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EDIT NEWS: Monty Python - Press Coverage 1980 - 89 |
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Daily Mirror, 2nd September 1982, p.17:
THE PYTHON IS TAMED
by PATRICIA SMYLLIE
The Monty Python team have finally become respectable.
Their outrageous, irreverent brand of humour made the Python shows a huge ratings hit a decade ago.
But the BBC bosses didn't share viewers' enthusiasm.
Many of them were shocked by the series' anti-establishment message.
Times, and opinions, change, however.
And the BBC now feel that Monty Python is even suitable for kids.
For as part of the channel's 60 year celebrations they are screening a 1970 edition of MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS (BBC-1, 6.25) in children's viewing time.
Monty Python star and scriptwriter Michael Palin finds the turnabout very funny.
Decent
"I am waiting with baited breath to see the reaction of the children. It will be the first time many of them see it," he said.
Monty Python was certainly not allowed to go out anywhere near children time originally.
"I feel this is the final rehabilitation by the BBC. We have really made it after all this time.
"The BBC were very decent and let us choose the show that should go out. In fact, we chose with great difficulty.
"Looking back on the shows, how we managed to get away with so much I don't know.
"We certainly came up against the BBC. At top they were far too cautious and a lot of them were openly critical.
"Now all is sweetness and light, which in a way is rather nice and rewarding."
Palin is currently at work on the team's latest movie, Monty Python's Meaning of Life.
"We are trying to keep the content of the film a secret, but it is very difficult," he says. |
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Village Voice, 22nd October 1985, page 33
By Ella Taylor:
All situation and precious little comedy, The Bounder is one of the more sleep-inducing offerings on the complicated map of British banter, and if you like your humor riotously evil, it will do little more than inspire a thirst for a marathon fix of Monty Python reruns (Wednesdays at 11:30 p.m. on WNET). Monty and I go back a long way. Every Sunday night throughout 1970, my final year as an undergraduate in London, the entire commune of nine card-carrying cultural critics with whom I lived would settle down, bathed in revolutionary élan, to watch out favourite new comedy. We chortled away at John Cleese's Ministry of Silly Walks, his "Mr. Hitler" thundering out his tidy plans for the Jews from the balcony of an English seaside hotel to approving nods from the suggestible locals ("he's right, you know!"), and the Upper Class Twit Obstacle Race, a double bonus because it was hilarious and politically correct.
Like all Monty Python bores, I still remember all these sketches by heart and pepper my speech with their lines. But more and more these days, my laughter tails off into a nervous titter. Nazis and the idle rich are rendered absurd and loathsome, but so are women and foreigners. There are two kinds of women in Monty Python: dumb blondes with Judy Holliday voices, vacant eyes, and huge breasts; and dim-witted, prissy, or hysterical - and always ugly - middle-aged housewives in flowered aprons and curlers. Foreigners tend to be diminutive, squeaking Asians, obsequious colonials in national costume, or goose-stepping Krauts, and it's far from clear that we're supposed to be laughing at British xenophobia. For all its verbal sophistication, Monty Python gives us promiscuous satire. The show routinely glides over the border between wit and sneering meanness of spirit, and the Python gang (all white men) does its stuff so well that viewers are seduced into joining the mind game. Confounding its own critical purposes, the show ends up colluding in the same loathing and arrogant sense of hierarchy it seeks to lampoon (a recent Monty Python record, Contractual Obligation, contains a song that runs, "I like Chinese/They only come up to you knees/But they're cute and they're funny and they're ready to please").
There's a vicious strain that runs through a good deal of British TV comedy, particularly where race and gender are concerned. I suppose I notice it more because it stands in sharp contrast to American TV comedy, which, for all its faults, is solidly populist and pluralistic. While American mass culture is often faint-hearted about actively confronting racial conflict, it doesn't on the whole countenance explicit racism. Maybe that's why English television hasn't (to my knowledge) come up with the wonderfully ironic banter on ethnicity we got in, say, Barney Miller.
Monty Python works out of the best and worst traditions in British comedy. At its best, it hacks away at the peculiar blend of class superiority and xenophobia that blithely assumes there are only two languages in the world, English and Not-English. |
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The Sun, 24th January 1987
[Apparently Michael Palin kept this front cover framed on his wall!]
TV PYTHON AT SEX ORGIES
By Kevin O'Sullivan
MONTY PYTHON star Terry Jones was a guest at bizarre sex orgies, a court heard yesterday.
The zany TV funnyman was spotted by an undercover policeman at a house where men were queuing on the stairs to take prostitutes into bedrooms, it was alleged.
Jones, 44, is said to have chatted to house owner Cynthia Payne - who faces vice charges - at the foot of the stairs.
Other guests included a transvestite dressed as a French maid and men watching kinky "floor shows", Inner London Crown Court was told.
Last night Jones, married with two children, agreed he was there - and reacted with a joke about Manchester's crusading police chief.
"I had heard the police were coming so I wanted to be there to meet James Anderton," he said
The comic's business partner Anne James added: "Terry was only there for research. He was making a film about Cynthia Payne."
His £2million movie, called Personal Services and starring Julie Walters, is due to be released in the summer.
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The Scotsman, 6th June 1987
By Ian Beil:
Given that it was a week of nostalgia, I dropped in on Monty Python's Flying Circus to see if it was still as good as it seemed at the time. It was, but for interesting reasons. One was surprised by the fact that it was all so middle class, with as many jokes about the Beeb itself as anything else. The rest was sketches about architects, freemasons, insurance salesmen - really subversive stuff, in other words. The legacy of Python seems to be SDP party politicals and appalling student revues. They were better than that, though. A half-forgotten sketch on the East Midlands Poet Board - "Morning madam, I've come to read your poet" - had surrealism becoming sublime.
Speaking of the SDP - I may be the only person who still wants to - one realises, particularly watching their party broadcasts, just where the spirit of '67 ended up. If there is a TV equivalent of muesli, they are it. Or as Timothy Leary didn't say: "Turn on, tune in, drop off." |
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Today, 30th September 1987, page 27
From Janet Street-Porter's column of the same name
OH GOODY, THERE IS A PYTHON IN THE HOUSE
THE NEW STATESMAN (ITV, Sun)
THE DAME EDNA EXPERIENCE (ITV, Sat)
MONTY PYTHON (BBC2, Sat)
The current repeats of Monty Python are a high point of the weekend.
