Doing Tiger Impersonations.
He is the kind of man who, even in repose, suggests a whole minefield of outrageous humour about to explode, a superbly deadpan deflater of pomposity.
And, as such, he is in process this week and for some weeks to come of helping to put the inimitable Monty Python team on celluloid - the making of their second feature film.
They have been on location for the last fortnight and yesterday they settled briefly at Doune Castle, Stirlingshire, to shoot some scenes for "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
Indulge
And when I say it is loosely based upon the legend of King Arthur and his knights, I indulge in some oversimplification if not downright untruth.
John Cleese plays Sit Lancelot in the film and other parts are embraced lovingly by Graham Chapman (King Arthur), Mike Palin (Sir Galahad), Eric Idle (Sir Robin) and Terry Jones (Sir Bedevere).
Filming yesterday was like most filming, apparently disorganised and sporadic.
Eric Idle read a two-day old newspaper and when I approached him he said: "In answer to your question, Nixon is guilty.
"Secondly, if your newspaper is read by lots of delicious, eager and hungry girls, we are all staying in the Woodside Hotel. If it is read by lots of elderly grey-haired poofs, we are staying 'somewhere in Glasgow.'"
John Cleese draped himself full length before us and thought that "my chance of entering Parliament are now fairly low."
All of which will give some indication of the difficulty of an interview with a semblance of sanity.
The film has so far been shot on location in Glencoe in Killin. It will move on from Doune to Kelso and finally Hadrian's Wall before being completed in London.
And contrary to what one might imagine, the lads do not cavort around their hotel at night outdoing the Marx Brothers in razzamatazz.
Dignity
"We have a few drinks, we read and have a general chat around," said John.
And with that, during the long lull in putting together what they call their "cut-price epic," he takes is languid Kensington drawl to a spot beneath the battlements and proceeds to play some violent football with the rest of the Monty team.
As one of Europe's six leading cowards, he remains infinitely polite and infinitely droll - unlike others of his kind who are Trappist monks without a gag book...
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The Courier and Advertiser, 8th May 1974
[With great picture of the Pythons (Idle, Innes, Palin and Cleese)
lounging about in Doune Castle. No writer credited.]
'PYTHON' STARS AT DOUNE CASTLE
Royalty returned to Doune Castle, in Perthshire, yesterday after an absence of a couple of centuries.
But the notable nobles who stalked the grounds of the old stronghold near Dunblane bore no resemblance to the titled heads who once strolled around the towering walls.
In fact Doune's latest "Royal Family" included such legendary figures as King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad and Sir Bedevere, plus an army of their history-book cronies and a horde or two of serfs and peasant folk from the area around.
As you may have guessed, the ancient castle and its gardens were the setting for a completely different happening - the shooting of the latest in cinema sagas, otherwise known as "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".
The film, which is said to "make Ben Hur look like an epic," stars all of the regular "Python" crew, and may be the last production involving the six original members, since John Cleese has announced he won't be taking part in the next series for B.B.C.
Plot of sorts
It's due to be released in November if producer Mark Forstater can keep the cast to their tasks, and is being shot on location in Glencoe, Killin, Castle Stalker, Hadrian's Wall and Kelso, as well as at Doune.
According to Mr Forstater, "The Holy Grail" actually has a plot of sorts, though in typical "Python" fashion, they've already filmed part of the ending, which means that the leading figures have already met their dooms.
Yesterday they completed a song-and-dance routine involving a high-kicking sequence on top of a table in the banqueting hall, in which the serfs, played by locals from Doune, village, have to look lively to avoid flying platters of Dark Ages nosh.
Once it was in the can John Cleese explained his decision not to take part in the next TV series.
"I feel it's time to make a change and perhaps do something in theatre or cinema. I've nothing against 'Python,' though I'm not sure where the show can go now - maybe we've done it all."
Another story
Just then he was joined by Sir Galahad, better known as Michael Palin, who explained the possible format of the next series.
"We've signed to do six shows and they'll possibly be along the lines of the cycling tour episode in the last series, which means more of a theme than a collection of lunacies.
"We'll miss John in some ways and his going means we'll be down to five. Still Morecambe and Wise get along and there are less than three of them."
Following these revelations the pair went off to discuss the scenes still to be shot, which include three-headed knights and a battery of monsters.
"It's a formula which will be packing the cinemas long after Doune Castle returns to its long sleep following the strangest events to occur there since Mary Queen of Scots ran off with Bonnie Prince Charlie.
"But that," as Eric Idle remarked, "is another story entirely."
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Times, 10th May 1974
[In a piece called "Diary" by P.H.S., whoever that is]
The little village of Doune in Scotland, has been invaded by Monty Python people. The are making a film called Monty Python and the Holy Grail. According to a press release, the Grail will make Ben Hur look like an epic. My foot loose reporter, now at wild in the north, visited Doune Castle to look at the Pythons. He sent this report:
The fourteenth-century castle, which was the location for yesterday's shooting, was full of trendy movie makers - with clapperboards, arc lights and facetious prattle. The producer, an American called Mark Forstater, said that the movie was subtitled: "Where were you in 1282?" He said it was based on the King Arthur legend, and that a group of Python characters are told by God to search for the Holy Grail. God says: "Don't ask me where it is. I can't do everything." Forstater said that he might have to sue me if I described the film as blasphemous.
According to John Cleese, God is dealt with "quite nicely". I spoke to Cleese at lunchtime as he waited to be called on to the set to do his "Lancelot thing". He has a distant and magisterial manner, and said that he had taught for two years at a prep school in Western super Mare. The school has now been bought to make way for a housing estate.
He said he had been rather a tough teacher. "They're little animals, those wretches of ten"; he said. Of the movie, he said: "It is the usual garrulous rubbish." And he added that making a movie was the most boring, tedious, uncomfortable and unprofitable business he knew. Such had been the lack of moneys on The Grail film, he said, that the crew and actors had been asked to double up in bedrooms. After a fight, however, they had been given their own rooms.
Extras from the village were at yesterday's shooting. One was a retired teacher, done up in a serf's outfit. He said he was paid £2 a day for his labour. "I'm doing it for a laugh, or a giggle as the young say these days." He was not fond of his outfit. "There are no soles on the shoes", he complained. "But then I don't suppose in medieval times they worried much about the comfort of the serfs."
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Daily Mirror, 13th May 1974:
[On the cover of this issue was a picture of Cleese dressed as
a knight playing football with the caption "..now for something
completely different - centre pages". The centre pages have the
following articles plus a large photo by Peter Stone of the Pythons
in a footballers pose in front of a very modern white football.
Caption: "Monty Python United (well, almost, G. Chapman
having been transferred out of town). left to right: E. Idle, J. Cleese,
N. Innes. Front row: T. Gilliam, M. Palin, T. Jones". The top of
this page has two scissors and the motto "Cut out this page, read it
and re-cycle it"]
WILL MONTY PYTHON REPLACE SIR ALF?
It may sound ludicrous, but the men of Monty Python, stars of stage, screen and the odd television ad., believe that they have the necessary qualifications to carry on where Ramsey left.
"We'll do anything for anything for money," said a spokesman, "and we don't care who knows it.
"Not only that, but we have always wanted to be Archbishop of Canterbury." For more lunacy, please read on.
FROM BILL HAGERTY
on location in Doune, Scotland
Up on the hill, where the Castle has stood, grey, silent and minding its own business since the 14th Century, they are searching for the Holy Grail.
They are also playing football.
A strange combination, perhaps, but the fact is that the Circus has come to town - Monty Python's Flying variety, famous for its lunatic excursions into television, its books and records, and a film called "And Now For Something Completely Different."
Here at Doune Castle, a mere mountain goat climb from the back of the River Teith, a second film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," is being put together.
"Makes Ben Hur look like an epic," says the publicity sheet., Pythonishly. And the truth of the matter is that with a budget of £165,000, this is a shoestring production that has immense difficulty in lacing one whole shoe.
John Cleese, who has the face of a grave-digger and the height of a chimney, explains: "The money is so tight that they actually asked us to double upon an hotel room. Come off it, we said, we're getting a little old for that."
Another manifestation of the sickly wallet is that visitors to the location tend to find themselves recruited as extras: "Everybody's in the film," says Cleese. "You can't spend more than half-an-hour here without ending up in costume."
This nonplusses a number of people who have come just to see the Castle - "One of Scotland's best preserved fortifications," says the guide book.
The football bewilders them, too.
The Holy Grail tale tells how King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table go looking for the very plate used by Christ at the Last Supper.
With Graham Chapman as the King, Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Neil Innes (an ex-Bonzo Dog Band musician who augments this weird group from time to time) as the Knights, and Terry Gilliam as just about everyone else, it is better than evens shot that it will be a long hard search.
Jones and Gilliam are co-directing, Innes has written the music and everybody has written the script. One would not be half surprised to see them all peddling programmes come opening night.
Films being the go-stop-go operation they are, the cast sometimes finds itself with time on its hands. Hence the football.
"It's a pleasure to see you play, John," Idle tells Cleese. "You're wasted in comedy."
But more of that later...
The name "Doune" is from the Gaelic word "dun" meaning a fortified place.
We thought you would never ask.
WHEN THE SAINTS GO HOBBLING IN
Pythons 6, The Rest 3�
From our man on the terrace)
John Cleese, formerly of Weston-Super-Mare and Cambridge University, overcame the handicap of being 34 years old to star in the Pythons' impressive victory over a number of schoolboys and, judging by their performances, elderly men with broken legs.
Cleese, Michael Palin, Neil Innes and (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) Eric Idle, co-opted on to their side two schoolboys. It was later suggested that the schoolboys were really very short persons not unconnected with Glasgow Celtic Football Club. Say no more. Cleese, played in wizardly fashion, displaying ball control remarkable for a man with the face of a grave digger and the height of a chimney.
Innes showed considerable initiative in the Pythons' goal by moving the goalposts until they were no more than two feet apart.
Idle, whose physical weakness more than atones for his lack of skill, very nearly scored a goal. Palin spearheaded the attack, scoring two knees to the groin and a remarkable elbow to the kneecap.
A capacity crowd of five teenage girls encouraged the masterly Cleese with frequent sardonic cries of "Why don't you do your funny walk?"
The Pythons all wore chain mail and flowing skirts, which probably explains everything.
TEAMS: PYTHONS - N. Innes, E. Idle, M. Palin, J. Cleese, G. Best, Pele, B. Bremner
THE REST - Groucho Marx
AND HERE'S ANOTHER FOUL STORY
Ask Terry Jones to define Monty Python and he will tell you: "It's really a university revue with nobs on."
He is, of course, one half of that dynamic Anglo-American directorial duo, Jones and Gilliam (Gilliam is from Minneapolis).
Together they selected the locations for the film.
"Which shows what we know about it," says Jones. "We picked a place for the opening shots that looked great, but when we got there the crew had to haul the camera up a bloody great mountain."
Later, directing a scene inside the castle, Jones calls for chickens. A stuffed cat arrives, which he throws to the floor.
Then the chickens arrive plus three ducks, all very much alive. "Is there a poultry doctor in the house?" asks Palin.
Idle tells a chicken to stop clucking, but is ignored.
Jones shouts to the crew: "Okay, let's do another of our famous zippo scenes." The crew laughs dutifully and Jones falls over a chicken.
"Python fans might well be surprised by this film," he says. "For us it really is something completely different..."
RICHARD BURTON'S TIGHTS - SAY NO MORE
Cleese, Idle and Palin slump on the grass in the courtyard. Inside the castle, filming continues of scenes in which they do not appear.
Palin: "It's a pity the really mad member of out party isn't here. (Graham Chapman is away for the day.)
Cleese: "He's a true British eccentric. A friend of mine says that the first time he saw Graham he was standing by himself at a postbox, looking through the slot and winding an imaginary handle at the side."
Palin: "I had an hotel room next to his and he kept shouting 'Betty Marsden' in the middle of the night. Then in the morning I would find a note pushed under the door.
"There was nothing written on it except the signature, 'Betty Marsden'."
Idle: "It's just like Colditz in this castle. We ought to plan an escape."
Palin: "Easy. We challenge the Goons to a game of Soccer, force a free kick and when they forma defensive wall we can climb over it and escape."
Idle: "When I took my costume tights off the other day I found stitched on the soles of the feet the legend 'Derek Nimmo - Babes in the Wood'."
Cleese: "I've got Michael Wilding's shirt on."
Palin: "I wore Richard Burton's tights once."
Idle: "EVERYONE'S worn Richard Burton's tights."
Cleese: "Talking of Terry Gilliam, do you realise he only ever says one of two things: 'I really like that' or 'that really pisses me off.'"
Idle: "What about the time we were going to have some coffee and he said: 'Right, let's boil up a whole bunch of water.' Can you imagine anyone saying that?"
Palin: "I think I've got cramp in the lower part of my scabbard."
Idle: "You know, you can get roast beef in Scotland. You remember roast beef - that stuff we could afford to buy before Ted Heath said he would cut prices at a stroke."
Cleese: "Isn't this BORING? Let's send out for a cricket bat."
Palin: "A pelota kit, please."
