Monty Python Speaks! Revised and Updated Edition: The Complete Oral History. David Morgan
but it just adds a wonderful pleasant madness. In Brian, Terry Gilliam makes dark, grunting noises where I stutter away and Michael is this very pleasant lost man who is somehow in charge of these lunatics. It is pure Palin at his finest. They are delightful scenes and my personal acting favourites.
PALIN: Personally, I always enjoyed when you were able to flesh the character out a bit, even within a sketch. I mean, I loved playing the man in the ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch or the ‘Cheese Shop’, because you can give them some sort of character – they’re not just somebody saying, ‘No, we haven’t got this,’ ‘No, we haven’t got that.’ It isn’t just the words, it’s the evasiveness and the degree of evasiveness, and why a man should be that evasive, and what’s going through his mind [that] appeals to me. I really enjoyed getting to grips with characters like that, even within a fairly short sketch.
CLEESE: I remember once that I particularly liked a sketch that either Mike or Terry had written about one of those magazines that is just full of advertisements, so if you wanted to buy a pair of World War II German U-boat commander field glasses or a mountain bike or a garden shed you went to this magazine. And I liked the sketch so much I asked if I could do it – very unusual for me. And Mike had slight reservations about whether I should do it, but they let me. And I didn’t do it particularly well, and I remember discussing it afterwards with Mike, and it was because I was trying to go outside my range – in other words, I didn’t do it as well as he would have done it because he’s better at doing the ‘Cheerful Charlie’ salesman.
But similarly if you’d given Mike that scene where I go on about the Masons and start that strangely aggressive and resentful speech, I think Michael wouldn’t be so good in that area. But it’s much more complicated than you might think because it is not that I am happy about shouting at people, because actually I’m extremely unhappy, I’ve almost never shouted at anyone. I’ve found it almost impossible to do, but I seem to be able to do it on screen. So it’s not like saying, ‘In character you’re the same as you are in everyday life’; that would be utterly simple-minded and untrue, but it just seems to be the case that some people are more comfortable portraying some emotions; I don’t mean that it isn’t utterly connected with their ordinary life, but that it’s not as connected with it as you might think.
Which of the Pythons did you think was the prettiest in drag?
GILLIAM: Prettiest woman, goodness! I don’t know. John was actually pretty nice when he played in ‘The Piranha Brothers’, he’s wonderful sitting in the bar: ‘He knows how to treat a female impersonator.’ John was fantastic in that. John loved it so much I was beginning to have concerns there! The most convincing woman? I think Eric was the best woman. I’m not sure ‘pretty’ came into it. Do you have another adjective?
‘We could have it any time we wanted.’ Chapman and Idle as the Protestants in The Meaning of Life.
‘Least unattractive’?
GILLIAM: I think in Meaning of Life, Eric as the Protestant Wife was spectacular. I just thought that was an extraordinary, wonderful performance. Terry and Mike were always very broad, and Graham was also very broad, but I actually thought the Protestant Wife that Eric played was amazing. Eric’s father died when he was young, so his role model was his mother, and maybe that’s why he was good.
THAT’S MY FLANNEL
Once the shows were assembled, was it easy to see it as a group effort, or was there still a sort of jealous, protective feeling:
‘This is our sketch, that is their material’?
PALIN: I’d like to think we naturally were rooting for every sketch [rather than] anyone wanting their sketches to go down better, although there probably was a little bit of that, but basically you just wanted the show to have laughs all the way through. Putting together that show involved decisions which we’d all taken – the choice of the material, the casting, the links, all that – as part of the group. So if something didn’t work, then yes, it was seen as a failure of the group: ‘We shouldn’t have put that in or cast it that way, set it up in such a way.’ It was very much all group decisions.
And quite interesting, because early on John was undoubtedly the most well-known, [yet] he was very happy to be part of that group – he didn’t want it to be in any way The John Cleese Show, and I would have thought if there was going to be a possible area of difficulty, that would have been one of the problems. John was the ‘star’ before Python; he wasn’t necessarily the star of Python, although he probably was – he was the best known and possibly the best performer. But John didn’t see it that way; John saw it as a group, and Python [assumed] responsibility for everything that went up there, rather than your individual responsibility.
I’m sure at the end of the day there was a bit of, ‘Terry and Mike … ehh!’
SHERLOCK: Graham and John did a bizarre murder sketch for David Frost whereby I think the murderer turned out to be the regimental goat mascot that belonged to the guard who was a suspect: ‘It was the Regimental Goat wot done it!’ It was new in terms of off-the-wall wacky humour. At the time we thought it was hysterical, but most people wondered what the hell the sketch was about. Some of the more surreal sketches they were doing [for Python] had been rejected by every other thing they worked for.
JONES: One of the first sketches was about sheep nesting in trees, which John and Graham had offered to The Frost Report, and the producer Jimmy Gilbert had said, ‘No, no, no, it’s too silly. We can’t do that.’ John’s thing was always, ‘The great thing about Python was that it was somewhere where we could use up all that material that everybody else had said was too silly.’
Did you and Michael also use sketches you had written for other comedians?
JONES: All ours was original material, squire!
Was there EVER any consideration given during the writing process to how an audience would respond to the material?
IDLE: None whatsoever.
PERT PIECES OF COPPER COINAGE
JONES: I think our budget was £5,000 a show. It had been kind of a tight operation. Everything was planned very rigorously. We’d do the outdoor filming for most of the series before we started shooting the studio stuff. We had to write the entire series before we even started doing anything because we’d be shooting stuff for show 13, show 1, or show 2 while we’re in one location, so that while you’re at the seaside you can do all the seaside bits.
PALIN: A lot of the early arguments were just over money; we were paid so incredibly little. So in a sense the BBC committed a lot, they’d given us thirteen shows (which was nice), but they’d taken away with one hand what they’d given us with the other. But on the other hand they let us go ahead and do it!
MACNAUGHTON: Because I was the producer as well as the director, I was able to speak as a producer, so I could say [to the Pythons], ‘That is impossible, we have only got so much of a budget; can we alter this slightly to allow that we don’t go too far over?’ Because you know at the BBC in those days if you went too far over budget the people got rather anarchic. Unless you were exceptionally successful.
PALIN: We presented a script to Ian, we knew what we wanted to do on film and what should be done in the studio,