With John Cleese and pals on Saturday, plus the odd gem from a sequinned Dame Edna, and my favourite character of all, the ghastly Alan B'Stard, on Sunday evenings, it is now actually possible to contemplate two evenings' viewing during which you might savour some magic moments to be subsequently retold down at the wine bar.
For in my view, great television is repeatable television, the occasions when you're glued to your seat and part of something you wish you could share with friends. It's not just comedy, but drama and live news coverage too.
DECEIT
In the case of comedy, I've always thought that we aren't so impressed by jokes, but comic situations, little webs of deceit and double dealing artfully spun in which we at home are voyeurs. Dame Edna is terrific at this. On Saturday she confided that she's recently sent her invalid husband Norman on a trip to Mexico, without him ever having to leave his bed in a top London nursing home. This holiday experience was accomplished by Edna placing a cactus on his bedside locker and getting the hospital to give him a little shot of gastro-enteritis.
She painted another little sketch of wanton abandon, when she confided to Larry Hagman that she and Madge liked to share a Jacuzzi, but they had a lot of trouble with the soap going up their ends... "Thank goodness for soap on a rope," she trilled.
The Pythons' forte is to pile one set of misunderstanding on top of another, to create one daft situation and interrupt it with a second. On Saturday it was the Elizabeth the 1st, episode three sketch, in which nobody is allowed to say the letter "r" because the director is Japanese. A motorbike messenger arrived at court with a despatch from Sir Francis Drake, and lo and behold, the entire royal entourage were on mopeds.
The proceedings were disrupted by John Cleese, leading the Fraud Film Director Squad, who promptly arrested the Japanese guy for impersonating Visconti. When you consider the level of sophistication of the Pythons, it's not hard to see why it hasn't dated one bit.
Alan B'Stard MP (Rik Mayall) is going from strength to strength in The New Statesman. He now answers his phone: "Hello, the rising star of the New Right..." I'm pleased to see that not one episode has elapsed without the statutory Jeffrey Archer joke. This week it was to the hapless wet MP Piers: "You're as welcome as Jeffrey Archer at the Daily Star Christmas party."
Piers does seem to bring out the best of B'Stard's put-downs: "If your IQ was any lower you'd need watering" and: "Any word more than two syllables and you have to have a lie down" were two classics on Sunday. B'Stard sees the annual Tory Party conference as an opportunity for sexual exploits, and joins a moral crusade group so he can watch filthy videos.
He gets an anti-porn tract printed with lots of explicit photos, then has it wrapped in cling film and does a roaring trade at the conference, right next to - you've guessed it - the Jeffrey Archer book stall.
DELIGHT
B'Stard actually gets the author of the pamphlet to pay for its printing and tells her to make the cheque out to C.A.S.H... "The Christian Approach to Society Handbook," he explains, his facial contortions a delight to behold.
The beauty of B'Stard is that we always suspect that he's about to meet a particularly nasty downfall - condemned to a week at the Labour Party conference or having to travel on public transport. How long before he ends up in Private Eye? |
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New Yorker, 13th March 1989, page 28 - 29
[No writer credited. And who's this David Adler chap? I like the
cut of his jib. And that hot dog stall they mention became a
favourite of mine during my long days' viewing at New York's
Museum of Broadcasting. Great knishes, only a dollar each.
Although thinking about it the stall's ownership has probably
changed hands ten years on. I dunno though...]
[That's enough talking about Jewish food - ED]
Python Scholars
The best thing that happened at the Museum of Broadcasting's Monty Python Marathon, during which all forty-five episodes of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" were screened, in two batches, on consecutive Saturdays, was the audience rebellion between Episodes 33 and 34, on the second Saturday. The projectionist started to reshow an episode that, owing to some malfunction, we had seen twice already (Episode 32, beginning with a mock documentary about women against smut in England), and people turned in their seats or rose and shook their fists in the direction of the projection booth, and one woman, her chin outthrust in a credible imitation of John Cleese, rapped on the glass and shouted, "We've seen this one already!" The rebellion was successful. The projectionist halted the offending episode, and soon we heard the familiar strains of Episode 34, "The Cycling Tour," in which Michael Palin, in a purple stocking cap and a backpack with pots and pans hanging of it, cycles from North Cornwell to Smolensk, crashing regularly ("My pump caught in my trouser leg") and faithfully recording the damage ("My sandwiches were badly crushed").
It is as exhausting to watch all forty-five episodes of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" as it is to fly from New York to Honolulu and back with half-hour stopovers in Dallas-Fort Worth, but the Monty Python experience is by far the most deranging. About ten people stuck it out from noon to midnight on both Saturdays, sustaining themselves on hot dogs and pretzels from the man on the corner of Fifty-third and Fifth until he folded his umbrella, around six, and then on illegal Mallomars. (Food and drink are prohibited in the auditorium.) They were an oddly scholarly lot. A bushy-haired young man in suspenders was camped out in the front row with his head bent over his notes the whole time. This was David H. Adler, perhaps the Monty Python scholar in America today.
David Adler's notes, on a yellow legal pad, were so detailed that during a segment about a French filmmaker named Longueur he knew what kind of lettuce the woman in the rubbish dump was holding (Webb's Wonder). On the first Saturday of the marathon, the Museum of Broadcasting had tried to slip one past David Adler by substituting Episode 26 for Episode 8, which was missing. Even the casual fan would have noticed that something was wrong, because the museum's brochure had specified that Episode 8 contained the legendary Dead Parrot Sketch, and there was no dead parrot. A more sophisticated fan might have recognised that Episode 26 belonged to a later period Python canon because it contained the Exploding Version of the Blue Danube (dad a dad um, KA-BOOM KA-BOOM, dad a da da dum, KA-BOOM KA-BOOM) and also the Undertaker Sketch, which took bad taste to new heights. But what aroused David Adler's suspicion was Spiny Norman, a hedgehog who peeked over into a scene at one point and got a laugh. Something was wrong, David Adler reasoned, because Spiny Norman had not been introduced yet. Also, in that episode John Cleese sat at a desk and said, "I'm not simply going to say 'And now for something completely different,'" and up through Episode 7 he hadn't said, "And now for something completely different."