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Daily Express, 13th May 1974
[Large picture of Cleese and Chapman enjoying, as the
stupidly long headline indicates, a pipe, a newspaper and
some tea. This picture was reprinted in a slightly larger form
(featuring Chapman's crown lying on the ground by his feet)
in Hotdog Magazine's Holy Grail article of October 2000 with
some pointless speech bubbles pasted over it, the idiots.
Caption: "Canteen tea at his elbow, the world's news at his
fingertips, Sir Lancelot (John Cleese) takes a break. Puffing along
at his side is King Arthur (Graham Chapman)"]
AT THE HIGHLAND COURT OF MONTY PYTHON, TWO KNITTED KNIGHTS FIND THEIR OWN HOLY GRAIL - A PIPE, A PAPER AND A CUP OF 20TH CENTURY TEA
PHOTO NEWS joins the Flying Circus as it pitches tent in filmland.
Picture by JOHN DOWNING
Words by IAN CHRISTIE
Doune in Perthshire, Scotland, is a tranquil little town with under a thousand inhabitants where practically nothing happens. Practically nothing has happened there since the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. So my pulses where set racing when rumours reached me that there were soldiers in the streets armed to the teeth. Even more disquieting was the whispered information that the castle by the town was being menaced by a gigantic dangerous rabbit. Sure enough both tales turned out to be true.
Medieval knights in chain-mail armour can be seen strolling down the street this very day and sinking lunchtime pints in the hostelries. And outside the fourteenth-century Doune Castle lurks the grotesque rabbit - 20ft. high from its paws to the tip of its ears - waiting to pounce.
All right, so it is made of wood and it's on wheels, but it is unmistakably a rabbit.
A Trojan-rabbit, would you believe, waiting at the gates as part of a plan to storm the place.
Legend
The explanation for the strange events that are causing a ripple on the calm surface of local life is the arrival on the scene of Monty Python's Flying Circus, a band of talented maniacs who are making their first feature film with a story - using the term loosely.
Called Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it has very little in common with the traditional legend of King Arthur.
"The idea started as a sketch for television," said John Cleese, who plays Sir Lancelot, "and we developed it from there. The six members of the Circus all contributed to the script, which originally hopped about in history.
"But we found we had enough material to be able to stick to the medieval period. We don't ride horses, though," said John Cleese. "We go on foot followed by page boys banging half-coconuts together to make the sound of galloping hooves. Not as expensive as horses and more fun."
Inside the castle director Terry Gilliam was setting up a shot in which Sir Galahad's vow of chastity is put under severe strain by the attentions of a lustful lady.
Other medieval maidens, played by models from Glasgow, shivered in their thin gowns and goose-pimples as they waited to be called for their scene. Cold places, castles.
Producer Mark Forstater had problems in the first place finding one he could use, for the Department of Environment shuddered at the thought of opening up drawbridges under its control to the Python Circus.
"They thought we would upset the dignity of their ancient monuments," Mark said.
Having got permission to shoot in Doune Castle he still has problems, for the castle is still open to sightseers. Two coachloads of Americans tramp around the set tripping over cables.
A formidable matron examines one of the girls in the cast as if she is in a zoo. "Hey Harry" she shouts to her husband, "come and look at Guinevere!"
Bizarre
An odious small boy touches John Cleese's armour and howls in disappointment "It's not real, it's knitted."
"Quiet please" shouts first assistant Gerry Harrison with some exasperation, "we're shooting."
The completed film should offer a bizarre comic experience featuring lunatic knights, wizards, witches, a contemporary historian and God who gets very bad-tempered when people grovel before him.
"God had a bigger part originally," said Circus regular Eric Idle. "But we couldn't decide which one of us should play him."
Outside the castle the great rabbit was being prepared for its attack and a heap of dead, stuffed cows, stags, and geese were ready to be thrown from the battlements on to invaders.
Eric Idle paused in his task of compiling a list of journalist' questions he is going to refuse to answer.
"I've got this great idea for the premiere," he said.
"I have had a couple of fires at home lately and, you know, firemen are terrific people. I'd like to have only firemen at the opening, sitting there in their uniforms and helmets with their engines parked outside." It should be quite an occasion.
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Newsweek, 20th May 1974, page 59
[More about the series this one, but it was in the Holy
Grail pressbook:]
ENTERTAINMENT
THE AMBIGUOUS PYTHON
"Pythonesque" is a new word in the English, or at least the British language; it denotes the surreal, the subversive, the mentally tongue-twisted, and above all, the comic. The term derives, of course, from Monty Python's Flying Circus (the title means nothing in particular), the notorious television comedy show, which since 1969 has been a favourite English indoor sport. Like so many other things in English, Monty Python is difficult for the foreigner to comprehend. In its satirical, sinister and sadistic sketches, the show communicates a special form of relief from the onslaught of the gloomy news that has inflicted itself upon the British media - and the British people. Recently, the Python troupe took its sets, film clips and wit to the stage of London's famed Drury Lane Theatre, where, during a limited run, the entertainers demonstrated why they are they the very cream of English comedy today, even better, in fact, in person than on TV.
While maintaining those traits associated with British humour - the dry, the clipped and the slightly cruel, the six-man Python crew has pushed into the far more dangerous territory of the surreal. Python sketches weave in and out of each other, without beginning or end. Visual motifs begin in one context and persist with complete incongruity into others. One notable sketch, involving a certain dead parrot nailed to its roost, starts halfway through the show, but doesn't finish until the encore. Thus, audience expectations are constantly mocked and defeated.
A characteristic element in this strange parade, which so frighteningly parodies reality, is the Pythonesque Olympics. Held every 3.7 years, it features such notable events as the 1,500-meter freestyle for non-swimmers, who simply jump into the pool and disappear, and the steeplechase for men who think they are chickens. But none of this holds a candle to the Philosopher's Football Match in which the Germans, who include Hegel, Kant and Marx (warming up on the sidelines) pit themselves against the great Greeks, with Socrates at the helm. During the match, not too much happens; philosophers wander about the field lost in thought as the crowd cheers and Confucius referees.
Who does Python satirise? The mentally ill? The Olympics? Philosophers? Television? Us? It is this startling ambiguity that makes the Python humour so beguiling. In the end, no single explanation is adequate for this comic technique, the illogical. One thing is sure, though, and that is the Python team's eagerness to parody the English stress on practicality and the English penchant for a logical positivist answer to any question, no matter how silly. All that is needed is a slight distortion of reality - filling the ranks of a quiz show panel with Che Guevara, Marx and Lenin, for example, and having the panellists bid for a set of furniture - and suddenly the whole notion of a safe and secure world explodes in giggles.
Although the Python team abhors individual egos and for that reason chose the pseudonymous Monty Python as its name, lanky John Cleese, 34, manages to emerge as the linchpin of the show. A graduate of Cambridge University, and a onetime NEWSWEEK staffer, Cleese explains that "Monty Python was the result of four years of frustration writing for television. We just put in all the stuff no one would use. Fortunately, the BBC can afford to take chances, and so they put us on, and by now we've built up a following of 10 million." Asked to pin down the Python style, Cleese throws up his hands, and then tentatively suggests: "We're a bit dangerous and subversive, especially by American standards. However, as a former head of the people one wishes to offend."
Loony: Cleese looks more like a banker than the loony comedian he is and the conventional appearance of the Python troupe is an important element of its success. The player's utterly sensible British deportment is a key to the secret of their subversion. They so resemble the archetypal Englishman with his bowler and rolled umbrella that we accept them as part of reality. And this allows them to go to work from the inside. Says Cleese, "It's a very silly humour, with a bit of thinking a long way behind it. If you want, you can abstract from the general idea behind the sketch, so there's a deeper level if you choose to look for it." The team developed the Marx and Lenin quiz-show sketch, Cleese explains, because "it's funny to ask Marx questions about football. But we believe the BBC would actually ask these kind of questions if they had Karl Marx in their studios. First they'd want to know what kind of person he is and then they'd hand him over to the sports department."
Cleese's personal inspiration for Pythonesque humour stems from his fervent admiration for another great in the history of English comedy - Spike Milligan and "The Goon Show." "There is something short and sharp and zany in that kind of humour that only British people like," Cleese explains. "And we ourselves got fed up spending hour after hour trying to think up punch lines. Then someone told me I should never kick out a sketch simply because it lacks a punch line. So we began moving from one sketch to the next without ant transition, while the rest of the comedy shows still tie themselves in knots over punch lines."
Teeth: Now embarked on a film entitled "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," the Python team manipulates its multimedia world with astonishing sleight of hand. Its players are masters of the long pause and the short frenzy. At the Drury Lane, they were graced by the presence of Californian Terry Gilliam's lavish animations, featuring musical teeth and anarchistic Christmas cards. And they were supremely comic, right from a dummy of Princess Margaret greeting the hooting audience to the final "Piss Off" projection, telling the audience it was all over in a manner characteristically Pythonesque.
-LAURENCE BERGREEN
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tvlife, August 1974, pages 66 onwards
["The magazine for all women who enjoy television", apparently,
and only 20p. Further sub titles for the piece: "THE DAILY
PROCESS... BOREDOM, COMPLAINTS" and "'MOST OF
THE TIME I FIND IT RATHER DULL...'". This piece is
covered with various sizes of that pic of Cleese doing that walk,
along with several other on-set pics of the Pythons dressed as
knights looking pissed off. Captions: "John Cleese as Sir
Lancelot... he hates dressing up"; "Carol Cleveland, the only girl
in the Monty Python team - she plays identical 19-year-old
virgins in the new film."; "And now for something completely
different... the Monty Python team on location in darkest
Scotland. Left: Terry Gilliam (co-director) goes over what's
laughingly called the script. After a hard day's knight, a call for
something refreshing (above), while John Cleese and Graham
Chapman catch up on the day's crazy events elsewhere"; and
"Silly, silly! What a load of knightly nonsense" Top left: Eric
Idle, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman and Michael
Palin on the trail of the Holy Grail. The other sketches are just
as silly, too... The Python team works hard for its laughs - but
the money, says Cleese, isn't very funny."]
WHY JOHN CLEESE IS BORED SILLY WITH ALL THOSE SILLY WALKS
The grinding, painful business of being of being funny is taking its toll of the Monty Python team, especially its star, John Cleese. The making of their new film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, has finally convinced him that he must turn his back on Python and let them return to a new TV series without him. But despite the teams' disenchantment, they have to admit that they are still as funny as ever... CHRIS ROBBINS visited them on location.
Finding a duplicating machine in the hall of the local hotel was the first clue that all was not what it seemed to be in the pleasant country town of Doune, in the Scottish Highlands. Babies bawled in the residents' lounge and the bathrooms were filled with women washing their smalls. In the dining-room two knights in full chain-mail ate their lunch in silence.
The Monty Python team were on location making their second full-length feature film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the hotel was doubling as their production office.
Doune is not Hollywood and Monty Python are not Walt Disney Inc. The atmosphere of disorganisation and penny-pinching, coupled with the boredom and low spirits of the cast, sometimes suggested amateur Thespians in the throes of a disastrous dress-rehearsal for the Christmas pantomime.
The truth was that after four weeks on the road most of the team had had enough. Even before they set out, it was accepted that the going would be tough because the film was to be shot on a shoestring budget. It was even suggested that they share hotel rooms, but they drew the line at that.
Most people are surprised that Python have to count the cost. The television series has become a cult and is now an industry which sustains international tours, TV specials, movies and best-selling books. But nobody is rich. The problem is that there are so many of them to share the spoils.
In their last film, And Now For Something Completely Different, they made an average of £1,400 each, which for writing and starring in a movie is very small beer. For this film, the stakes are similar and part of the team's contract stipulates that half their fee should be withheld against overspending.
"I have to do extra work to pay for the time spent on this film. That's how badly paid it is," said John Cleese.
Cash was so tight that the producer, Mark Forstater, had to borrow a pound to buy a drink. But the money is the only thing the team have to look outside for. (Michael White, presenter of Oh! Calcutta! put up half of the £165,000 budget and the rest came from a collection of rock groups.) The Monty Python team wrote the script together, provided their own music and two of them are co-directing. Just for the record.
John Cleese (Sir Lancelot) is the tall one who wears bowler hats and does silly walks, which is particularly silly as he does not like doing them. Offstage he is private, lazy and likes to eat dinner on his own. Hates dressing up.
Eric Idle (Sir Robin) is the nudging, winking one. Never gives interviews unless by accident. Almost as bored with it all as Cleese.
Michael Palin (Sir Galahad, the Chaste) is billed as the most natural and friendly of the team. At home he tries very hard not to be funny because his children hate it. If he looks even faintly satirical, at an unguarded moment, his youngest child kicks him. Graham Chapman (King Arthur) is the quietest, except when he has had a lot. Then he stands on tables in the bars of remote Scottish hotels and tells everybody very loudly that he is gay. Is frequently asked to leave bars in remote Scottish hotels.
Terry Jones (co-director) is described by Cleese as "strongly motivated", which sounds sinister but means that he does not share the former's boredom and laziness. His mind whirs almost as fast as the camera. When he's had a few he rambles on aimlessly about Chaucer.
