Monty Python Speaks! Revised and Updated Edition: The Complete Oral History. David Morgan
what had gone before. ‘No, no, no!’ We had a bit of a row, and we walked off together, Terry kicking stones right and left. And I said, ‘Look, Terry, just leave it for a moment – anyway, I haven’t got a cherry picker with me and can’t get the big high angle that you’re looking for.’ We came back and did it. We then went on another location in Norwich I think it was, and where we saw the rushes from the previous week, up came the rushes for ‘The Bishop’ – and this is what’s so nice about the whole group: Terry Jones turned around in the hotel’s dining room where we were watching the rushes, held his thumb up to me, and said, ‘You were right, it worked perfectly.’ And that is I think the biggest row we ever had, and it’s not a very big one, you must admit.
JONES: In studio, we tried to do it sequentially as much as we could. It was a bit stop-and-starty sometimes, but we tried as much as we could to rush through the costume changes. We only had an hour and a half recording time anyway, so you had thirty-five minutes of material to record. We very often did it as a live show with just a few hitches, try and keep the momentum going to keep the audience entertained. We didn’t want to stop the show because it meant the audience going off the boil a bit.
MACNAUGHTON: We had a studio audience of 320; that was a BBC policy, to have a studio audience. And you know, never had we laid a laugh from a laugh track on Python. It was a kind of policy, because we thought if the audience don’t really like it, they won’t laugh anyway, and there’s nothing worse than listening to shows that have laugh tracks on and the audience is roaring with laughter at something you’ve found totally unfunny yourself.
JONES: For me, when we came to the editing the audience was always the great key – we always had that laughter to go by so you knew whether something was working or not. And if something didn’t get a laugh, then we cut it. A lot of the time we were actually having to take laughs out because it was holding up the shows.
I remember one show that didn’t seem to work in the studio, and that was ‘The Cycling Tour’. Everybody came out very disappointed, all the audience and our friends going, ‘Eh, that wasn’t very good, didn’t really work, that.’ And of course the trouble with that was that it wasn’t shot sequentially, or even when it was shot sequentially it was very stop-and-starty. Like all the stuff in the hospital, the casualty ward, was very quick cuts – a sign falling off, a trolley collapsing, a window falling on somebody’s hand – that all had to be shot separately, so they didn’t seem very funny at the time. But when you cut them in very fast, that made it seem quite funny.
MACNAUGHTON: At the beginning they all wanted to come to the editing, and I said, ‘That’s no use, we can’t have five guys standing around me standing around the editor.’ So in the end only Terry used to come to the editing. We’d sit together and we’d say, ‘Yes, I think cut there,’ and ‘No, I think it should be cut later,’ and ‘No, I’m sorry, I think it’s quicker’ – the usual thing. There were honestly no problems.
GILLIAM: Terry tended to be the one to be in the editing room, sitting looking over Ian’s shoulder, and keeping an eye on things. I popped in occasionally, John, different people. Terry was almost always there.
Ian dealt with the BBC, basically; we didn’t have to. That’s the great thing about the BBC, it’s not like American television; once they said ‘Go’, they basically left. It was a real, incredibly laissez-faire operation. That was the strength of the place, because it just allowed the talent to get on to do what it did. And in the end the talent ended up producing more good material than all these meetings are producing now. I don’t think the batting average is any better now than it was then, it’s actually worse, and they all end up sitting around talking things to death. It was very simple: you’ve got this series, we want seven shows now and six later and you do it, that’s it.
We had freedom like nobody gets now, basically. And the only time we started getting some involvement from them was later on, I think it was probably the third series, because as we’d become successful they felt that they had to interfere in some way, to be involved in this thing.
WHY DON’T YOU MOVE INTO MORE CONVENTIONAL AREAS?
PALIN: I think there was always a conscious desire to do something which was ahead of or tested the audience’s taste, or tested the limits of what we can or cannot say. I think it’s probably strongest in John and Graham’s writing; they enjoyed being able to shock, whereas Terry and I enjoyed surprise more than shock. For us it was more putting together odd and surreal images in a certain way which would not offend but really jolt, surprise, and amaze. John and Graham took some pleasure in writing something which shocked an audience. I think this came from within, but John never seemed to be totally happy or centred – there was always something which John was having to cope with. And that desire to shock I think came from the way Graham was, too. Graham was a genuine outsider, a very strait-laced man who was homosexual and an alcoholic at that time and therefore found himself constantly in conflict with people, and so he would fight back. And the two of them would put together things like the ‘Undertaker Sketch’ purely because they knew it was outrageous, and yet they did it in a way none of the other Pythons would have done, so it was quite refreshing. When we first heard that we thought, ‘Well, we just can’t do it.’ But then you think about it: this is a really good, refreshing view of death, talking about it that way. In that particular case I think yes, there was a desire to shock an audience by talking about something that was not talked about.
Terry and I were not quite so interested in taboos.
Was it because, having been journeymen scriptwriters for hire, your previous experience did not allow for taboo material?
If you had written taboo material for others, you wouldn’t have got hired again.
PALIN: No, I don’t think that’s it, I think it just wasn’t in our nature to write deliberately shocking material; we couldn’t make it very funny. We could surprise, we could amaze. It was personal, it was nothing to do with our writing; in fact, quite the opposite: the writing that we had to do in the Sixties made us relish Python and the freedom Python had. We utterly supported John and Graham and what they were writing, and for us it was all part of the freedom of Python: to do stuff we wouldn’t have been able to do as journeymen writers. Great, someone writes a sketch about undertakers; it seemed shocking to start with it, you look at it and say, ‘Okay, let’s give this a go.’ And that was part of the exhilaration of doing Python. But no, I don’t think Terry and myself were particularly good about getting laughs [from] very abrasive material. There might have been instances, I can’t remember, [but] we were more about human behaviour, moralizing.
SHERLOCK: Cleese as he’s got older has become more conservative, but when they first started out Python was really quite left-wing; it was considered by some to be commie and subversive.
IDLE: Always we tried to épater les bourgeois.
Once when filming, a British middle-class lady came up and said, ‘Oh, Monty Python; I absolutely hate you lot.’ And we felt quite proud and happy. Nowadays I miss people who hate us; we have sadly become nice, safe, and acceptable now, which shows how clever an Establishment really is, opening up to make room inside itself.
FRANKLY I DON’T FULLY UNDERSTAND IT MYSELF, THE KIDS SEEM TO LIKE IT
MACNAUGHTON: Now Terry Gilliam was meanwhile working on the animation links for all the shows; sometimes Terry’s film would arrive on the day we were recording that certain episode. No one had seen it beforehand, but everybody trusted everybody else. Which was a very good thing.
GILLIAM: [In story meetings] I always had the most difficulty because I could never explain what I was doing; whenever I did, there would be these blank faces. I was in maybe the best position because I had the most freedom.