At the desk in the lobby of the museum was a document, provided by the Pythons themselves, that listed the contents of each episode. During the breaks, David Adler compared his notes with the official notes. "So far, my notes are pretty good," he said. Then he addressed a young man behind the desk who had been acting as host to the Python fans. "I would like to know one thing," he said. "In my notes 'The Spanish Inquisition' is in Episode 16, and you guys have it down for Episode 15. What I want to know is if you guys made the mistake or they did."
"I don't know," the young man replied. (It turned out that the museum had shown the episodes in reverse order.)
Our own notes have a lacuna between Episodes 14 and 16 - we had been laughing for nearly eight hours by then, and still had four to go. We managed to get down verbatim a line from Episode 16 ("Oh, oh, no more buttered scones for me, Mater, I'm off to play the grand piano"), which ought to come in handy sometime, and then our notes deteriorate into disconnected words, like the things you jot down in the middle of the night and can't make head or tail of in the morning. "Semprini," one page says (Episode 17), and "No pooftahs" (Episode 22). On the second Saturday, knowing that the note-taking was in good hands, we took a break after "The Cycling Tour" and went out to cleanse our palate. Probably we should not have been allowed on the street in our condition. We sang the tuba part of the Monty Python theme song while doing our silly walk (Episode 14) to a restaurant, where we barely resisted the urge to order Spam Spam Spam Spam Baked Beans Spam Spam Spam and Spam (Episode 25). |
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Sunday Telegraph, 7 Days magazine, 17th September 1989,
pages 13 to 16
[Features a full-page exclusive (colour?) photo of the six
Pythons together, possibly the last.]
TWENTY YEARS OF SILLY WALKS
Anarchic yet utterly English, the classic comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus took off two decades ago. Sue Summers talks to its six creators. Main photograph by Gered Mankowitz
The night of Sunday October 5, 1969 showed BBC1 as its conventional best. The main item was an Omnibus devoted to photojournalism, presented by the august ex-Fleet Street editor William Hardcastle; Hannah Gordon appeared in a detective drama; Malcolm Muggeridge provided one of his theological commentaries. At 10.55pm, when most people would have been thinking of switching off, came what the Radio Times billed as a new "satire show".
Viewers expecting some enervated sequel to That Was The Week That Was or Not So Much a Programme... were quickly disabused. The first sequence was of a young man - not yet recognisable as Michael Palin - crawling out of the sea. Cut to a much taller young man - barely recognisable as John Cleese - seated at a grand piano. A caption read: "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart". "Hello," Cleese said in what was to become the familiar tone of crazed respectability. "Welcome to the show. Tonight we continue to look at some famous deaths..." Monty Python's Flying Circus was airborne.
If the viewers were surprised, it was nothing compared to the surprise of the BBC, which, in those more trusting days, had not followed the usual procedure of asking to see a pilot.
A few months previously, the team of John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam had been called to a meeting with the BBC's head of comedy, Michael Mills.
Mills was prepared to give a sympathetic ear to the group of aspiring writer-performers drawn from TV comedy shows like The Frost Report.
"We had all put on suits," Michael Palin remembers, "Mills asked us what we wanted. None of us knew what to say. He tried to help us. He said: 'Will there be guest stars?' We said we didn't think so. 'Will there be musical interludes?' We didn't think so. 'Will there be a theme each week, like The Frost Report?' We didn't think so. He asked what we would be called. We said we didn't know. It was the world's worst job interview and at the end, Michael Mills stood up and said: 'All right, I'll give you 13 shows.'"
The first three or four if those shows, containing sketches which have become classics, passed almost without notice in a late-night slot, moving around at the whim of the programme-planners and always liable to be dropped for more pressing items like The Horse of the Year Show.
Two things ensured their salvation. The first was the attention of some insomniac television critics. The second was the discovery that the studio audience were not laughing merely at the prompting of the floor manager. After an initially tepid reception (the BBC recruited the first two audiences from an old people's home), tickets were soon in short supply.
"The reaction built slowly," says Eric Idle. "It was a long time before we were bothered in the street."
People had to become acclimatised to what was in effect a new kind of comedy. It was comparable to being in a restaurant where the dishes were not served but slammed in the customer's face. Monty Python was comic anarchy: sketches which were crazy in the way only the educated English know how to be deliberately petered out without punchlines or merged into new sketches even further from logic. All this punctuated by graphics which used the Swinging Sixties icons of Victoriana with an edge of violence and rudeness - giant feet coming down to crush babies, gobbling sets of dentures, squeaking effigies of Queen Victoria or Lord Kitchener.
Twenty years later, this style of comedy is deeply embedded in the consciousness of cultures far from England. In America, the members of Monty Python are better known than they are in Britain. The television shows, 45 of them in all, are repeated three times a day on the music channel MTV; thanks to timely legal action against the BBC, the proceeds go to the Python team.
The films that followed the shows, though some would say less funny, have made over £100 million at the box office. Today the Pythons are the owners of a small film studio, in London's Primrose Hill. The nervous young men who went in to see Michael Mills are now millionaire businessmen.
"The joke," says Eric Idle, "is that we spent years sending up accountants, and now accountants are running our lives."
Many of the sketches are now forgotten, but the best are part of comic history. The dead parrot sketch with John Cleese shrieking at Michael Palin: "This parrot is no more. This parrot is an ex-parrot." Eric Idle in blazer and cravat, the epitome of all golf club bores, eyes lewdly batting and elbows pumping, with his catchphrase: "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean, say no more." Graham Chapman's and Terry Jones's array of squawking harridans in headscarves. Michael Palin's game show Blackmail and his lumberjack song. John Cleese at his most manically imperious with the Ministry of Silly Walks.
[The top of the next page is missing here, annoyingly.]
...tional occupation - engineering, insurance or the police. Chapman, Cleese and Idle were contemporaries at Cambridge, Idle's first year coinciding with Cleese's last. "Cleese wore tweeds and went out with girls with double-barrelled names, very unhip," say Idle. "But even then he was the most brilliant comedian I've ever seen."
Palin and Jones met at Oxford, where they wrote and appeared in revues. Gilliam, the exception, was scraping a living as a cartoonist in New York; he contacted John Cleese after seeing him perform in the undergraduate sketch show Cambridge Circus in Greenwich Village.