Terry Gilliam (co-director) does the animation and is American as well. The only one who loves to play up to the Press, pull faces, jump up and down and make a fool of himself at the click of a camera shutter. His humour, it need hardly be said, is visual rather than verbal, which is fortunate as according to Idle he says things like: "Let's boil up a whole bunch of water".
Neil Innes (music) is part-time Python, ex-member of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Curriculum vitae is scanty but one or two "O" levels are suspected.
Carol Cleveland is the only woman in the team, a sort of thinking man's Barbara Windsor. Given to wearing moustaches and false eyelashes, due to Python's inability to determine sex. Poorly cast - plays identical 19-year-old virgins in the film. The only one in the crew worth looking at.
At the end of a hard day's filming, the last thing anyone wanted was to tell jokes.
Each day everybody thought everything had gone disastrously. And then came the transformation.
After dinner, the team gathered in the lounge of the hotel to see the rushes. The amateur theatrical group had temporarily transformed itself into a set of home movie buffs and settled down nervously to see the results of the day's shooting. A makeshift screen was put up and the lights dimmed. Hotel guests having their after-dinner brandies looked confused but sat tight.
After a few of the inevitable raucous laughs and rude remarks there was silence as they looked critically at how the day had turned out. After a while here was a collective sigh of relief. Yes, miraculously, it was funny and what was more it looked fantastic.
The process rarely changed from day to day. Boredom and complaints on the set, shredded morale at the end of the day, and then a revival at the showing at the rushes. The team seemed amazed at how good the cameraman managed to make it all look and at how the two Terrys had pulled it off.
"There's nothing to directing," Terry Jones confided modestly. "The art director fixes it all up for you and then the cameraman does the rest. It's so simple. All you have to do is wander around being bossy."
But, good film or not, John Cleese feels he has gone as far as he can with Python. Addicts will be grieved to learn he is not going to be in the next TV series.
"What's the point of doing another TV series? We've already done three," he said. "But the film is an advance on our earlier work, and it's certainly a development on the last series, when we found it very difficult to write anything that seemed at all new to us."
But even though the film turned out well, Cleese took little interest in performing it. He never seemed to be around when the rushes were shown and stayed in a hotel a safe distance away - living up to his reputation as a loner.
During filming he tended to wander around the set looking particularly sour, muttering to anyone who would listen how bored he was. As he had to wait for up to six hours to say nine words he had a point.
"Most of the time I find it very dull," he said. "I don't want to sit around in an uncomfortable place for hours on end doing nothing. It's just bloody uncomfortable and I refuse to pretend it's otherwise."
It is ironical that Cleese, the most disenchanted, has become the star.
"It usually means I get stuck with doing the publicity pictures, and as far as the others are concerned I'm welcome to that. A lot of inane photographers are always asking me to do funny walks. It really is humiliating."
He is not being funny. Two minutes later an innocent bystander shuffled up to him on the set and started the disastrous conversation: "Out of all your sketches, I love that one of the silly walks."
Ha ha. Cleese forced a bleak smile. He did the silly walks sketch three-and-a-half years ago and has had to talk about it five times a day ever since. He fears that unless he retires soon, silly walks will pursue him to the grave.
He has no doubt that his retirement will be happy. It will be spent writing with his wife, actress Connie Booth, and making industrial trading films on videotape, a form of filming he enjoys - "mainly because we do it in suits in warm offices.
"Acting is such a mug's game basically. It's all very nice to be recognised to begin with, but after a time it becomes a pain in the neck. I don't want to be recognised, I just want to sit. I'm a fairly private, English kind of person and a lot of the time I just want to be quiet. The trouble is that you can't just be recognised on Tuesdays. But every time it happens I feel that it's an intrusion on my privacy."
Cleese was longing for the present ordeal to end. "I shall have to make a reassessment a couple of weeks after I finish, but if I never had to make a film like this again I wouldn't be unhappy. Of course, if the net result is very successful I will be tempted to forget the reality and say it won't be so bad next time. But it always is."
Meanwhile, the other members of the team are preparing a TV series without him. Originally, they were worried they might be short of material, but that has given way to a feeling that Cleese tended to overbalance the programme. The hope is that it will develop along different lines. Monty Python will continue the grinding, painful business of being funny.
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Films and Filming, December 1974, pages 12-17
THE FACTS BEHIND THE FILM THAT MAKES BEN-HUR LOOK LIKE AN EPIC....
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. Produced by Mark Forstater. Music by Neil Innes. Written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin
'HE SAID WITH INCREDIBLE ARROGANCE...'
MONTY PYTHON challenges Gordon Gow to joust over art and life...
The six regulars of the Monty Python gang have collaborated in writing and performing their second cinema film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which according to the advance blurb 'makes Ben-Hur look like an epic'. Of these six, four held forth for films and filming on the matter of art-plus-life and suchlike, including Terry Gilliam who co-directs the film, and then additionally they roped in the genial Neil Innes who provided the score. A whelming collection - neither over nor under but just presently right and doing their best not to barrack one another in the course of such individual interviews as were held in the relaxed environment of Graham Chapman's house where the refrigerator holds, among other things, some cans of Fosters Lager, doubtless to fortify those devilish down-under accents which this group of Oxford and Cambridge graduates can summon up with more exactitude than any other English strolling players I've ever heard trying it. Since Chapman portrays King Arthur in this neo-Camelot essay, it is with him we ought logically to begin. So, let's.
***
Concerning Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Graham Chapman says: 'This terrible-or-marvellous King Arthur figure goes through the lot, with terrible thing happening in the background. To a large extent, he's immune from it - from the peasants who are trying to eat earth, literally scrabbling around in huge piles of turds. When you look at the way people lived in the past, and not at the way history books tell you they lived, when you actually discover the condition of the common people, it's really revolting. It really was a matter of searching for scraps in a heap of dung.
'So a lot of that is in the film. And a lot of the violence in the age is in the films... people getting their arms and legs chopped off. It happened then. It happens now but we don't notice - why don't we notice? It's reported on television but it has no effect on people.'
Essentially he is in sympathy with Arthur's pacifist aspirations. 'I've always been a pacifist myself, and I've found that it's a very good thing because when someone attacks you physically - and it's happened to me quite a few times - if you behave passively and just say, "Oh, go on and do it," they can't do anything. They're just unable to commit actual physical violence against you. It happened to me, for example, in a pub. I was being a bit show-offy I suppose, talking to a strange guy's girl friend, and he got a bit uppity about it, and he started bashing my head on the wall. But I offered no resistance and he couldn't carry on with the act of violence.
'It's best just to succumb and lie on your back like little dogs do. If a big dog comes around and gets aggressive, the little one just lies down on its back and puts its paws up in the air and everything all right: the big one won't bite.'
Chapman allows, though, that he has an aggressive streak in him too - or, as he put it after a longish pause to find the exact phrase he wanted, 'I'm aggressively humble. On location for this Holy Grail film when we were in Scotland I went into a pub where there was a crowd of the regulars of that lace: young people, old people, quite a mixture. And I thought they were all a bit uptight, because they were all out with their wives and girl friends having nice drinks. And I'm afraid there's a trait in me that's aggressive in that I try to split that up and make them think again, because I know how basically unhappy most of them are. So I decided to kiss the entire pub. I went round, man and woman, boy and girl, trying to kiss the lot, and succeeded mostly, except that one particular person was very annoyed and I got thrown out.
'The next day I decided that the only thing to do was to go back to the same place and not be frightened. So I went back. Met the same bloke. Immediately I walked in the door he said, "Oh I suppose you're going to kiss everybody again tonight, are you?" That got a bit of a laugh from his friends. I took no notice, went up to the bar, bought myself a drink, and then went and sat down right next to him and said, "I think you're rather boring, and you're probably the kind of person that only talks about cars and the number of girl friends you've had." And the girl who was sitting next to him suddenly said, "You're right. He does. That's all he does." And the other people started joining in. "That's all he talks about. Nothing but that." He went bright red. It was a lovely moment. But it doesn't always work out. Sometimes you get your head bashed in."
Chapman studied medicine at Cambridge and would probably have gone into psychiatry, except that he feels it's 'an awful job. A lot of people in medicine are conservative because they've come from conservative backgrounds. They're usually sons and daughters of doctors. That's one of the things that has held psychiatry up for so long. People who are doing it are incapable of looking into other people's minds because they don't know what normal people are like - not normal - average, one could say - all of these words are horrible. But psychiatry students are theorising about their own thoughts. The way they're made at the moment has very little to do with real people. It has to do with getting a medical degree and then deciding to specialise in psychiatry. But during that time the student has met no average people. He's been in a medical school - an ivory tower. Psychiatrists, as we loosely call them, should be living in the society they are trying to help. It's a bloody difficult job.'
I wondered if his Python work, whether writing or performing, served incidentally to get something out of his system that needs to be gotten out. He thought maybe so. 'Certainly in terms of writing. You get the argument from a lot of people that you're supposed to write to make people laugh. That's true. But also everything you do is written from something in your own experience. Nothing is written from outside the universe. You can't do a good situation comedy about stones. It's got to be animate. It has to be about human beings. Writing is therapeutic for me because - as you say - it gets something out of my system, some frustration, some anger. You almost have to be angry to write, I think. If you're angry about something, then you can always put something down on paper. If you're not, if you're just totally happy - and I don't actually know anyone in the whole bleeding world that is - you wouldn't be able to write a single thing. But if you're angry about something, it's possible to be witty, possible to be interesting, possible to write.'
With half a dozen Python men credited as writers of the screenplay, I asked Chapman how the collaborative process worked? 'Well, we don't actually collaborate,' he said at once. 'What we do is to write little bits in separate groups. Two of us will go off and write something, another two will be writing somewhere else. Then we read it out to each other. And we're capable now of being very critical and saying, "That's rubbish." Then we rewrite; one person will take something that Eric has written and go away with Eric and work on it. Or maybe something that John Cleese and I wrote would subsequently be pushed over to Michael Palin and me.'
This leads to no feeling that a loss of identity has taken place. 'We haven't got one.'
The point would come up again on another occasion when I met John Cleese.
***
Michael Palin says of the Grail job, 'We decided to make a cinema film which would be very different in style from the first one we did, And Now For Something Completely Different, which in fact turned out to be something completely similar. It was bits of the TV shows, made for America primarily, and I felt it was a bit of con on the British public because they'd seen most of the things before, and there was no new material. Some of the sketches that we refined worked better, others worked worse. So now we decided to do a completely new kind of film.
'The thing that we hadn't done on the telly series, but that we were starting to develop, was the idea of doing a story. And so we thought we'd try and wrote the plot for a film - but that didn't quite work out. Everybody was writing different little sketches. And one of the sketches began with a scene between King Arthur and some sentries on a wall... as simple as that. This was read out at a meeting and thought we'd keep it in. And then the film became half mediaeval, based on this King Arthur character, and half present-day. In fact we had the knights in mediaeval times having counterparts in the present day. Galahad became a solicitor who lived in Surrey and had so much money that he couldn't get it in his house. There was money everywhere, and he was saying, "Sorry about this damned cash." And he pronounced his name G'had. But then, that seemed again to be ordinary Python territory. So about a year ago we decided to rewrite the script and make it entirely mediaeval. Within that we've still got the range to develop little Python characters who would normally be in present-day garb - and yet it has the unity of being an historical film.'
***
John Cleese recalls how the television show's offbeat title evolved. When they first went to the BBC they were taken in hand by comedy advisor Barry Took, whose advocacy of the idea led at first to it being loosely described as 'Barry Took's Flying Circus' because there was a general feeling that it would be a matter of six blokes doing strange things and looking untidy. 'We quite liked the label, and we thought we'd keep the latter part of it but then we wondered whose Flying Circus. We all have a hostility to the kind of people who put their names up - the Jim Smith Show, kind of thing. Everybody does that. So we thought we'd dream up a name we all liked. When we finally came up with Monty Python it made everyone laugh for about five minutes. It touched a communal nerve. Monty had connotations of people with seedy little mustaches trying to pretend that they'd had something to do with war in the desert. And then the Python was all the treachery of a musical agent type, you know.'
The bunch is invariably alluded to as the 'Monty Python team' in line with the current-affairs TV ethos of hopeful teamwork, which arguably can be said to be essential to such set-ups as football teams but in other spheres might limit a person's oneness. Cleese agrees that it could imply a deprivation of the spirit, but in the case of the Python lot he feels that the 'team' is usefully integrated nevertheless. 'All of the material - except to a degree, the animation - is vetted by everyone at every stage.'
Still each keeps a distinctive personality and becomes identified with one or two specific quirks of invention. Cleese, for example, is the man with the erratic long legs from 'The Ministry of Silly Walks' with its put-down of bureaucracy and its favourable-funny acceptance of eccentricity. The idea developed from notions shared by Cleese and Graham Chapman. 'We had the idea that there should be a Ministry of Something, like perhaps a Ministry of Anger, where everyone was just routinely angry with each other, whether they were just discussing whether they wanted tea or whether the morning post had arrived - which I still quite like as an idea: maybe it could still be done one day. But when we mentioned it Mike and Terry reacted positively and then at the next meeting they'd come up with the thought that it should be silly walks. I liked it, but not amazingly so. Although it's probably the best-known of all the things I've done, it's by no means my favourite, not by a very long chalk. But when we went out to film it for the TV series, I was aware that it was funny. My favourite moments in it are a couple of lines, which when we did it in our live show at Drury Lane you never heard because the audience was laughing too much anyway. There's one line to the effect that "last year the government spent less on silly walks than it did on industrial re-organisation" - which I say in the course of explaining all the problems I have running the ministry on a limited budget. I always loved that line, but I'm sure nobody's ever heard it. At Drury Lane I didn't even bother to say the lines: I used to discuss the weather with Michael Palin, because on account of the physical joke of the walk itself, nothing I said could be heard.'
