Monty Python Speaks! Revised and Updated Edition: The Complete Oral History

How did you start with animation in England?

GILLIAM: That was just a fluke, really. When I was in London, still drawing these fucking cartoons, I was on a show doing caricatures of the guests, and they had some material they didn’t know how to present. I remembered seeing somewhere years earlier, projected on a sheet in somebody’s flat, a Stan VanDerBeek cartoon. It was the first time I’d ever seen cutout animation, and it was Richard Nixon photographed with a foot in his mouth, trying to get it out. I thought it was outrageously funny. So on the show I said, ‘Why don’t I make an animated film?’ And they let me. And overnight I was an animator.

I had two weeks to do it in, and four hundred pounds. The only way I could do it in that time was using cutouts. I just did these silly things with these cutouts and nobody had ever seen that before on British television. And the result was instantaneous; within a week I had all these offers to do all this other stuff. That’s the power of that going out there and millions of people seeing your stuff.

BIRTH (#ue8ca10d0-2b7c-5fe0-befb-0ed9bff34644)

Chapman in the delivery room, from The Meaning of Life.

LEAVE IT ALL TO US, YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT HIT YOU

How did the grouping of Python come about?

BARRY TOOK, BBC AND INDEPENDENT TELEVISION PRODUCER: Marty Feldman and I were sitting in an Indian restaurant. He had been working on The Frost Report with John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and I’d been working at Thames Television with Michael Palin and Terry Jones, and I said, ‘I’ll put my two Oxford chaps against your two Cambridge chaps.’ It started as a joke – hah hah hah – so I got home and I thought, ‘Hey, that’s not a bad idea.’

So I put it to Michael Palin, and he said yeah, he thought it’d be fine by him, but if it came off could he bring Gilliam and Eric Idle because they’d been working together at Thames on this children’s show, Do Not Adjust Your Set. And I took it to Cleese and Graham Chapman, and we got together and talked about it, and I went to the BBC.

CLEESE: So what happened – and I am fairly clear that my account is fundamentally right – after Graham and I had been laughing at Do Not Adjust Your Set every Thursday, we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do something with those guys, because they are the funniest people around.’ Connie had now been in England for a year and a half and had found her feet, so I didn’t feel guilty about going off to the studio for rehearsal. We rang them up – I rang them up, because when I say ‘Graham and I’ rang them up it always meant I did; Graham didn’t do that kind of thing, he’d sit there sucking on his pipe – and I suggested it to them, and they were a bit cautious. They didn’t say, ‘What a wonderful idea!’

I was told later that they’d had an offer from Thames Television, so they were making up their minds how to proceed. And then about two weeks later they rang back and said, ‘Okay, we’ve thought about it and we like the idea.’

Marty Feldman’s writing partner was Barry Took, and they’d written hundreds of very good radio shows together of which Round the Horne was the best known. Graham and I wrote a certain amount of stuff for Marty during that period when we weren’t performing, so I knew Barry a little and I’d always liked him, and I knew he was some kind of comedy advisor to the BBC. I spoke to Barry and said, ‘Look, I’ve talked to the Do Not Adjust Your Set people and we’d like to do something.’ And my partly constructed memory is that Barry said, ‘I’ll speak to someone.’

PALIN: I can remember John ringing me up and saying that he’d seen The Complete and Utter History of Britain that Terry and I did, and saying, ‘Well, you won’t be doing any more of those!’ – John’s estimation of The Complete and Utter History, which had been a partial success (or partial failure, according to which way you looked at it)!

Terry, Eric, and myself had all been contributors to The Frost Report, [but] I had worked as an actor with John and Graham on a thing called How to Irritate People which was made in 1968. I think this was the first time that I’d actually acted with John in sort of long sketches. John was pretty much a star in the television comedy world by 1968 because of The Frost Report and then At Last the 1948 Show, and I was very flattered that I was asked to go and do this show, because John was the best around – by far he was the most interesting, the most effective television comedy writer/performer around, as far as I was concerned. I think it was doing that that we realized that we enjoyed working together, we had a similar sense of humour, but also a similar attitude to comedy performing: playing it straight for laughs rather than to handle it too obviously. So that really brought John and myself together. I don’t think John had worked with Terry Jones, but he knew Terry Gilliam of course because he worked with him on that magazine in America.

So anyway this phone call came and I think it must have been early in ’69, John saying why don’t we do something together. I think not just because Complete and Utter History was over but [also] I don’t think John wanted to do any more of At Last the 1948 Show. I think he had had enough of those for whatever reason. Marty Feldman had gone on to be a big star, and I think John saw his future with a style of writing that Terry Jones and myself were doing being compatible with his and Graham’s writing.

TOOK: By then I had become the advisor to the comedy department at the BBC on what they called cheerfully a ‘peppercorn rent’, meaning they paid me nothing but I was allowed to steal; I didn’t steal because I’m not that sort of person, but I desperately wanted to get some shows together. Things were pretty flat [at that time] because David Frost had gone elsewhere, the Marty Feldman series was finished, and they had a show called Broaden Your Mind with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden which was a bit flabby.

I had seen Barry Humphries, the Australian, in a one-man show and thought he would make good material for television, and I had this idea of putting this Cleese/Chapman/Palin/Jones together. So I arrived at the BBC and they said, ‘Well, Barry Humphries was a female impersonator.’ I said, ‘He’s not, he’s a very broad, interesting comedian, he does all kinds of things, and Edna Everage was just one of his jokes’ – it came to overwhelm him in the end, but I mean in those days he had several characters. And they said, ‘Oh, this Palin and Jones, all that is much too expensive.’ I said, ‘You must do it, you’ve got to. Why the hell have you employed me? You said come in, bring us new ideas, I bring you new ideas, you say: We can’t do it. Too expensive.’