By the time they came down from university, Cleese and Chapman had already joined the charmed circle of writers which revolved around David Frost. Chapman gave up a career in medicine and ended up working with Cleese, Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor on At Last The 1948 Show. Palin, Jones, Idle and Gilliam, meanwhile, were working for Rediffusion on a children's comedy series, Do Not Adjust Your Set.
Cleese, who thought this the funniest show on TV, rang them with the idea of working together but found them "a bit snotty".
It was Barry Took, co-writer of early surreal radio shows like Round the Horne, and adviser to the BBC comedy department, who finally put them all together.
"My first though was that the combination of Oxford and Cambridge would be a wonderful counterpoint," he says. "Seeing Cleese and Palin together, in particular, was like the sun being reflected off a mirror. It caught fire."
"We were all fed up," says Terry Jones, "with people like the Two Ronnies and Marty Feldman changing our stuff. I remember thinking when we all got together that it had to be the funniest show around. What arrogance we had in our early days."
"We all felt the same way about comedy," says Graham Chapman. "None of us was happy with punchlines, for instance, because things don't necessarily have punchlines in life. We had one meeting, then went off to the pub to celebrate and that was it."
The new show (known disparagingly at the BBC before it had a title as Baron Von Took's Flying Circus) maintained the old alliances. Cleese and Chapman wrote together, as did Palin and Jones. Idle worked alone. Finished material was read to the entire group and included only if everyone thought it was funny. A sketch, once accepted, was viewed as common property and often worked on by the others. The Ministry of Silly Walks, for instance, was conceived by Cleese and Chapman in the wake of Denis Howell's appointment as Minister for Drought. "It was originally going to be the Ministry of Anger," recalls Chapman. "But we were working at my house and, fortuitously, a man I'd noticed the day before happened to walk by again. He was walking up the hill leaning backwards; it did look very odd. We rushed out, but we couldn't see his feet. It was lunchtime and we wondered how we were going to write it, so we rang up Michael Palin and Terry Jones and they wrote the actual sketch."
The Spam sketch, set in a café with only "Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam" on the menu, was written by Palin and Jones, and reworked by Cleese and Chapman, with, Jones felt, unhappy results. "John is very logical and I felt he hadn't appreciated that their was no logic in the sketch - it was purely a rhythm thing. We went along with the rewrites, but when it came to the show, we actually did our original sketch."
Eric Idle originally wrote his "nudge, nudge" routine for Ronnie Barker, who read it and didn't think it was funny. "It just said: 'Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.' He didn't get the point at all. We went into Python with a lot of material other people wouldn't touch."
The mutual criticism could be unsparing and hard to take, particularly for Idle, who wrote without the protection of a partner. There were arguments ("I only threw a chair at John once," says Terry Jones). But on one thing all the members of the group agree. The underlying strength of Python was the way in which individual egos were submerged for the common good.
"I can't ever remember a fight about who should do what, which is remarkable," Cleese says, "It was because, as writers, we instinctively knew who would get the best out of a sketch, and we all put the material first."
"Python was totally unselfish; that was the great thing about it," Michael Palin says. "It was them and us. We were us and the rest of the world was them."
"When a group first forms, it's always the group against the world," says Cleese. "Then, when you become very successful, you stop huddling together for warmth and that's the time - you see it again and again with pop groups - when things start to go wrong."
What went wrong was Cleese's own defection, before the fourth and final series, to take on his quintessential comic role as Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers. For some time previously he had felt his enormous comic energies were being constricted by the group. He believed it had done its best work and was now beginning to repeat itself. His ego could be subordinated no longer.
The other Pythons tell only half-affectionate tales of Cleese's emergence as a prima donna during the team's Canadian stage tour in 1973. "We'd go out for dinner after the show and John would be sitting in the same restaurant at a separate table," says Eric Idle. "He got bored with Python just when everyone else had finally learned how to do it. It was slightly annoying, because we'd just started to make some serious money."
"John has this extraordinary talent, which is something of a burden to him sometimes, I feel," says Michael Palin. "It gets in the way of him carrying on with his life."
Cleese takes the view one might expect from someone heavily involved in psychology and therapy. "I remember being accused of disloyalty and thinking: 'I joined the group to make some TV shows. I didn't marry them.' It's the usual thing that people who are the least secure kick the most. That's true in marriages."
After the end of the TV series, they had one outstandingly happy collaboration, on The Life Of Brian, a film which might best be described as religious satire and is still considered too strong for either BBC or independent television. This was followed by The Meaning Of Life, which John Cleese in particular loathed and which turned out to be the valedictory of the group. Since then each has gone on to independent projects, trying to escape from the Python name. Although they appear in each other's work, the former brothers often seem to snipe at one another, the success of John Cleese in particular proving to be a powerful irritant.
With Fawlty Towers established as a British classic and his international box office success with A Fish Called Wanda, Cleese is permanently at his own high table. Some fellow Pythons turn this fact round to evidence of his long-standing neurosis. "It has always," says one, "been important for John to do better than all the rest of us."
In fact, the primal urge in each is still to prove himself to the rest of the group. "We're like some terrible, feuding family," says Terry Gilliam, whose recent big-budget folly Baron Munchausen had some of the aspects of a ghastly family occasion. The chaotic shoot tied up the loyal Eric Idle for more than six months. Gilliam also upset Michael Palin by taking away the role he'd volunteered from the goodness of his heart to play, and giving it to the bigger box office name Robin Williams.
But the Pythons themselves naturally prefer to make their own inner tensions and jealousies comic. "We take genuine delight in each other's failures," says Idle. "John was terribly worried that Baron Munchausen might have been a hit. Now he can really enjoy his success."
The entire team are planning to make one final appearance together on BBC1 shortly, adding one new sketch to a 75-minute compilation of their material to mark their 20th anniversary.
Despite everything, says Chapman, the group is indestructible. "A documentary was made on us and we were all conscious that we'd been asked what we thought of the others. We went to see it with some trepidation. Afterwards, the atmosphere was amazing. We all looked at each other and thought: 'I know you have your faults, and you think I have mine. But I like you.' And that was it. We all hugged each other."
BIOGRAPHIES
JOHN CLEESE
Shortly to turn 50, John Cleese is at the peak of his profession. He is recognised as an outstanding comic talent, thanks to A Fish Called Wanda, the most commercially successful British comedy ever made - "I imagine that must be annoying for the others," he says.