Cleese considers the script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to be 'markedly different from anything we've ever done. In fact I think it's probably the only real step forward that we've taken in the last two-hand-a-half [sic] to three years. When we started out we developed for a couple of years, and then I think we sat and worked out the other variations without progressing. But here there was a continuous storyline.'
He would concede, too, that the TV audience is virtually one or two people in front of a single set - many more over the nation, of course, but in terms of performer-to-spectator an exceedingly intimate thing - whereas cinema has a collective and at the same time more captive public, unlikely to wander out at any given moment in search of a cup of tea or something. Plus, of course, the fact that the screen is bigger - but that's a technical thing which I don't understand the implications of. Occasionally I have the intuitive feeling that for cinema I should be doing something differently from TV - but that is almost instinctive: it's not based on any understanding of theoretical principles.
'I remember when Bedazzled came out, I saw it in New York, and I was extremely jealous because I thought it was so good. And Peter Cook and Dudley Moore told me that when it had come out in England everyone had said they had not made the transition from the small screen - because in England they were known as TV people. But there was no mention ever of that in the States in all of the 60 or 70 different reviews - because they didn't know Pete and Dud worked also on TV. And I believe that people get a preconceived idea.'
Cleese, of course, has appeared briefly in sundry previous cinema films: The Statue, The Best House In London, Interlude among them. 'And I did realise that it was different from TV - because there, by the time we'd done about four Monty Pythons it was like playing at home, football-wise. We knew the camera crew's faces, we knew the studio, we knew the make-up girls, we knew the feel of the place. And when you are working in a team with whom you generally work, there's an enormous sense of security. You don't have to go through all this business of getting to know people, as you would in a play or a cinema film.
'When I went into the film of It's a 2' 6" Above-the-Ground World, in which I was very bad, it was a long time since I worked on my own, out of the context of a team. And I suddenly realised how difficult it was to walk in and meet the director and shake him by the hand, and sit down and discuss it, and then forty minutes later to be doing a take.'
For all that, there can be occasions within the 'team' when one person is not en rapport with the rest: 'Oh, absolutely, Michael Palin has kept a diary which I would dearly love to see in years to come. It would probably make a fascinating study for a psychiatrist - rather like the history of the Balkan States in 1870 to 1910, by which I mean the varying of the people's relationships, the movements of alliances - how so-and-so and so-and-so get on very well for a time, and then something happens and they become slightly resentful of each other. I don't want to create the impression that there has been continual warfare or anything like that, because I think as a group of remarkably different individuals, we got on very well over five years. But I was fascinated a great deal of the time - since I was part of the process as well; I'm not suggesting I was standing in an Olympian way outside it - I was fascinated to see the way that friendships changed. I don't suppose there has been any moment when any one member of the team has not been thoroughly sick of another one. There were six of us, so we each had five relationships, so that's thirty relationships. With the possible exception of Michael Palin, who is such an extraordinarily nice man - I think one or two of us never got sick of Michael.
'When I talk like this, people may think what an awful thing. But if they actually examine what happens in their office or wherever over a period of five years, it is true that you go through periods of five years, it is true that you go though periods of getting on very well with people and you go through other periods when people rub you up.'
Team membership, however, has been full of advantages for Cleese. 'These advantages were very obvious at the start. Then there were a number of disadvantages which became more obvious the longer we went on. I'm quite a good team man in the short run, but not in the long run. Whether it's to do with being an only child or not, God knows. But I don't like the feeling of being tied down too much. And the trouble when you are one of a team of six is that you finish up having not much say in your own life.
'It's been a difficult thing to say that I didn't want to do any more television with the group, because I felt that I had done all that I was going to enjoy and I was getting bored - especially with the mechanics of having to be out filming, and all the time-wasting that that involves, and the rehearsing. I didn't find it very satisfying latterly. This is why I'm not in the new television series. They've gone ahead with my blessing and good wishes - in fact, I think they've got some of my material which I wrote with Graham in the first show, and I'm glad about that.
'I think I want to spend much more time now writing. Because the lovely thing about writing is that nobody says you've got to be anywhere at any time. All they want is a script, at a particular point, but how you do it and when you do it and where you do it is almost irrelevant. The other thing I've found is that it's enormously time-consuming, and I really do want to have more time to pursue the things that I enjoy. I suppose in the last five years of Python I have worked many more weekends than I've had off. And in the end you think "For what?" On the other hand, I enjoy writing, although I find it very hard as anybody who's any good always does... he said with incredible arrogance. But I've only ever met two people who said they found writing was easy, and neither of them was very good.
'But there'll be time now for enjoyment, too. And I enjoy just finding out about things, because there is so much about that is interesting and exciting which I've never seemed to have time for in recent years. Working for the series, and taking on occasional other commitments, you tend to think when you're out at dinner that you have to get up at a quarter to eight the next morning. You cease to enjoy your spare time, because ninety per cent of your time is occupied by work. Another thing is that I don't find it terribly easy to relax. It's an almost pathological fear of being bad - I think you ought to relax and realise that we're going to do bad work sometimes. The right to fail, you know.'
***
Neil Innes, who declares modestly that he 'only writes the music' for the Grail film and for Python activities by and large, had been going his own way until the group encompassed him. 'First I started working on their record albums when they wanted tunes to go with fairy-tale things, or there was an atrocious football song they wrote which I set to music. And then we went on tour, and for the stage show my own music fitted in with what they were doing. We were obviously of a like mind and I'm getting more and more involved with them.'
At London University, Innes studied fine art: 'That really offered no hope of a sensible job, because all you can do with the eventual qualification is teach other people fine art. And I just wasn't interested in that. So when I left college I joined the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, writing and also playing keyboards. It lasted five or six years and then finished up.
Now for the Pythonised Arthurian period where does he seek his inspiration? 'Well, one obviously looks at mediaeval styles of music, and in doing so you find it's not that far removed from modern-day formats of pop records. There's about three or four chords in it, and then just repeat a theme. Having read the script and appreciated the basic feeling behind the film, it is kind of an anachronism of a present-day situation. In a way it's a parody of life today, and it's made more real because it's set in an olden age and one sees the cruelty more easily because they were more overtly cruel. That's in the film, but it's still funny.
'So I've hovered between two ways of doing the score. I wrote more music for it than could possibly be used, but half of it could point certain heroic moods or terrifying moods, and some of it is semi-boring here-we-go again kind of music and it's catchy. And I'd like the score to be catchy.'
***
Monty Python and the Holy Grail has two directors, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, and I talked with the former. Gilliam did the bemusing animation of the tele-series (as he has also done for Grail) and occasional walk-on parts. I asked him how it is possible for two people to direct a film: a situation not unique but nevertheless uncommon.
'Perhaps it's not possible,' Gilliam allows. 'The difficulty in our case was that we're two very similar people. We both operate on adrenaline, which doesn't make for coherent direction. It's like everybody running around with their heads chopped off.
'After the first couple of weeks of that, however, we subdued ourselves. I think if your abilities don't match up quite as well as Terry's and mine do , it wouldn't be possible to get through it. But we did, and we're still speaking to one another. But I think it would have been better if one had been the outgoing person and the other had been very quiet and introspective. But in fact both of us are large-type people.
'But you don't really direct Python. I think all we really did was organise a few things, like deciding that the camera ought to be pointing over there, or people ought to be wearing certain kinds of costumes - because Python directs itself really.'
What the team-members seemed to feel was that Gilliam was the guy with the visual sense whereas Jones was better suited to bringing out the emotive stuff from the performers. Gilliam is an American who was educated at a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles: 'Most of the graduates become insurance salesmen. I studied political science, mainly because it's easier to major in than art.'
He prefers the term film-maker to director, because 'directing is the great ego trip for most people - the kind who read about Napoleon all the time, you know. I don't get that kind of kick. The thrill is being able to make films, from the beginning to the end - that's the fun part of it.'
Ask him to name his favourite directors and Gilliam mentions Kubrick, specifically for Dr Strangelove and Paths of Glory, but he cleaves to the opinion that what counts is not the opinion but the film. Thus he has a fondness for Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, for The Sugarland Express and for La grande bouffe - 'one of the great films of all time. A film that we should have made. I would be very proud if Python could make a film as outrageous as that.' He would concede, too, in addition to his enthusiasm for the outrageousness, that La grande bouffe has a lot to say about life as it is lived today - whereas Monty Python and the Holy Grail 'has a lot to say about life as it was lived in the 13th century, which I'm sure has a great deal in common with today'.
Chapman agrees instantly, 'Quite right. Because we haven't progressed one bleeding jot - not one iota.'
and now for something completely different, it's...
[Accompanying this piece are some exclusive black-and-white
on-set shots never reprinted anywhere else, as far as I know
(the exception being a still from ANFSCD). They are captioned
thus:]
The story so far as seen on previous pages:
Top row (l-r): King Arthur (Graham Chapman) and Sir Bedevere (Terry Jones) riding in the enchanted boat to Castle Aaaaaaagh; the knights battle with the vicious beast that guards the cave at Caerbanag; Sir Bedevere examines the alleged witch (Connie Booth) brought to him by the bloodthirsty villagers.
Lower level (l-r): Sir Lancelot (John Cleese) kills a guard at the Wedding Feast; Wedding guests sing about the Prince of Swamp Castle (Terry Jones) and his great escape from death; Village life in the 10th Century
The fierce three-headed knight (Terry Jones, Graham Chapman and Michael Palin)
Tim the Wizard (John Cleese) playing with his pet special effects rabbit
The Lord of Swamp Castle (Michael Palin) introduces Sir Lancelot (John Cleese) to the assembled wedding guests, most of whom Sir Lancelot has just maimed or killed
The Monty Python team taking a mediaeval break (l-r: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin)
Concorde (Eric Idle), Sir Lancelot's page, introduces the Prince of Swamp Castle to the assembled guests
Concorde carries the newly dead Prince (Terry Jones) into the Wedding Ball
John Cleese introduces one of the silly bits in 'And Now For Something Completely Different', Monty Python's first excursion into cinema
King Arthur (Graham Chapman), the Knights of the Round Table, and their pages, ride in search of the Holy Grail
Neil Innes, of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, wrote the music for Monty Python's epic saga.
|
| | | | |
| | | |
|
New Musical Express, 25th May 1974, pages 26-27, 30-31
[The issue which included the free Tiny Black Round Thing
flexi-disc. Front cover featured a giant DP Gumby stomping around
London with the Post Office Tower tumbling. Word bubbles emanate
from this and other buildings saying 'Help!'; 'Psst Wanna score'; 'My
brain hurts' and 'LEMON CURRY?'
Under the disc it reads:]
The piece
of cheap plastic
you have just prized
delicately away from this
page (what do you mean, you've torn
it � dolt!) comes to you ABSOLUTELY FREE
from NME, D.P. Gumby, Charisma Records and those
blokes who recorded this stuff during their run at the Theatre
Royal, Drury Lane � a full albumsworth of which will shortly be
released on the Charisma label. If you're the kind of bone idle
hippie who hangs around dole queues and can't screw enough
out of social assistance for a decent player, you may
need to use some kind of weight to ensure your flexi-disc
doesn't slip under the stylus. A bust of Galileo is
ideal for this purpose. Failing this, a slab of
con... ...2p piece has been
k... ...well (what do you
...d you 2p 'til
...day)
[Unfortunately, the sticky bit that the flexi was stuck to
the page with covers up most of the text at the bottom.]
[Photos accompanying the main article include: a picture of
the knights laughing between takes; a grid featuring nine faces
from the film (Jones, Chapman, Gilliam, Innes, Palin, Cleese,
Mark Forstater, Idle, and Andrew Tyler, "freelance journalist
of this parish"); the two Terrys directing; Cleese playing
football in full Lancelot gear; Idle and Innes with a guitar; and
the knights marching in long shot. Plus, a short script extract
for the Black Knight scene, entitled "A Small Piece Of Script".
When the article continues a few pages later the title reads
"Consumer's Guide to PEARL CARR and TEDDY
JOHNSON Part Six (Some more of what you were reading
on p.27)"]
HI THERE, TIGER!
And welcome to Page Twentysix of this week's credibility-destroying issue. Next week we'll be coming over all serious again and attempting to rebuild our image as a Legitimate Musical Journal - but for now...let's talk about bottoms. Better still relax, sit back, and enjoy a good story about MONTY PYTHON making a film in Scotland. It's very well-written by a jolly nice journalist we know, and the whole thing's quite a treat and exceptionally good value, if a bit runny...
Verbals:
ANDREW TYLER
Visuals:
BARRY LEVINE
The Dunblane Hydro bestrides a cemented hillock just five miles across freeway and dale.