I thought, you can’t fiddle about with these guys, you’ve got to go for the throat, you’ve got to say, ‘You’ve got to do this!’ So my boss at the time, an eccentric man by the name of Michael Mills, said, ‘You’re like bloody Barry Von Richthofen and his Flying Circus. You’re so bloody arrogant – Took asks you a question, halfway through you realize he’s giving you an order.’

So it was known internally as Baron Von Took’s Flying Circus. It was then reduced to The Flying Circus and subsequently The Circus. All the internal memos said ‘The Circus’: i.e., ‘Would you please engage the following people at these prices dah dah dah.’ I have a copy of the memo somewhere which predates anybody else’s claim to have invented the name, it’s something I’m fairly jealous about – I mean, I don’t give a damn, but I did invent it.

When they wrote their first script, it was called Owl Stretching Time or Whither Canada? and Michael Mills said, ‘I don’t give a damn what it’s called, it’s called The Circus in all the memos – make them call it “something Flying Circus.”’

PALIN: Pretty soon after we decided to do something together, John and Graham went off to finish a film they were doing with Carlo Ponti or somebody like that and then take a holiday in Ibiza, leaving Terry and myself and Terry Gilliam to think more about a shape for the show. That would have happened during May or June of ’69; when they came back we actually started writing.

IDLE: I remember sitting on the grass in some London park idly discussing what we should do. Mike, me, Terry G., and Terry J. already had an offer to do an adult version of Do Not Adjust Your Set on ITV, but not for another year. John and Graham came with an offer to go straight ahead in the autumn. John was keen to get Mike, and we had him. John was not keen to do a show on his own that the BBC had offered him, therefore he came to us. Our decision was to blend the two shows: At Last the 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Set.

Mike said Cleese was interested. We met up with him and Graham in this park somewhere, [and] said, ‘Let’s do it.’ [We] went to the Beeb, who said, ‘Right you are, thirteen on air in September,’ and that was it.

It wasn’t like US TV at all! We didn’t have to do anything as stupid as selling a concept. There was no executive structure. They just gave us thirteen shows and said, ‘Get on with it.’ Executives only spoil things and hold back originality – that is their job.

CLEESE: The worst problem we had with the whole show was finding a good title for it. We had the first show written and we didn’t know what to call it, and we had a whole lot of fanciful titles: A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin, which I really liked; Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble and Boot; Owl Stretching Time; The Toad Elevating Moment. In fact, the BBC had started to call it The Flying Circus. They’d started writing it into their schedules, in ink, and so they said, ‘Well, could you call it The Flying Circus? Because otherwise we’d have to write out new schedules.’

Then we couldn’t decide who. We thought it might be Gwen Dibley’s Flying Circus, because she was a name Michael had pulled out of a newspaper, and then somehow we went off Gwen Dibley, I don’t know why – she could be famous now, you know? But somebody came up with Monty Python and we all fell about, and I can’t explain why; we just thought it was funny that night!

TOOK: I fended off the BBC, who were constantly whinging about how much it was going to cost. They just thought there was too many of them, they knew the animation would be very expensive, and they knew these guys had a lot of imagination and they’d rush off into the fields and film, they would have elaborate sets and all that, and they knew the whole bag of tricks would be very costly, as indeed it was. I said, ‘How much is in the budget for scripts?’ And they said such and such, and I said, ‘Well, split it in six and give them a sixth each. And how much for performing? Do the same thing. It won’t cost you any more.’

‘Well, we can’t because John Cleese gets more than Michael Palin.’

‘That’s irrelevant; if they’re going to do it they’re going to do it.’

I was about ten years older than the Pythons were and was regarded by them as a man who had a track record which was quite respectable, and I looked a fairly cheerful person. I could be objective. We used to have these meetings at my home in the study, and they used to come in, have tea and cakes and chat and discuss ideas, and they would argue and discuss and they would all agree, and then they would go home. An hour later, the phone would start: ‘Is this a bad move for me, is it worth doing?’ And I said to all of them, anybody who would ask me that, ‘Well, if it’s a success, it can’t possibly hurt your career, and if it’s a failure it’ll be off so fast that nobody within six months will remember it, so it won’t hurt your career at all.’

Were they confident in being able to carry the show by themselves?

TOOK: Well, yes, they’d been given free rein. They were told by the BBC, ‘Yes, you can do whatever you like, within reason, as long as it’s within the bounds of common law.’ I made the BBC make that statement to them so they wouldn’t feel threatened. And that was my role, then I got out of the way!

To see people with real talent using that talent to the full, it’s terrific and if I’ve been involved in somehow helping to shove that along I’m even more pleased. I suppose I remember my own struggles and how you need patrons and people who help you along in the beginning.

The only criticism that I actually had to face head-on was [from] the head of Light Entertainment, a man called Tom Sloane, [who] came into my office one day and said, ‘Excuse me, Barry, I’ve just been looking at a playback of Python. Does John Cleese have to say “bastard” twice?’ I said, ‘Yeah, if he wants to.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m just asking! I’m not trying to –’ He shut the door and went away. And that was that!

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

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

PALIN: I think probably something like Dad’s Army

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

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

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

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

ALL BRONTOSAURUSES ARE THIN AT ONE END, MUCH MUCH THICKER IN THE MIDDLE, AND THEN THIN AGAIN AT THE FAR END.

– (MISS) ANNE ELK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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