He is also a businessman (about to sell his training film company, VideoArts, for millions) and is now at work on his second psychology book.
Cleese was the Python more concerned with the quality of individual sketches than with breaking conventions. "John is conventional," says Terry Jones. "But he uses conventions, as in Fawlty Towers, in a radical and brilliant way."
MICHAEL PALIN
Michael Palin, 46, is the youngest Python and the most unassuming.
He lives with his wife of 23 years in the North London family house they have shared since 1968 (they have now expanded their territory to include the house next door).
Here he writes gentle, nostalgic TV plays like East of Ipswich and, his current project, a film script which is based on the story of his own great-grandfather.
He co-starred in A Private Function and A Fish Called Wanda; next month for the BBC he reconstructs the journey of Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days.
"As we've each established ourselves, the rivalries of the past have softened a bit," he says.
(See My Favourite Films, p42)
ERIC IDLE
Variously described by the others as "a loner" and "the wittiest of the group", today, Eric Idle, 46, spends much of his time in France (where he and his wife Tania have a house) and America (where he stars as a ghost in NBC's Nearly Departed).
After Python, the former president of Cambridge Footlights wrote his own television series, Rutland Weekend Television, which he followed with a film, The Rutles.
He now concentrates on acting ("It's much easier," he says) and is shortly to be seen dressed as a nun in Nuns on the Run, with Robbie Coltrane.
He is unenthusiastic about the Python's 20th anniversary celebrations: "It's like making turkey curry out of it."
TERRY JONES
"If you take Terry Jones and John Cleese to be the opposite poles of Python," says Michael Palin, "John represents the head and Terry the heart."
Jones, now 47, remembers conceiving the format of Python as he walked up the stairs of his parents' Claygate house after watching Spike Milligan's Q4.
He was the one who fought hardest against the group's break-up because, he says, "I was less confident than the others that I had anything outside it." Since then he has written children's books, an academic work on Chaucer and directed the Python movies, as well as Personal Services.
His latest film as writer-director is Erik the Viking, which opens this month.
GRAHAM CHAPMAN
The original writing partner of John Cleese and one of the most immediately brilliant of the Python team, Graham Chapman, 48, is managed separately from the others and is not involved in their film company, which is called Prominent Features.
A more vulnerable figure, he says he found the competition within the group distressing and destructive.
He decided he had to get away from it but his own film, Yellowbeard, proved unsuccessful.
A former alcoholic (the others blame his professional break-up with Cleese on his drinking), he has recently had an operation for cancer from which he is now recovering.
TERRY GILLIAM
Part of a close-knit Python sub-group with Terry Jones and Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam worked alone on a shoestring budget.
"We never saw much of him," says Chapman, loftily.
But the American animator's surrealistic cartoons were a vital influence on the way the show developed.
"I suddenly realised everything should be integrated with Terry's cartoons," says Jones. "One thing should just flow into another."
Now 49, Gilliam has subsequently had the most controversial career of any Python, as the director of highly-visual, big-budget, but largely uncommercial feature films like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
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The Sun, September 18 1989, cover and pages 16-17
[The first of three consecutive interview 'exclusives'
Chapman gave The Sun not long before he died. John Cleese
alludes to these pieces on page 230 of Monty Python Speaks,
adding that he was relieved it wasn't all lies and fantasy.]
[Cover story: (Just beneath a huge ad for The Sun's 'All New
Neighbours Sticker Album - plus 2 packs of stickers'),
accompanied by a photo of Chapman in a wheelchair looking
extremely knackered but still grinning. Caption: 'TV's brave
Graham... he is battling spine cancer'. Picture: STEVE LEWIS :]
EXCLUSIVE
My fight to walk again by Python's Graham.
By MIKE HOUSEGO
and JEAN RITCHIE
MONTY Python star Graham Chapman told last night of his battle to walk again after suffering cancer of the spine.
The 48-year-old comic is confined to a wheelchair after a huge operation to remove a huge tumour from his back.
He is in constant pain. And his weight has plummeted by 30lbs.
Pals
But he still plans to appear in a charity show tonight at the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London, pushed on by his Python pals.
Graham, who beat cancer of the tonsils just 12 months ago, vowed: "All this has made me realise how wonderful life is.
"I am determined to walk again."
Full Story - Centre Pages
[The main story is accompanied by a great big photo of the
wheelchaired Chapman in his back garden with John Tomyczek,
David Sherlock and two dogs. Caption: 'SO GOOD TO BE
BACK HOME... Graham Chapman with his adopted son John,
left, and partner David Sherlock'. Picture: STEVE LEWIS. There's
also an early photo of the Pythons captioned 'ZANY DAYS...
Graham, pipe in mouth, with the Python team'.
As a header-graphic there's Python foot with 'Sun EXCLUSIVE'
on it.]
DIY diagnosis saved me, says Python star.
By MIKE HOUSEGO and JEAN RICHIE
MONTY Python star Graham Chapman used his own training as a doctor to diagnose that he was suffering from cancer of the spine.
The he arranged to be rushed into hospital for an emergency operation that saved his life.
Surgeons who operated immediately discovered a large tumour growing so quickly that it was just hours away from turning him into a cripple for life.
Seven weeks later, the lanky comic star has only just been allowed home from hospital.
He revealed in an exclusive Sun interview that he is in constant pain, has lost two stone, and is having to walk again on his matchstick-thin legs.
It is the SECOND cancer that he has beaten this year.
But even so, the only tears that 6ft 3in, 101/2 stone Graham are of joy. He explained: "My illness has made me appreciate the extraordinarily good life I have.
"I want to tell people loud and clear DON'T be afraid of cancer, it CAN be beaten."
Graham, who qualified as a doctor before going into showbiz found he had spinal cancer as he was recovering from an earlier operation for cancer of the tonsils.
After that first course of treatment Graham went home to his beautiful four-bedroom home set in two and a half acres in the Kent countryside.
Lying propped up with cushions on the settee in the living room, Graham, 48, recalled:
"Over the next few weeks everything went well except that I had backache. I thought it was because of my neck operation but physiotherapy didn't make it better.
One night I went into Maidstone for a Chinese takeaway and I felt wobbly. I staggered as if I'd been drinking.
It passed, but the next day I couldn't tell the position of my right foot.