In the spring months it's entirely encircled by thickets of National Buses from English mining towns, most of its residents being grey, wizened ladies with dry, furry hair and beige stockings who, because there's football on the telly, sit drawing breath in the hotel lounge.
It's an enormous place, with all the festering appeal of St. Pancras at sunset. Yet the Hydro serves as a kind of engine-room for the local community.
In the basement is the town's legendary masseuse, a brawny, pink-skinned woman with trucker's thighs and a smile of unparalleled radiance. This woman does things with the back muscles that you wouldn't believe; rolling and kneading them between her fingers, smacking and tugging and inducing all manner of prurient notions the likes of which become clear the moment you're back on your feet.
It's just the thing for a couple of London boys who got waylaid after a man concert in Glasgow and would up searching for The Holy Grail (containing droplets of blood from Our Lord) with several dozen other looneys and imbeciles.
This last turns out to be the latest, most outlandish, and freeloading scheme of Monty Python's Flying Circus, supported with cash from the likes of Zeppelin, Floyd, Charisma and Island, and a West End mogul called Michael White. And it's as repellent as anything they've attempted before, featuring star and bit acts being constantly harangued with sheep excrement, mattresses, mediaeval hangnail and a glove-puppet rabbit that bites the heads off knights and bloodies their jowls.
"A compellingly turgid melodrama," according to NME's film critic.
"A cheap mediaeval extravaganza... makes Ben Hur look like an epic," maintains Python.
So here we are in Blundane with a city-charged adrenaline power-pack tippling over the edge and pretty soon you discover there's no way of meshing with local opinion in this kind of condition. Where the devil are the Python crew? They were supposed to be mere miles away in Doune, filming in the local castle.
Bawn, of Python (Monty) Films Ltd., says they're dragging behind schedule slightly and plan one more day on a Killin mountainside, some 50 or 60 miles away.
There's a prop truck leaving from the Doune Woodside 6.30 the following morning and Tim Read of U.A. and I are aboard. We're driven by a jolly sod called Mick, whose friends are also called Mick. Or sometimes Keith.
Mick says he's ready for anything and although he's not sure about progress to date he's under the impression the crew, including Python's two Terrys (Gilliam and Jones), have been in Scotland a couple of weeks lining up background shots and shooting random "fill" scenes.
"Bloody nerve of these people," says Mick. "I gets up this morning at six-a-bloody-clock and they tell me the Pythons have arrived and my room is wanted for one of them, so now I've got to look for another hotel. 'Ere I am six-a-bloody-clock in the morning, packing up my gear and trying to get this lot out to the set gurgle arrgh."
In Mick's rentatruck we burrow through the lumpy Perthshire countryside and, a little after eight, arrive at a Killin farmhouse where Arthur's bloodstained knights are working through a breakfast fry-up; faces concealed by runny beards and scrambled eggs.
We join minstrel-knight Neil Innes for one more cup of coffee and a cigarette, and a man in a sagging roll-neck sweater runs over asking Tim and I, "How would you boys like to be pages today?"
It transpires that Python crew-members have been calling on locals all week, dragging them away from their loved ones and getting them to perform perverse mediaeval acts in front of a specially-imported American camera that breaks apart whenever the camera wind drops and the sun peeps out from behind the clouds.
It's a tight budget. Somewhere in the region of £200,000. Which is something like half the figure required to do a relaxed job.
The crew are all toiling for record-low wages. Extras who utter less than 13 words are rewarded with £2 a day, and Python people - each of them playing a handful of roles - are reported to be working for zero... contenting themselves with promise of lucrative royalties and even more fame.
With Neil at the wheel we motor a couple of miles to the location, set steep on the side of a hill.
Deep inside a ravine is a muddy cave wherein is said to dwell the fugitive rabbit; paws of a panther and steely teeth that can divorce a man from his head with a single gulp.
This morning King Arthur (the lovely Graham Chapman) and his knights plan to exorcise the truculent beast who, alone, bards the way to The Holy Grail and a satisfactory conclusion to the film.
John Cleese has persuaded his frame into a cleft on a hillock where he reads a paperback in full ceremonial gear. Chapman, with what looks to be a genuine clump of facial hair, is an enthralling Arthur-cum-Francis-of-Asinine in majestical robes and rest-easy bootees.
Hello Arthur.
"Hello yourself!"
So what's going on, already?
Graham as Arthur and Arthur as Graham are almost melancholy this morning. Alert and full of bodyheat yet not the disgusting looney you'd half anticipated... not that we didn't always know those antics were just for the television cameras and that no-one's personal habits could be that all-round depraved.
Cleese put his tabard on it the next day at Doune when he said darkly: "It's the enthusiastic ones. The ones, when you're walking along the street just quietly going to buy a newspaper, who lean out of their vans and shout 'Ere Monty, give us one of yer funny walks. At the same time about 40 other people turn around and start nudging each other: 'Oh look it's that newsreader from ITV.'
"That can be very embarrassing. But 90 per cent of the people are very nice. If they want to say something they come up to you and say it quietly."
"And then the people that were of Antioch brought forward the grenade that it might be blessed. And St. Attila raised it on high..."
The Holy Handgrenade, a glittering org not unlike the one used by Queen Majesty for the Coronation, is the only way out of their troubles.
To invoke its awesome power Arthur has to read from the Book Of Armaments, housed in a broken-down cart guarded by Brother Maynard and his rabid monks and containing the fingernails and ossified kneebones of dead saints.
"...three shall be the number thou shalt count and the number of the counting shall be three. Four thou shalt not count. Neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out."
Michael Palin, crazed cyclist and laundromat confidante to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, reads the lines in a squealing falsetto, surrounded by his brother knights, one of whom played by Eric Idle, is soiling his armour.
"That's Sir Robin," says Chapman. "He's not in the original story, mind you, but we decided to introduce him. He hangs to the back a good deal and runs away very quickly.
"Then there's Bedevere. He's quite strange. Another dimension. That's Terry Jones. Neil Innes is playing Gawaine and Terry Gilliam is playing the parts that need a lot of make-up and are very uncomfortable because he's the only one who'll do that sort of thing. And John is Lancelot."
Python animator Terry Gilliam and housewife-impersonator Terry Jones have been elected to direct the epic. Jones the Serious and Gilliam the Good-Natured goof with Quinn the Eskimo features and a boundless capacity to accommodate Eric Idle's rancid put-downs.
Gilliam laughs madly and pretends the whole thing's as easy as popping a blackhead, but the gleeful profile drops at the day's end and he begins to resemble a worried man. Just like Terry Jones in fact, who has no intention of masking his anguish.
"The first shot of the film," says Chapman, "we did in Glencoe, quite high up on the side of a mountain. We were going through a rather involved dialogue scene about three or four minutes long, when the camera broke down after 15 seconds - the first shot of the entire film! They had to cut it, and we had to wait around while they tried to get another camera, and for three days we had to use cameras not equipped for sound. It means dubbing on dialogue for the first three days' work which is a bit awkward."
It's not as winky as it sounds, mind you.
There's an almost lurid attention to detail and period etiquette. Costumes are by Royal Shakespeare Co Ltd., Stratford, and by Nathans of Drury Lane. And most scenes are shot (and re-shot) with a smokey Canterbury Tales aroma accomplished by use of a pungent incense expelled from hand-operated bellows.
"How do you like the smoke?" a props man asks assistant-director Gerry Harrison.
"All right, was it?"
"Yes. It was very good."
"There's a battle scene," says Graham, "where we didn't have as many extras as we would have liked but it looks like a lot on the screen. We're having about 200 involved at one point and we're also having numerous numbers of extremely pretty ladies in one particular scene, which I'm not in, actually. But then that doesn't matter because I'm a poof."
Aside from this one carnal feast it's the usual appalling Python violence, with excessive amounts of tearing and shredding of flesh. Knights are continually bombarded with dead cattle and lunch a lot on mixtures of burnt sheep-bones and animal-droppings.
Worse than the Peckinpah tennis-match sketch, says Chapman.
"Yesterday Neil had his head bitten off by the rabbit. That was fairly horrifying. And in the final sequence there's a bit where Arthur gets lots of human droppings thrown all over him."
Why would anybody want to do a thing like thing?
"It's the French, you see. They're taunting him. Excuse me I have to go and do a bit now."
And so have Tim and I; togged up four inches thick in knobbly tights, tops, and belts that allow our uniforms to swill around our persons. We're supposed to look cool and uninterested while Chapman, Cleese, Palin, Jones and Idle dither with the Holy Hand-grenade.
"Would it help to confuse it if we ran away more?" Sir Robin enquires.
"Shut up and change your armour," replies the unhelpful King Arthur.
"Have you heard about the masseuse at the Dunblane Hydro?" I ask Eric Idle during a break in shooting, knowing full well Lone Eric can't stand being interviewed, but hoping he's hot for Scottish women with thick thighs.
"That's my beard you're wearing," says Idle, astonished that a music writer should have the fall to cower alongside him in the costume he'd been wearing just one day before.
"That's a very good imitation of me," he finally decides.
Thanks very much... I know you don't like doing interviews, but how about...
"Careful with that beard, won't you? I have to wear it tomorrow."
Sure thing, Eric... I know you don't like doing interviews, but how about if I kind of creep up on you when you're least expecting it - and see what your reaction is then?
A few minutes later I approach Idle again with my tape-recorder just when he's most expecting it.
"Interviews are so boring," he confirms. "People you expect to be interesting, just go winding on and on, and the whole procedure's such a waste of time."
Aw common, Eric. We could make music, you and me.
"The Ellsberg interview in Rolling Stone was a worthwhile read because it divulged all sorts of facts that wouldn't otherwise be available. But that's an exception."
"Why don't you write down some questions on a piece of paper and Mike Palin and I will answer them over lunch?"
Mid-morning snack is served from bins and pails.
Cold, congealed scrambled eggs, sweating sausages, soiled rolls. Lunch comes off the back of the lorry, down the hill and quarter of a mile along the road. Rodent stew, sticky pie, and squash.
But first, knights and pages gather on a hill-ledge for a disappearing-into-the-skyline shot; knights whinnying on imaginary horses, pages following in profile making horse-noises with coconut shells.
A man from the local press has arrived with camera pack. A rust-haired clown in flappy check jacket and cord trousers.
"A member of the fascist press to ask inane questions," says Idle. "I want to tell him a lie. What can I tell him?"
"Tell him his hair looks nice," says Chapman.
The camera goes gung ho again and someone remarks how this filming business is such a disaster.
"It's a disaster that frankly parallels the Boer War, although the machinery these days isn't quite advanced." says Cleese.
"It's not as bad as a famine," Palin observes.
It's very avant-garde, I remark (but I don't think anyone heard).
Notes from a Perthshire film set: the grass is green and pointed. The clouds are wavy and grey. My armour doesn't fit very good. But here are the questions anyway.
How tall are you?
What's your favourite colour?
What is the most boring thing you've ever done?
Are you scared of rabbits?
Are you scared?
Do you like making films?
What do you think of echoes?
What do you think of echoes?
A hut has been constructed on a lull on the hillside. A sheep-dung stew is brewing by an open fire. In the dirt yard outside a chicken scrambles around, one leg pegged to the ground by a length of string. Terry Gilliam and Suko Forstater, whimsical oriental wife of producer Mark Forstater, stare hazily at the camera, rolling from foot to foot.
There's no apparent logic to these events, but they complete a day's shooting and the crew load up for the trek back to the Woodside.
The most brain-scarring Python story of all time involves not a droplet of excrement, not so much as one single sliver of animal remains. It concerns the usually moderate Tony Smith, promoter of Python's recent Canadian tour.
The tour, across the breadth of the country, had been the usual forlorn business of drab changing rooms, drab hotels and more than a comfortable amount of zigzagging from town to town.
One night most of the crew were gathered blandly in a hotel room, examining each other's knuckles, when Tony Smith, in a moment of uncharacteristic frenzy, invited the boys to get themselves together and smash the room into tiny pieces.
"G'won," said Smith. "I'll pay the bill in the morning."
But the Pythons, probably unaware of famous rock 'n' roll precedents for this kind of nonsense, were satisfied to peel off little bits of wallpaper while Smith went on a rampage hurling furniture across the room and breaking toothbrushes in half.
"That's how boring it could all get," says Idle.
Idle and Innes, companions since the days of "Do Not Adjust Your Set", a BBC innovation featuring the eccentric talents of Bonzo Dog, are hunched together on a bench outside the Woodside, guzzling beer and trying to remember chords to Beatle songs.
The two Terrys are making film-talk over dinner.
Palin and Cleese are out eating expensive fish and Graham Chapman is trying to locate the male dancers from London who, tomorrow, are lined up for a mental banquet hall routine.
Idle's the insufferable pub bore; the disgusting mind behind the Australian wine sketch; performer and co-writer with Cleese of that astonishing holiday sketch featuring bandy-legged wop waiters and a fat bloated tart with her hair Brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for foreigners.
A brilliantly agile mind is Idle, whose sketches are tight as a fist and whose attitude to reporters is generally don't - touch - me - I'm - an - artist. A scrupulously moral individual who, according to producer Forstater, "tries to be temperamental, but it's just a put-on."
Lone Idle has more of a cheroot-chomping rock 'n' roll mentality than his Python brethren. While the others arrange themselves in pairs (Chapman/Cleese, Jones/Palin), Idle chooses to write solo.
He can razzle you with wit and brotherly vibes - and just as quickly rip off your head with one mental chomp.
Tonight it's Eric the Affable, recounting strange Python stories and winding down and out on connected and unconnected subjects. He'd probably want the whole thing forgotten, because it's just a moment in time, innit - and, besides, he's no Ellsberg with evidence of White House corruption or inside fax on breaches of political decorum up in the North Country.
But I'm no elk. And this is what I remember. Remember what you can, says Eric. OK. This is what I remember.
I can't remember anything.
Oh yes. I remember. Eric Idle's dentist wrote "An Englishman Needs Time" (no, really) and Joey Bishop, cringeing stand-in on Johnny Carson's "Tonight" show, wrote Python off completely after they'd been hired for a nationwide spot.
"Here's an act from Britain," said Bishop. "I'm told they're funny. I don't really understand what they're supposed to be doing, but here they are anyway. See what you make of them."
Python came on, performed one of their more intolerable sketches, and were greeted by the kind of ego-smashing audience inactivity that performers will travel the world for.
"I've never see so many jaws drop at once," says Idle.
Canada, she was altogether more harmonious, probably because Canadians had previously been softened up by the TV shows. Crowds came out to greet the team at airports and Idle remembers peering into the stalls one night and seeing an entire row dressed as a caterpillar.
But why, you might wonder, hadn't an aberrant nation like the United States picked up on the Pythons? There were precedents, in a minor kind of way, in the shape of Firesign Theatre and the Early "Laugh Ins", after all.
The answer is as basic as vomit, masturbation and all the other naughty phenomena American TV-programmers find unnerving.
Even a hardy subject like birth-control had to be expunged from a sketch the Pythons performed for "Midnight (the-show-that-knows-where-its-at) Special". But then don't we remember the BBC slicing up a sketch involving a man whose hobbies were strangling dogs and masturbating?
Masturbation is right out, said the BBC. Strangling dogs is cool. But no wanking. And no wanking while you're strangling that dog.
Rip-off dept: Dean Martin lifted an entire segment from the Python's How To Be Invisible sketch, stitched it into the opening of one of his shows, and never said so much as a thank you, kiss my State Of The Union Address. Lampoon also ripped off a Python sketch to close their Broadway Show and, when pressed by slim British lawyers, coughed up £70 by way of compensation.
Idle on the subject of America, and especially its handsome, mixed-up president, is a treat:
"I am not lying. I have never lied. That last lie I told is not a lie. I have no knowledge of Watergate. I have no knowledge of my lovely wife Pat or my lovely daughter Tricia or of John Erlichman or Bob Haldeman. I have no knowledge of the White House. I have no knowledge of Richard Nixon.
"Richard Nixon. This Is Your Life. Do you remember this telephone conversation with John Erlichman? BEEEEEEEEEEEZ. And this one with John Dean: WHIIIIIIIAAARRRRP."
Idle's acting a complete fool, falling from his chair and rolling dangerously close to the fire. Innes and the rest of us are soiling ourselves.
"Put that tape recorder away," says Idle. "It's just going to ruin things." Screw you, Idle.
He probably dreads the thought of being boring in print; of not having control over the outcome.
Python humour, he says, is an organic evolution of six minds apprenticed in university revue (with Gilliam providing moving pictures of the spirit of America), through BBC shows like the "Frost Report", "Marty Feldman", "Do Not Adjust Your Set" and "At Last The 1948 Show".
Offstage, they can be eminently worried and straight-talking people. Eminently worried by talk of Python being Last Year's Thing and how they don't stand a chance without Cleese, who plans to lope off after filming's through to make industrial movies on methods of dealing with angry customers and how you can have a real nice time of it in your tedious 9-to-5 job riveted to the hat-bands counter.
By way of revelation, Idle says he had a bit of a scare before the first Python series went out when he saw Spike Milligan's "Q.5".
"It was more or less what we already had in mind for ourselves," he says.
Gilliam shows up and, in a painfully tactful way, tried to convince Idle he'd best get his hair cut and fall into line with the others.
Idle not only refuses outright, he carves Gilliam up into tiny particles that blow across the hotel lounge and return moments later in a more relaxed, off-duty format - just as Palin and Cleese return from their fish supper.
The Woman's Institute committee and dance rooms have been rented by Python the following day as changing-quarters. It's full of old men coughing and struggling into mediaeval pantyhose and a sour make-up girl who keeps slipping me dirty looks.
The national press are due today and so are hordes of kids who've bunked off school to watch Python filming in Doune Castle.
The Dancing Knights scene - the day's main action - is more obsessive lunacy in which seven fancy men from London cavort on table tops, kicking bowls of vegetables and sheep-bones the length of the banqueting area.
As they dance, ducks and chickens are tossed into the maelstrom, while we pages are supposed to be retrieving the flattened vegetables in a disgruntled kind of way. But the dancing knights keep knocking us to the ground with mad leaps and pirouettes.
Ducks are screaming, chickens are getting caught up in the lights, and one poor canard gets so scared and wounded it starts shivering, and tears roll down its beak.
Terry Jones finally disqualifies the animal from further hardship after the dancers have gathered round to coo and ahhh and tickle its throat. A restless chicken, meanwhile, is being hypnotised by a crew-member with some deft strokes between the wings.
The scene, says Gilliam, will end with a Busby Berkley shield arrangement, out of the centre of which Neil Innes pops up and sings "I have to push my pramalot" (to rhyme with Camelot).
It's one of those days where everything's a Python. Cleese and Idle, in shrink-proof chainmail, are kicking a ball around the yard, chased by national press photographers. Elsewhere kids are wandering loose, laughing at the funny men in their silly clothes.
"Let's be serious," says Palin. "No jokes."
OK, Michael. No jokes. How do you like filming?
"I enjoy it, thank you. When you get into the meaty bits, that is. But you're invariably walking around with helmets on your head which don't come high enough so you're not looking through the eye holes you're looking through the mouth holes, tramping across rather sharp granite terrain which isn't very pleasant.
"But if it looks good it doesn't really matter, and we were all very encouraged by the first rushes. I mean it would be terrible if the film looked bad as well as being uncomfortable to do."
What have you been doing since the last series?
"Well, we've been working on the film quite a lot and in the last three or four months most of our time has gone into the stage shows in Canada and Drury Lane. It was difficult to write during that period, but Terry and I have got together a kind of Christmas book for kids."
A gentle thing, is it?
"No, very violent. Very, very violent. Dreadful. For very young kiddies. Really violent ones."
I see.
I'm interested by those ever so sharp parodies, like the one you do on '19' magazine in the new book, for instance. How much involvement with subject matter does that demand?
"Oh yes, Eric reads them every week; '19', 'Country Life', 'Health And Efficiency'. You name it, he takes it. I don't know much about that. It was Eric's piece."
Whose was the Peckinpah Film night sketch? The one with those deadly rackets and balls.
"John's and Graham's. You're talking to the wrong bloke, aren't you?"
How about the cross-country cyclist with the Politburo cabaret and the guy who wakes up in the Russian cell and finds it wasn't a dream after all?
"Yes. It wasn't written for Python originally. It was written by Terry and I just as a half-hour to do sometime. Then we were short of a show and people read the script and it formed the basis. I think the first 15 minutes or so were ours, and then it got rewritten and people put in ideas."
The central character was quite brilliant, I thought.
"What? That silly man? I thought it was a bit over the top, actually. I was a bit sick of it the second time. It was rather painful to do because I had a saddle that was too high and we were unable, for some reason, to get a spanner in Jersey. So we couldn't adjust it. So I couldn't put both feet on the ground when we were resting."
Those crash-scenes looked fairly diabolical.
"Can you imagine? A camera at the other end of the field about 100 yards away. 'Off you go... fall off!!!'
"You crash through the verge, dislocate your shoulder, break a few ribs, and he says 'No, no, no, you've got to fall off earlier than that, silly'."
You were damaged, were you?
"Mentally... mentally. I've damaged myself so much, damn you Python. Err, no. We do all our stunts. I think all of us at one time have jumped into a marsh or thrown ourselves into a river.
"I think one of the things I was most apprehensive about was when we did the fish-slapping dance. Which is a silly bit where I dance and hit John with a couple of small herrings. At the end of the dance he picks up a huge pike and knocks me into the river.
"We did it at Teddington Lock which was a ten-foot drop. But by that time it was all set up and you've just got to carry on. It looked much better actually, because it was such a big fall. And you get a free brandy when you're done."
Michael reads New Musical Express and he finds it "...interesting".
"The mentality of your readers is about the same as ours, I would say. Yes. I do read it quite a lot now. There seem to be many more articles of a general nature which I quite enjoy."
Most people think you're mad. Does this worry you or do you feel safe inside the Python set-up?
"Yes. Basically, there are five or six of us putting it together, all tending to share the same ideas. The collective thing helps to give us more of a sense of security and gives the show more strength."
Is it difficult selling the BBC your warped visions or did the script-writing background make it easy?
"Even with the BBC background I found it difficult to sell it to them. They were reluctant. They didn't quite know about the show... they like to know what things are about.
"They like to know what you're going to be doing and when you're going to have a music break. How many sketches you're going to do and do you want a guest artist. So we say we don't know. No, we don't want a guest artist... 'Well do you want some music somewhere?'... No... 'Well, what are you going to do? Just sketches?'... Well, we've got these ideas, you see..."
Python, minus Cleese, bombards the screen again in November. That might be tough going. Do you have any ideas yet? (This isn't the BBC speaking, is it?)
"I don't know." (Grin.) "All suggestions gratefully accepted, sent to Michael Palin, c/o NME."
The fluid delicacy of Cleese the Footballer is a sight to see.
Like a spring-loaded rhubarb, he ghosts through castle courtyards leaving the opposition in tangled knots, crossing low balls for one of the Doune Boys to hammer shots between a pair of shields.
Palin serves as a wild minefield sweeper, rushing around a lot and getting very red. Neil Innes is Python's unharried goalie and Idle a vigorous full-back who sometimes cuts into the attack.
But it's Cleese who earns the crowd's pleasure. And their jeers.
He has this habit, you see, of folding to the ground when he's got just the goalie to beat. It's an involved, hypnotising event at Cleese comes down. Kind of like the time-lapse footage they show on "Film Night". But the man has no shame and he's soon back on his feet to make a shambles of the opposition with his superhuman swagger.
The game over, we fall into a sweaty, fermenting heap by a castle wall. Michael Palin idles through the Sunday Times, Eric Idle palins though John Cleese, though Graham Chapman isn't here because he's not wanted for shooting today.
A pretty little girl with no teeth shuffles over to Palin and asks shyly for his autograph. She's followed by a couple of firm-breasted schoolgirls who can't make out Palin's signature.
"Whatsit say?" they ask each other.
"Michael Idle," says Palin.
The girls make the rounds with pencil and pad, and wind up with names like Alf Ramsey, Bill Shankly and Johnny Mathis.
"We took a day off school specially," say the girls.
Their accents are a dense as a Highland pony yet, strangely enough, one's from Berlin - daughter of an RSM - and the other from Plymouth.
"What do you think of Scotland?" they ask.
"It will be very nice when it's finished," says Idle.
Over there is Mark Forstater, Python's producer in the realm of feature-films.
"I was personally not very pleased with the first film and they weren't very pleased themselves. When they began preparing this one they asked my help in getting it together to help raise some money. They all have lots of potential, you see, but not much direction."
The script, says Forstater, is as brilliant as anything they've done.
"John Horton, the Special Effects man at the BBC, read it and said it was the best thing he'd seen in five years."
Forstater on the Pythons one at a time:
"John is basically a lazy person and that's the reason he's leaving the show, John enjoys his leisure, he'll tell you that. But when John works he works fantastically hard. He'd always the first to learn his lines."
Eric we already know to be making hopeless attempts at being temperamental.
"Terry Jones can be temperamental but he soon forgets. Terry Gilliam gets annoyed by things, but he's so bubbly it's soon behind him. Graham and Michael are genuinely easygoing."
(Chapman is genuinely mad, says Palin. "I had a hotel room next to him on tour and he was up half the night screaming 'Betty Marsden. Betty Mardsen'. And he talks to letter boxes.")
Forstater is quite small.
John Cleese, by contrast, is quite tall. Cleese, the People's Choice, is at least as tall as anyone on the set.
Cleese is the People's Choice not only because he's tall and funny, but because he's the ogre of headmasterdom. The prancing, screaming, budgie-beating head boy gone mad. So mad, he can hardly be a real worry any more.
But is he basically a serious person?
"I think we all are, aren't we?"
Is it hard being serious?
"I find it much harder if they expect me to be funny. I find I'm often much more serious in my private life, because when you've spent eight hours trying to think of funny things it's often quite nice to give it a rest.
"There used to be a certain feeling of obligation. It doesn't happen so much now."
Eric was saying you write very precisely and methodically, rather than spilling out.