I could feel with it but I didn't know where it was. Walking was difficult.
When I went swimming one of my legs felt as though it was two feet deeper than the other."
The Monty Python star is a homosexual and shares the £750,000 house with his partner of 24 years David Sherlock, 42, his adopted 32-year-old son John, two beagles, a cat, a hamster and a lake full of fish.
That night Graham showed John how to do a neurological examination on his legs - and realised something serious was wrong.
"I couldn't tell if he was moving my toe up or down," he said. "And when he scraped the bottom of my foot my big toe should have gone down. But mine went up which I knew meant there was something wrong with my spinal cord.
Humour
"I am a doctor and cancer was the obvious conclusion."
In hospital Graham realised he had made it just in time.
He said: "I was operated on the very next day - just a few hours later and I would have been paralysed for life.
"After the spinal growth was removed I had two weeks flat on my back unable to do anything except think and talk." Now Graham cheerfully looks to the future.
And tonight, in his wheelchair, he is taking part in a charity show organised by Stephen Fry.
Although he can't walk yet the muscles and nerves in his legs are in working order and he will gradually get more strength back into them.
Graham's good humour didn't falter as he told of his first battle with cancer.
He found he was ill last November after visiting his dentist.
He said: "I felt a pain in my throat afterwards.
"When I looked into my mouth I could see a hole in my palate. I'd also got a swollen gland that was refusing to get better.
"So I went to see an ear, nose and throat specialist and just after Christmas I went into hospital for an exploratory operation." When he came round from the anaesthetic Graham was told he had cancer of the tonsils.
He said: "I'd had my tonsils removed when I was nine but there was a little bit left. For 30 years I'd been smoking a pipe and the jet of smoke hit my throat at exactly the spot where the cancer was.
Pact
"There was a secondary growth in my neck."
Looking back Graham believes the cancer actually started in 1983 - the worst year of his life.
He said: "My father died, my great friend Marty Feldman died, I had a huge tax bill and problems with a film I was making.
"The stress broke down my resistance - doctors today know stress is a key factor in triggering diseases like cancer."
Graham was not frightened of the word cancer.
He said: "It is a disease, and a disease that can be beaten nowadays. So when I heard the diagnosis I wasn't shattered - I was just relieved to know what it was."
He broke the news carefully to David and John.
He said: "We made a pact that we would treat it as a setback, but that's all."
The lump was still there after radiotherapy and two months later he had an operation to remove it.
The op was a success but complications set in fast - and at one point Graham thought he was going to have to carry out an emergency operation on himself to save his life.
He explained: "I knew there was a risk of blood building up in the wound. As I lay on the recovery trolley I could feel a mass in my neck getting bigger and bigger until I could hardly breathe.
Stab
"I tried to get up - I thought I would find a sharp instrument and stab it into my windpipe so I could breathe, a sort of DIY tracheotomy.
"The staff restrained me and the next thing I knew I woke up with a respirator keeping me going.
"I could see a TV screen monitoring my heartbeat and I thought 'My heart's going all right. I'm alive, everything's okay.'
"From then on I became so absorbed in my own treatment that it was as if it was happening to someone else and I was the doctor. That helped a lot."
[An inset story at the side of the main piece:]
GRAHAM'S ANGER AT AIDS RUMOUR
GRAHAM was angry and upset when rumours that he had AIDS were rife even BEFORE he was ill.
He said: "I'd just lost weight, which may have been caused by the beginning of my illness. But then people started asking if I had AIDS.
"Well I haven't and I don't need a test to tell me that. I resent the fact that because someone is known to be homosexual everyone assumes that they are at risk of catching AIDS.
"I am not promiscuous. I have not always been faithful to David but I have always taken care - even before AIDS was known about I was very worried about the risks of VD. I've always practised safe sex - other kinds of homosexual acts don't appeal to me.
"The saddest thing about AIDS is the ignorance and fear that attaches to it - it's very similar to the ignorance and fear that surrounds cancer.
Graham said his recovery was helped by the Pythons and pals like Peter Cook and Willie Rushton visiting him in hospital.
He said: "There were jokes about me walking again - and needing permission from the Ministry of Silly Walks. They were shocked to see how ill I looked - but their attitude changed when I was cheerful."
[Along the bottom of the page:]
TOMORROW: Truth about the man who shares my life
[We don't have a copy of that one. But we do have the
one that came afterwards...] |
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The Sun, September 20 1989, pages 16-17
[The third of the Sun 'exclusives'. There are two photos
- one of Chapman in his university days (captioned 'SILLY
TALKS... Chapman hams it up as a Cambridge comic'), the
other of him in a wheelchair looking very thin, forcing a smile
while watching David Sherlock emerge from the pool, grinning,
holding a large inflatable parrot upside down as if it's dead
(caption: SPLASH FELLA... Graham Chapman and his lover
David Sherlock at the pool in their home. Picture: STEVE
LEWIS). The only other thing occupying this two page centre-
spread is 'Bushell On The Box - which must have pleased the
NF-tattooed homophobic TV critic no end.]
I NEARLY DIED ON THREE BOTTLES OF GIN A DAY
Monty Python star Graham tells of his booze battle.
MONTY PYTHON comic Graham Chapman is fighting to walk again after a spinal cancer operation - 12 years after he nearly drank himself to death. Today he tells in an exclusive Sun interview how he realised he had become alcoholic, and how he managed to kick the habit.
By MIKE HOUSEGO and JEAN RITCHIE
GRAHAM CHAPMAN started hitting the bottle when he was just 14 - and by the time he qualified as a doctor he could guzzle THREE BOTTLES of gin a day.
The Monty Python comic believes his boozing began as a habit because he had an inferiority complex. But it became an addiction that nearly KILLED him.
Graham, 48, said: "In my teens it was a few jars with the lads after playing rugby at home in Melton Mowbray, Leics.
"At Cambridge University I was drinking the best claret I could afford.
By the time I was qualifying to be a doctor at Bart's hospital in London, I could knock back gin and tonics all day long.
"Eventually I could finish off three bottles of gin a day with no trouble at all."
The comic is being nursed back to health at him luxury Kent country home - after a spine cancer operation - by his lover of 24 years, David Sherlock, 42, and adopted son John Tomyczek.