"Yes. I spill out at the 'idea' stage and sometimes stuff goes down very fast on paper - usually when it's something you've been ploughing along with for two weeks.
"I wrote a half-hour with my wife quite recently and, when we got to the final parts, they were going down on paper almost as fast as we could think of them. We'd been thinking abut them so long, you see. But it's quite right. I use a much more measured and slow style than the others."
A lot of Python humour seems to hark back to your university days. What were they like?
"Central to it all was the Footlights Club, which I found to be the easiest and most enjoyable company in Cambridge. Three or four times a term at these smoke concerts, as we used to call them, you got up on the stage and had the chance to try things and, of course, it didn't matter if you died. And this is why I think so much comedy is coming out of the universities these days."
Who were your contemporary loonies at Cambridge?
"Well, of this lot, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden.
"It was always more difficult at Oxford, because they didn't have a clubroom, they had to create their own atmosphere and find places to meet. But they produced an interesting lot, going back to Bennett and Miller from about 15 years ago and, virtually contemporaneous with our lot, they had a very good selection of whom Mike and Terry, I suppose, are the best known."
You're probably the best-known Python of all. Do you know why?
"This is very simple to explain. It's just that I'd done two years of Frosts and 'The 1946 Show' beforehand.
"I also refuse to wear moustaches and beards and that's a great help. I mean that quite seriously. Somebody like Michael is turning in marvellous performances the whole time. He's a superb performer, but is very frequently unrecognised because he's done four brilliant performances in four different disguises and no one realises it's the same person.
"Michael was the assistant in the pet-shop sketch. He was the leading cardinal in the Spanish Inquisition thing. But we always have a joke with Mike that he can't act without a moustache. He doesn't know what to do. He's got this great desire to disguise himself and acquire facial hair, which I find most uncomfortable."
Are you sure you won't change your mind and stay?
"It's a rude thing to say, but the truth is I'm bored.
"I've been doing two-minute sketches on television for eight years and I'm lucky enough to be able to do different things. You've got more fluidity in this business than if I was working in a car factory and that's how I like to be.
"But I think the others are going to have a bit of a problem coming up with something new, because a lot of people thought the third series wasn't as good as the first two, and I think the answer is that it probably was as good, but people are now used to it.
There isn't that initial impact and I fail to see how you can keep that impact sustaining."
So let that be a warning to you all.
Right about now we wind down the windows, apply the brakes and let it be known that the whole damn bus is cheering because Python And The Holy Grail is no rinky Carry On Gooning effort.
All over the set there are people with artistic wrists, thin hips and the kind of "that was lousy - do it again" mentality that should transform The Grail into the cheap mediaeval extravaganza Python have been straining for so earnestly over the past 18 months.
Neil Innes has already got together the bones of an elaborate film-score, parts of it involving strange figure-eight modes and synthesised cellos. He played small bits of it in the Woman's Institute changing room, and bracing it was too. But a make-up girl came along and told him to shut up.
"I'm sorry, but I'm trying to work in there."
Then she came back again and said how sorry she was and please carry on with your tunes.
Shut-up yourself, I say.
And you can shut-up too. (Is that the end? - Ed).
Hey, that's pretty heavy.
(Pause 5 secs, holding shot then mix thru to blatant commercial.)
And you can hear MONTY PYTHON'S zany, madcap humour on the following records which Tony Stratton-Smith begged us to mention:
"Monty Python's Flying Circus" (BBC Records REB 73)
"Another Monty Python Record" (Charisma CAS 1049)
"Monty Python's Previous Record (Charisma CAS 1063)
"Matching Tie And Handkerchief (Charisma CAS 1080)
[On page 30, alongside the article, there is a genuine advert
for 19 magazine which proves what an accurate send-up
the Pythons did in Brand New Monty Python Bok
[When the article was reprinted in the 'New Musical Express:
Greatest Hits' annual in 1975, it had this different intro:]
FUNNY WALKS IN THE HIGHLANDS
ANDREW TYLER AND PHOTOGRAPHER BARRY LEVINE SET OFF WITH TV'S 'MONTY PYTHON' TEAM OVER SCOTTISH HILLSIDES IN SEARCH OF THE FEROCIOUS RABBIT THAT GUARDS THE HOLY GRAIL. OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT.
[The screenplay extract was missing, as was the ad for the
LPs at the end. The photos were all gone too except for the
one of "King Arthur and the boys on the march" (albeit
cropped so as to miss out the final few marchers) and another,
not printed with the NME article, of the Knights with a boom
mike above their heads (captioned "Attacked by a modern day
lancer...?").
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UNKNOWN: A selection of articles where the exact source is unknown.
[The first article is by Quentin Falk, who wrote for Kine
Weekly and Today's Cinema, both of which merged into
Screen International the year after this article was published.
It may be from one of these issues printed 29th June 1974 or
not, depending on which article this date refers to. It features
a picture of Jones in full costume standing by a film camera and
directing. Caption: ""As quick as you can please," says Terry
Jones (right), co-director.":]
QUENTIN FALK'S PRODUCTION EXTRA
Python in days of yore
"Cruel as Kung-Fu. Makes Ben-Hur look like an epic. Filmed entirely on location at the chemist." It has to be Monty Python and the group's second feature has them in medieval garb in search of the Holy Grail.
Completion of filming on locations in the wilds of Scotland coincides with the news this week that NBC television in the States bought some chucks of the BBC series for showing in America.
Until now, Python had really made no real inroad into American television. Group member Graham Chapman: "Some time ago people from the BBC went over to the States with tapes in their briefcases but were rather embarrassed to show them. That's the kind of salesmanship we got."
The first feature, "And Now For Something Completely Different" was specifically intended for the American market.
Said Chapman: "It did very well considering it was a cheap budget, rip-off thing with material from the old shows. We also realised it was a bit of a cheap deal for British audiences."
The producer of "Monty Python And The Holy Grail" is a young American, Mark Forstater.
"The boys came to me and said: 'We've got this script; can we raise any money on it.'"#
And raise money independently he did with finance from three record companies, a couple of pop groups - Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin - and theatre impresario, Michael White.
The film is to be distributed by EMI after a November opening.
"In the States we had this probe that people thought Monty Python was just one man doing lots of funny voices. This time we are going to make sure we get the right people to handle the film there.
"Of course, it will never be a mass audience thing there like, say, the Mary Tyler Moore show.
"I think we have taken a lot of trouble over costumes, lighting and sets so that it doesn't look like a trashy British comedy.
"If we want to show it abroad where Python isn't known, it will have to stand on its own as a film."
[This next piece seems to be from a newspaper/tabloid, and
may also have been published on 29th June 1974, depending.
Features a picture of three knights standing heroically (caption:
"Sirs Eric Idle, John Cleese and Mike Palin") and a fascinating
allusion to Fawlty Towers. The last few paragraphs are all over
the place:]
IT'S... ARISE, SIR MONTY PYTHON
By JAMES GIBSON
Don't panic if you're up Doune, Perthshire, way next week and you hear agonising screams coming from the local castle. It will only be John Cleese slaughtering the occupants with a broadsword. He charges in on a wedding feast in the courtyard and hacks the guest to pieces. When he finds his princess, he discovers "she" is a prince.
I should explain. Doune Castle has been commandeered - pillaged might be the word - by the mad, mad, mad world of Monty Python. They are making their second feature film, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," in and around the castle (built 1381) and yesterday I was invited, entirely at my own risk, to see how the location shooting is progressing.
First man I recognised, in a pseudo chain-mail suit (circa 1250), making his 6ft 2in frame look rather ridiculous, was Cleese.
"Let me just get a ciggy. I'll be down in a minute." He climbed three dozen steps to the main hall, crammed with lighting and sound technicians, and returned promptly to bring me up to date with the picture.
"The six of us wrote it - Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Mike Pallin [sic] and me. And because the budget is an amazingly low £165,000, which makes us work very hard, we must be the first people in history to form a company to exploit ourselves. We're on a six-day week from 7.30 a.m. to 6 p.m. for five weeks."
TV SERIES
When the film is finished, the Python Circus goes back into the TV studios to start another series. All except Cleese.
"I've been doing three-minute sketches on TV for three years now. It's time for a change. I've written a half-hour pilot for a series with my wife and the BBC are looking at it now. Situation comedy I suppose you'd call it. And I'm doing some more sketches for Les Dawson for 'Sez Les.' I enjoyed them and Les is a delightful bloke to work with.
"But no more Python Circuses on TV for me."
Gleese [sic] was apologetic about his attire. A knight accoutred for the fray but not for the jousting with the Press.
"This isn't my Lancelot gear. The other suit I wear is more martial. Most of us play a basic knight. There's me, Lancelot, Graham is King Arthur, Eric plays Sir Robin (that's a knight of our own creation) and Mike is Galahad. Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, who is directing, are Sir Bedevere and a soothsayer respectively. Don't forget Carol Cleveland who arrives tomorrow. She's Zoot and Dingo, the twins."
Mark Forstater, a 30-year-old Philadelphian who has worked on documentaries is producing. H'd [sic] searched all over Britain for the ideal castle and finally found Doune.
The first Python film ran a slight profit and went well here and in Canada and Australia. It was a remake of the TV things and very British. The Americans were cool on it.
THAT SLOGAN
The Holy Grail should have a broader appeal, reckons Mark. "The Americans know what an epic is." (The slogan says this film "makes Ben Hur look like an epic.)
knights look very hard for the Holy Grail, meeting all manner of strange creatures in the castle and woods around. But they never find it. We don't mind revealing the outcome of the plot. We must stress that it's all original material never before seen on TV or published in the book."
[This one's from Variety, again possibly from 29th June
1974, and seems to be missing its picture:]
PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS' EXTRA-CURRICULAR WHAM IN UK (UPPER KLONDIKE)
London, June 25.
England's radio-tv landscape periodically blossoms with vogue comedy smash, be it a radio "Goon Show2 of the 1950s with Peter Sellers, et al. Or the later video-frontiersmanship in political satire pioneered by the David Frost-anchored "That Was The Week That Was" which subsequently transferred format and host to the NBC airlanes.
Of more recent vintage in the vogue dept. is BBC's anarchic series "Monty Python's Flying Circus," which over the past three-four years has become a merchandising hit in the bargain. The "Python industry" encompasses books, disks (via the Atlantic label in the U.S.), a recent London legit stand, and two feature films, of which "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" ("makes 'Ben Hur' look like an epic") is in post-production.
"Flying Circus" is a melange of sketch and stylised animation wherein there is much non-sequitur humour and much kidding of the idiosyncratic British.
All This & 'Comedyworld'
The show is into its first U.S. grind this summer via breakout sketch segments picked up for NBC's "Dean Martin's Comedyworld." And there's the possibility of a solo stanza anon via one of those ABC-TV latenight "In Concert" segs.
All of which makes for upbeat following their admitted flop last year guesting on the "Johnny Carson Tonight Show" when SEEMINGLY NOBODY LAUGHED AT THE BOYS. That came on top of the poor biz in the States for their first feature pic, "And Now For Something Completely Different" (a catchline from the tv edition), for which they rap distrib Columbia Pictures. Knocking the distrib is, of course, a standard and sometime justified reflex in the wake of dismal b.o.
From Left to Right
Key personages in the "Python" repertory company are Terry Jones, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and Terry Gilliam, latter also the unit's animator. All are hyphenate performer-writers on the show, most of them having developed as staff scribes on earlier David Frost comedy shows in Britain.
The company has done one short flight series a year since the "Python" format incepted, and this fall it will be in production with another BBC mini-series (six segs), but minus the "star" presence of Cleese. The show's fall run may be the finale, but there's no hard decision as yet.
As for "Holy Grail," the new feature, suffice that it's an originally plotted piece set in the medieval England of King Arthur and cohorts. Film will be sold off territorially, with EMI already set to release in the home market. No sale as yet in the U.S.
[This next one was accompanied by three large photos.
Captions: "Living with John Cleese is "very unpredictable"
according to his wife Connie (left, with three-year-old daughter
Cynthia). But at work he is a compulsive "perfectionist".
Above: On location at Castle Stalker, Argyllshire, John Cleese
(centre) with Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam in a scene from
Monty Python and the Holy Grail", and "April, 1971. Cleese
was installed as Rector of St Andrews University... and given the
usual facetious presents. Enough to make a comedian laugh?"]
THE ENTERTAINERS: 3
ONE MAN'S HUMOUR IS ANOTHER MAN'S PYTHON
Fans of Monty Python's Flying Circus have made the show a cult. Others - including John Cleese's mother - are less amused. In the last of our series on humourists, Mr Cleese talks to WILLIAM DAVIS
John Cleese does not like jokes, and proves it by remaining stony-faced when you tell him one. It is not as unusual as it sounds. Professional humourists frequently resent being thought of a comics with a burning passion for stories about the actress and the bishop. They find jokes glib, mechanical. And they dislike the notion that, because they are professionals, they must be funny all the time. When Eric Morecambe had a heart attack, a couple of years ago, everyone thought he was clowning. And Morey Amsterdam, the American humourist, says he was walking up Sixth Avenue in New York when he met an old friend. "Where have you been?" the friend asked. "Sick," Amsterdam said. "I've been in bed with a cold." The friend looked at him curiously. "What's so funny about that?"
Peter Sellers hates going to parties where he is expected to be funny to order. Spike Milligan, always unpredictable, would rather discuss poverty or mental health than come across with his favourite joke, and is liable to walk away if you insist on reciting your repertoire. John Cleese will give you the rather uncomfortable feeling that you - not he - are mad. He tends to be shy with strangers and could easily be mistaken for a very correct Army major, or a master at Eton. It is not easy to recognise the zany star of Monty Python's Flying Circus. He likes to do his clowning in front of the camera, or on the stage, and not at parties or at home.
People have mixed feelings about Cleese's particular brand of television comedy. Some cannot bear it: they switch off as soon as he comes on or reach for the telephone to complain to the BBC. Others think Python, with its apparent contempt for conventional humour and strong touch of lunacy, is the best thing that has happened in years. Cleese - instantly recognisable because of his height - insists that he is only part of a team, but has collected quite a following of his own with sketches like his "Ministry of Silly Walks".
Like much else in Python, the appeal of the sketch is largely visual. Cleese, dressed in pinstripe trousers and bowler hat, is seen walking along the street like a professional contortionist. Inside the Ministry he tests various people who want a grant to develop their own silly walk. The whole scene is played dead-pan; there are none of those obvious asides to the camera which Frankie Howerd and Eric Morecambe have made their trade mark. It sounds outrageous, and it is. But many people consider it a classic, and children all over Britain have been seen trying to copy the Cleese walk.
It comes as no great surprise to find that Cleese himself does not like that famous sketch. "It's not one that personally gets me," he says. "It's not funny to me. There are a couple of good lines in it, but non-one ever hears them because they're falling about laughing. It's very irritating."
His mother does not like it either. Indeed, Cleese says, there is very little about Monty Python's Flying Circus which amuses her. "But I work for the BBC," he adds, "and that makes up for a lot of things. The BBC is very respectable." His attractive American wife Connie (they met in New York) is more enthusiastic about the show, and Cleese says his three-year-old daughter is a fan "though she misses some of the more obtuse puns".
John Cleese was born in Weston-Super-Mare in the second month of the War and his ancestry is replete with solicitors, insurance men, and auctioneers. He went to public school, and thinks that a good deal of the Monty Python comedy comes from a reaction against the system. "Looking back I see a whole set of values being imposed on me which I must have absorbed and not questioned for at least another three or four years." He certainly questions them now - though he maintains that, far from being a self-confident rebel, he is ridden with self-doubt and very vulnerable.
Most of the other members of the team come from the same sort of strata, and their feelings were probably best expressed by the "Twit of the Year Contest", another famous Python sketch. John played Nigel Nigel Hyphen Hyphen Stoke Money, "a really excellent twit. Beat a boy to death at Eton for being middle class." The sketch is very funny, but it is more than routine comedy performed by professionals prepared to behave foolishly for the sake of entertaining the public. It is pure satire, and it is all the more effective because of its underlying contempt.
In Monty Python's Big Red Book, the team's highly successful attempt to convey their ideas in print, there is a spoof Radio Times feature announcing the contest as the Greatest Upper Class Race in the world. "The English public schools," it declares, "play a strong part in encouraging the right sort of chap to exterminate himself publicly on the playing fields of the world." There is advice on what to look for in a Great Twit. "Head. Look for thickness. This is what makes for outstanding Twitting. Military training is an obvious advantage here." And there is a sharp dig at Royalty: "Her Majesty the Queen has always wanted to win this Race and certainly this year she stands an excellent chance."
Given this kind of approach, the Python brand of humour clearly cannot be to everyone's taste. Most people want to laugh at others, not at themselves, and get very indignant if someone tries to mock them. Python is popular with the young, who are naturally inclined to irreverence and less class-conscious than their elders. It also appeals to devotees of the former Goon Shows, and late night satire shows That Was The Week That Was. But many viewers find the shows offensive, pointless, self-indulgent, and irritatingly intellectual. They also complain about the frequent absence of tags, or punch lines. Sketches are sometimes left half-finished, merging into each other or being broken off by an imposing military figure who suddenly announces: "No, this is silly. The whole premise is silly and it's not well written. I'm the senior officer here and I haven't has a funny line yet. I'm stopping it." To viewers accustomed to neat, well-rounded comedy sketches, this kind of thing seems dreadfully unprofessional.
Cleese and his colleagues are unrepentant. They accept that it is impossible to please all the millions who watch BBC TV, and that others behind John's mother find the shows unfunny. They defend the freeness of construction, which has become a Python hallmark, with the argument that it allows much more variety. "We had the idea of a flow, one thing leading to another by association of ideas," says Terry Jones. "The show itself has got a shape, an entity, and the components shouldn't because they break it up."
The team acknowledges its debt to Spike Milligan, who first tried this kind of technique in his Q5 series. Q5 never really caught on, but Cleese says Spike is their great hero. "The Goon Show influenced us enormously. And when we first saw Q5 we were depressed because it was exactly what we wanted to do."
Until then, all of them had spent many hours writing the more conventional kind of sketch. Cleese first got involved with showbiz when he joined the Cambridge Footlights revue at the end of his first year. He lifted ideas from Punch and Peter Simple, rewrote them and learned about performing. But it was not meant to be a career. He was studying physics, maths and chemistry. "I was going to be a scientist," he says. "But it looked like too much hard work to me. So I switched to law." His mother was delighted: he was carrying on the family tradition. But radio got in the way. The Footlights revue has often proved a valuable source of talent, and some BBC people thought Cleese had potential. He and two others were offered jobs; Cleese was guaranteed £1,500 a year and found himself writing for Dick Emery, Brian Rix, and Terry Scott.
He rejoined the cast of Cambridge Circus (that year's name for the revue) when it went to America in 1964, and stayed to play the cad who embezzles Tommy Steele's money in Half a Sixpence. He had written a few sketches for That Was The Week That Was and David Frost had kept in touch. Cleese was asked to come back to England, and join a new television show, The Frost Report. He did. During that period, he recalls, his father wrote him a letter asking if he had ever thought of getting a job with Marks and Spencer. They were a great firm, and he was sure John would do nicely. Father meant well: writing comedy routines really did not seem much of an occupation for a grown man. Where was the security, the pension?
Also the cast of The Frost Report, which first bought Cleese to the attention of a large television public, was an ex-medical student called Graham Chapman. They got on well. Chapman describes himself as "looney with a point... I like to do things that surprise and worry people, like crawling around the floor in restaurants." He says he would have been a rotten doctor. "I couldn't have taken the routine and it's quite likely that I'd have laughed at the wrong times. Hospitals are places of extraordinary dignity and I've had been tempted to run around and do stupid things."
The BBC was happy to let him do just that, and pay for it. After Frost, he and Cleese worked for I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and At Last The 1948 Show. Another television show about the same time was Do Not Adjust Your Set, written by Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, with cartoons by Terry Gilliam. When Cleese was offered his own show he asked the others to join him. "We wanted to do something different," he says, "but we didn't know what."
The man credited with bringing them together is Barry Took, a one-time stand-up comedian who was then a "comedy script adviser" at the BBC. Took went to Michael Mills, Head of Comedy, and told him they were fed up of working for ITV (which was screening At Last The 1948 Show) and suggested that the BBC gave them a try. In his book The Laughtermakers, David Nathan quotes Mills as saying: "I had them down and told them what budget they had. I said 'Don't get too clever. If you try to do too much you won't get away with it and you'll bugger your show up. Now start quietly.' And it worked."
Cleese says that at first they simply called themselves Circus (echoes of Cambridge Circus?), and were briefly known as Barry Took's Circus. Then someone came up with Monty Python's Flying Circus., and the name stuck. "And now for something completely different" was easier. The show was to be completely different. To BBC men, too, the line was very familiar: radio producers on programmes like Today had used it for years to separate each item.
Putting together a Python series is hard work. They split up to write material - Chapman and Cleese, Jones and Palin, and Idle on his own. This takes several months. Then they meet at John's flat, or Terry Jones's, and read it all to the others. They map out the material into rough shows, make lists of what goes where, and lastly start linking each show together in detail. A good deal is put on film. Dressing up, rehearsing, going out on location to shoot a sketch is a time-consuming business, and the end result generally takes up only a few minutes on the screen.
Cleese says they need six or seven working days for each show, and record 35 minutes to get 30. He is a "compulsive perfectionist", but finds film-editing tedious. "Terry is the one who loves it," he adds. "He is very energetic and full of enthusiasm. He'll volunteer for anything. He's always the first, for example, to offer to ride a horse - even though he can't ride. And if someone had to fall out of a second-floor window Terry would do it."
Jones himself says he can't help it, he's Welsh. "The others," he goes on, "have a thing about the Welsh and I tend to get kicked around a lot." He gets very excited and involved with things, and his colleagues enjoy teasing him. Some of their idea-swapping sessions get a little out of hand, but Cleese claims that they are always dead sober and that the process of putting together a show tends to be quite mundane most of the time. "The only thing which is mad is the idea," he says.
I am not sure that is strictly true, but creating humour does tend to be a rather more serious business than the general public is inclined to think. According to Cleese, "the actual business of getting something down on paper is like pushing a car out of a ditch". For every idea that makes it, a dozen are discarded. And there are plenty of moments when it all seems that there is nothing worthwhile at all - let alone material for a whole show. Cleese, who has more than his share of self-doubt, insists that a certain amount of tension is not only inevitable, but necessary to the creative process. "You never get anything when you are relaxed," he says. "You've got to be edgy - and a bit catty."
Michael Palin, one of the other partners, says that, for all his seriousness, Cleese can be "delightfully silly". Palin, an extrovert, can be funny without trying simply because he was born with a funny face.
He is the chap who stands behind the shop counter, selling dead parrots to gullible customers, and who plays crooks who are not much good at being crooks. His air of injured innocence never fails. Silly? Yes, of course he is. They all are. Silly is (next to naughty) their favourite word: they even have a Silly Party of which Palin is the Deputy Leader. (He is also, of course, Honorary Reader of Books in the Extremely Silly University of Baden-Baden-Baden-Baden, which is very silly.)
Eric Idle - nudge, nudge, say no more, know what I mean? - is said to be the wittiest member of the team. He certainly has a well-developed contempt for platitudes, and has put it to good use in commercials as well as the Python series. Terry Gilliam, the sixth member of the team, is American and does the cartoons which pull each show together. He is a strange man, and many viewers find his animations deeply disturbing. They certainly have a lot to do with Python's bizarre flavour. Gilliam is one of the most original animators working in Britain today; Python wouldn't be the same without him.
None of the team is exactly rich. Cleese himself makes a comfortable amount of money, but he says there is "very little chance to save". He has a mortgage, and the only car they have is a Hillman Minx which his wife bought for £350. He doesn't go for night clubs, doesn't particularly care for champagne, but says he spends a lot on food. He also loves to take life easy in the sun; recent trips have been to Sardinia, Morocco and Rhodes. The Python team has made one successful film (financed by Victor Lownes, who runs the London Playboy Club) and is working on another, to be called Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It has also made some programmes for Bavarian Television: they seem finally to have convinced the Germans that all Englishmen are mad. Not least, Python has appeared on stage. Cleese hates repetition and swears that he will do no more stage tours. "We are not," he says, "very good at acting. Once I've done a sketch as well as I can do it, I have no desire to keep doing it." He is appearing in the new film, but does not intend to be part of the next Python television series planned for the autumn. "John," says one of the others, "doesn't want to get up at dawn and catch a train to some Godforsaken spot just so he can be filmed doing silly things for a silly sketch that lasts a couple of minutes on the screen."
The team is going ahead without him because, understandably, they want to hang on to a large, devoted, and lucrative following. There always has to be at least one comedy cult - and, touch wood, Python is still the obvious successor to the Goons and Beyond the Fringe.
Cleese wishes them well, but doesn't hold with pretentious talk about the intellectual significance of Python and the great "breakthrough" it has made in comedy. He runs a company which makes industrial training films. - "I don't," he explains, "want to be too dependent on one thing" - and he and his wife have written a new half-hour comedy series which, he hopes, will appeal to the programme planners. Critics (and some of his "friends") charge him with being self-centred, stubborn and disloyal, but Cleese insists that he simply likes to be his own man. He claims to be lazy and interested only in making enough money "to lie about on a beach somewhere". I asked his wife what he was like to live with. "He's very unpredictable," she said. "He was very spoilt by his mother, and he never knows where anything is. Tonight he was running around the house shouting: 'Where's my vest? Where's my shirt?' John," she went on, was "infuriatingly good at invective." Cleese benevolently agreed. "I take pleasure in attack," he said. "I love writing sarcastic letters to people, especially to the pompous officials. I put silly things on cheques, such as 'Pay the Postmaster General in the sincerest hope that the Telephone Service will soon show a marked improvement the sum of £60'." And at home? Does he use his talent for sarcasm in domestic quarrels? "Yes," he says. "But then I laugh at it."
"Well," said Connie, "it drives me wild."
Mother, wife, officialdom, BBC executives and assorted viewers - all less than enthusiastic about the Cleese brand of humour. It's a risky business, being funny. Risky, naughty and, of course, extremely silly.
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