Graham told how he overcame the addiction. He said:
"It took me years and a lot of anguish to come to terms with the fact that I am an alcoholic. I have not touched a drink for twelve years.
But that doesn't mean to say I am cured. It would be the easiest thing in the world to go back to boozing, but if I did I would be dead in a very short time.
I have often tried to analyse - and after all I am a doctor - why I drank so much.
Security
And I have to admit it's because I have a bit of an inferiority complex and drinking helped to overcome it.
When I started to do the stage work, I never like to go on "alone" as they say, so I'd have a couple of stiff drinks first.
It helped to shake off inhibitions. Eventually, booze took over.
As a scriptwriter on Monty Python I never had any great feelings of security. It's easy for a doctor to know whether he's good at his job but it's different in comedy.
Drink also helped me sleep. It made me unconscious and it was something I could rely on.
It became my friend. And beating it became one of the hardest contests of my life.
The way I was drinking I could tell I would be dead by 45.
I had a tremor every morning which I'm surprised was never picked up on the Richter earthquake monitoring machine.
I had red blotches on my skin, a sure sign of the liver disease cirrhosis - and a yellow tinge about the eyes, an indication of liver balm.
I used to throw up every morning. In short, I was a shaking, quivering wreak.
Kissing
I had to have a quick gin as soon as I got up in order to stop coughing fits. Then I would have cold sweats. I often wondered if I would ever be able to stand up again.
And I used to get violent, too. Not so much with people... they hit back, but with things. I would break things.
I would also do silly things in pubs, as drunks do. My speciality was kissing people.
One day when I was working on the Doctor In The House series at London Weekend Television I decided to pick on the sports department. They were always trying to be butch.
I swooped on them and kissed them all. Jimmy Hill took it well but the others were amazed.
I did the old kissing routine in Scotland, too, where we were making Monty Python And The Holy Grail.
I didn't think I was drinking much at that time, a head-starter at eleven maybe. But I found out different.
Just as the camera was about to roll I started to get the DT's. I knew I wasn't shaking from cold, it was booze. No one had a hip flask to help me.
I had dialogue to do and I was shaking like a leaf. I then had to face it, drink was affecting my work.
Wagon
I ended up consulting me - Dr Graham Chapman - about drink. I hadn't got to the stage where I was drinking secretly or hiding bottles around the house, but I was drinking in staggering quantities.
I chose to have my last drink on Boxing Day 1977... not the easiest of days to give up.
I could have chosen New Year's Day and made it a resolution, but I wanted to give up sooner. Besides, no one ever keeps a New Year's resolution.
I told close drinking friends I was going on the wagon. I told others I was going away for Christmas so I wouldn't have loads of people arriving at the house.
There was just David, who I live with, and our adopted son John.
I planned to go to bed and stay there until I thought I had it beaten.
I tried not to drink too much on Christmas Day. Just a few by normal standards. On Boxing Day I was shaking a bit. I got up around lunchtime and tried to eat a sandwich. But I was shaking so much I couldn't eat it.
I weakened and had three large gins in the afternoon to try and put a stop to the shaking.
That night I was annoyed with myself. I hadn't stopped at all. So I went to bed and stayed there for three days.
Sweat
It was probably the worst experience of my life. I didn't know whether it was day or night. Objects in the room seemed to be hurling themselves at me.
I had sensations of creatures crawling towards and over me.
I couldn't bear the light on and I couldn't light my pipe because I was shaking so much.
I had no drugs or pills to help. This was cold turkey you don't have after Christmas.
The drama went on until I thought I could manage a cup of tea and a slice of toast.
I got dressed. I could stand up and I wasn't shaking, which was a miracle in itself. I said to myself, "I've done it."
I called a couple of mates over and offered them a drink. I had a tonic water.
Suddenly I got the shakes. Then I just slumped to the ground and I was unconscious for a while.
I was taken by ambulance to the Royal Northern Hospital. And this time the real treatment had to start. They told me "You are an alcoholic. Do you want not to be?"
I said Yes and I meant it.
I had just been playing at it and hadn't admitted it to myself. Having made that decision it was fairly easy. I took Valium and a kind of sedative called Antabuse which makes you sick if you drink. I never gave it a chance.
I haven't had a drink since, not even wine. I don't miss it, although I do miss the mood change that drink induces.
I can go and sit in a pub all evening and - if the company and the mood are right - still have a good time.
Of course I have noticed a vast difference in my bank account. Booze is an expensive hobby.
[An inset at the bottom of the left page:]
Mates were in the dark
NONE of Graham's friends had a clue he was an alcoholic - and it took a long time for him to recognise it himself.
he explained: "If I had told my friends that I was an alcoholic they wouldn't have believed me. The others in the Python team drank, but not a lot.
"To them, I was a heavy drinker, I would get out of my mind and there would be a lot of laughter. But there was nothing to laugh about in the morning.
"My liver must have been very accommodating. I'd begin on Scotch but that started getting me aggressive and noisy so I switched to gin and tonic.
"I used plenty of tonic, thinking that it wouldn't be much stronger than beer, which I could also consume in vast quantities.
Demon
"I was careful up to a point - I'd take loads of vitamin pills and try to eat well. And from time to time I'd even dry out for a week.
"Having convinced myself that I could live without demon drink I'd head straight back to the bar.
"Anyone who drinks will know what I'm talking about."
[The base of the page bears the legend "© News International.
Our lawyer is watching". What, in case anyone fancies nicking a
rewrite of the first chapter of A Liar's Autobiography but in
shorter sentences? We gather People Magazine in the US later
bought and ran the same story and pics.]
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The Guardian, 6th October 1989, page 37
Graham Chapman died 20 years to the day that Monty Python's Flying Circus was launched on the screen. John Connor considers the roots and the legacy of a determinedly silly series
THE PYTHONS UNCOIL
Twenty years ago the Americans put a man on the moon. A portentous moment, but with hindsight an incredibly expensive and indeed rather surreal way of battling the Soviet Union. It was an age when the fantastic had become reality.
On October 5, 1969 the BBC launched what was to become their own surreal flagship, Monty Python's Flying Circus. It was modestly budgeted, but it did have something in common with the US space programme - it was extremely silly.
So silly in fact that it became a smash hit amongst my 13-year-old contemporaries. Python sketches would be enacted in the playground - and all these years later, if you're not careful, you still find them brought out as party pieces. The memory stands up but does the series?
It will not be long, now that Graham Chapman - a founding Python member - has died, before Monty Python is back on television. A BBC compilation programme is in the making and an Omnibus special is scheduled for December. On Python's twentieth anniversary, it's time some of the Python myths were uncoiled.
They were not that original. They were anything but undiscovered talents. And they were not the beginning but rather the end of something.
It will surprise no one if I point to Spike Milligan and The Goon Show as their precursor. Milligan established a quirky, homegrown, surreal humour as a quaint corner of the British scene. But he was a writer born of a radio generation - the Pythons were the first to grow up with television. Milligan's humour never worked properly on television; yet he beat them to it with Q5.
"I remember," Terry Jones is reported as saying in George Perry's book Life Of Python, "watching Q5 on BBC2, and thinking 'He's done it!' He'd got it all - scenery being pushed off the set in mid-sentence, sketches abandoned and completely new ones taking over. We'd all been writing clichés - sketches with beginnings, middles and ends. Milligan showed us how you could end sketches in the middle without it really mattering - so I talked to Mike Palin about it. The three of us felt that this was the shape, the right thing. But it was a bit of a fight when we started into the shows. John tolerated the idea, but felt that it was the sketches that mattered."
It wasn't just Milligan. Surreal TV humour had also been attempted by fellow Goon, Michael Bentine in It's A Square World. In the States, too, the vaudeville-rooted Laugh In had taken on both surrealism and satire, and even the Monkees took their spoof of Beatles' films into quite crazed territories.
What Python got right was their timing. They looked rebellious - even though they were anything but - and they were the first to capture in comedy the same generation feel as pop music. They were a band that jammed with one-liners and the odd wet fish.
When the shows were repeated recently I and many other people were surprised how little of the material stood up (in contrast to Hancock and Steptoe and Son repeats which blow away the modern sitcom). There are the classic sketches - but there's an awful lot of dross alongside them.
And this from highly experienced comedy writers. Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin had written two series of Do Not Adjust Your Set, as well as performing in it. Whilst John Cleese and Graham Chapman had been writer-performers in two series of At Last The 1948 Show - which also launched Marty Feldman.
For all their undoubted abilities as writer-performers, it wasn't the Oxbridge five of Cleese, Chapman, Palin, Idle and Jones that made the show so distinctive, but, rather, the frenzied animation of the least-known Python, the American cartoonist Terry Gilliam. He'd met Cleese in New York when he asked him to pose for a photographed comic strip.
Gilliam's animation literally stamped a style on the show. When you might weary of in-jokes about television formats - mucking about with the credits, hoax continuity announcements - there was always Gilliam to waft you away to somewhere completely different - his imagination. The innovation of the others was to get out of the studio and set up desks in streams. They were very dependent on stagey sketches - the customer in a shop was a regular stand-by; cheese, parrots, chemist, travel, naughty postcard ads.
The Pythons were the end of something. Television had long ago taken on board revue performers from the two universities - it had become a career structure, one that wasn't to be broken until the rise of alternative comedy in the Eighties.
When the Pythons finished their last series in 1974, without Cleese, they didn't leave an established genre behind them. It wasn't until The Young Ones hit the screen in the early Eighties that surreal television humour started again. They were the kids who had watched Python.
The Pythons, except for the injection of Gilliam, were to a man from lower-middle class backgrounds aspiring to the solid middle class. They satirised their own - that's why Purley got it. But they never went for the throat - there was always something warm about it. They'd put a judge into a dress but they'd never tackle politics the way that Cook had been able to do Beyond The Fringe a decade earlier.
But perhaps that doesn't really matter. The real secret of Python wasn't their surrealism - it's the fact that they were the first to articulate the madness of the British, and in particular the English. Margaret Thatcher could have been created by Python. Alternative comics at the beginning of the Eighties were getting laughs on routines about privatising the army. Now we have Securior guarding them! It's straight out of Python.
We are a nation rooted in ritual and irony. We have a monarchy that has the overwhelming support of the working class, and is at the moment thought to be a bit left wing by the standards of the government. Behind the stiff upper-lipped facade is the reality of Cynthia Payne and her nice gentlemen friends. And our judiciary do indeed wear wigs and robes.
You can level the accusation that they were a bunch of schoolboys, albeit highly talented ones, putting on a revue for their masters. The trouble is we didn't take them seriously - we thought they were only joking.
Graham Chapman obituary, page [unreadable] |
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Daily Mirror, 18th November 1989, page 25
TV SPECIAL
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
THE LAST SILLY STEP
by JACK BELL
The Pythons are set to take their last silly walk into the history books. After that, says Michael Palin, Monty will be as dead as the parrot in the famous sketch.
And , unlike the parrot, the Pythons don't intend being nailed back on the perch. They will be concentrating on their separate careers.
Terry Jones is in Australia promoting his movie Erik the Viking, while Terry Gilliam, animator of the deadly cartoon foot in the opening titles, is in India.
Eric Idle is in Texas, playing Ko-Ko in The Mikado.
Michael Palin is working on a new script, after Around The World in 80 Days.
Heavy
John Cleese is filming a commercial. And Carol Cleveland, the only girl regular, is in Los Angeles with her husband-to-be, comedian Carl Waxman.
The Pythons will be reunited for the last time at next month's memorial service to Graham Chapman, who died last month.
"It won't be anything too heavy or serious," says Palin. "What we are really having is a concert of celebration for Graham." But for Chapman's death, they would currently be whooping it up for the 20th anniversary of the Pythons. ("It was the only time Graham was guilty of bad timing," says Carol.)
Despite the years, the shows still enjoy a cult following the world over. Palin, aboard a container ship in the middle of the Bay of Bengal, was confronted by a Yugoslav officer who pointed and said: "You are Monty Python."
The books and videos sell on. The scripts have just been published and it is rare for the series not to be showing somewhere in America. Tonight the BBC weighs in with a 75-minutes anniversary programme.
Show
Those tuning in for the parrot sketch will not be disappointed. Though the show's title seems to suggest that it may not be there... that it is no more... demised... deceased... gone to meet its maker... it will be shown.
PARROT SKETCH NOT INCLUDED: 20 YEARS OF MONTY PYTHON (BBC1, 9.15pm). |
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