Monty Python Speaks! Revised and Updated Edition: The Complete Oral History. David Morgan
from anything I’d done before. The word ‘cult’ was quite soon applied to Python, though we weren’t quite sure what a ‘cult show’ is. It applies to something that is the property of only a very few select people. I’d never been interested in doing that before. Frost Report was a very popular show; Do Not Adjust Your Set was aimed at a popular audience. But Python seemed to fit into this niche of daring, irreverent, therefore only accessible to those of a certain sort of intellectual status, and that lasted for a long time.
So much in television depends on when programmes go out. The BBC labelled the programme – without meaning to – by the time we put it out. We were put out so late at night and people who had to work early next morning couldn’t see it; there wasn’t videos, you couldn’t tape them and run them the next morning if they were put out late at night. Insomniacs and intellectuals were the only people up!
MACNAUGHTON: You do know about Spike Milligan’s remark on the radio once when somebody asked him about the success of the Pythons? ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘my nephews are doing very well, aren’t they?’ Which is a very reasonable thing, because they loved Milligan.
Python would not have been what it was had it not been for
The Goon Show or the Q series.
MACNAUGHTON: Precisely. But would The Goon Show have been what it was were it not for the Marx Brothers? And then would the Marx Brothers have been the way they were were it not for burlesque, and would burlesque have been the way it was were it not for music halls? And so it’s got a wonderful progression, I think.
The trouble is, since Python I haven’t seen anything come up yet that takes its place. And I’m very pleased, because quite honestly I don’t think you can. I guess that’s one of the big pluses for Python, in that nobody can really copy their style – it doesn’t work. I mean, Morecombe and Wise can be copied. But how do you copy [these] guys? I think it would be very difficult to do it again.
CLEESE: My experience is that critics recognize what is slightly original, but very frequently miss what is very original! And if you look back at the reviews of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, they were really not particularly noticeable – nothing remarkable about the reviews for quite a long time. I suspect you would probably get to show nine or ten of the first series before anybody was really writing that something remarkable was happening. A few people got it right away. But critics on the whole did something that they do when they’re insecure: they describe what the show was like without really committing themselves to a value judgment.
GILLIAM: We’d rather be making films that people are passionate about than, ‘Oh, that’s a nice film.’ And Python’s always managed to do that; people are passionate about Python. I think that’s where we’ve always been good. That’s probably the area we should stay in. It’s like comic books; comic book artists and people who deal in comic book all feel like outsiders, they’re never given respect. There’s an amazing skill involved in making a good comic book. The artwork in comic books is brilliant, some of the writing is brilliant – comic books is a really great art form, but it’s not [considered] art. Not literature. It’s this bastard thing hanging out there. And they complain, [but] I keep saying, ‘No, you’re lucky that you haven’t been accepted – keep being angry and outside and doing stuff.’ Because if you become a Keith Haring or Basquiat or any of these people who get drawn into the Establishment, they die, they just freeze up. What’s Keith Haring? His stuff is nice and it’s sweet and it’s cute, it’s all right, but I don’t think when they look back a hundred years from now they’re going to say, ‘He nailed it.’ Except maybe they will: that’s how infantile and silly things had got, that in fact he captured the essence of the whole thing doing just nice, sweet stick figures and nice colours. I don’t dislike his stuff at all, I think it’s nice, but I don’t think it’s Wow!!
I think certainly with comedy, comics, and all that – comics/comedy, we’re stuck with sounding very similar! – that’s outside, and it should stay outside.
MACNAUGHTON: They were quite surprised by the positive reaction to the Gumbys, these daft people with the handkerchiefs tied on their heads. When they walked into the studio one time, what happens but the whole front row of the audience had handkerchiefs tied around their heads! Gumby just had to appear and there was a roar of laughter.
GILLIAM: I’m the luckiest one because I’m the least known, the least recognized. And it’s nice to be recognized occasionally. I get enough, somebody saying ‘Hi,’ just to assuage my fading ego: ‘That’ll keep me going for a month or two.’
And the whole thing is so ephemeral, it’s just incredible how thin the line is between being known and not known. There was one day after we’d done a chat show here after one of these series, my wife, Maggie, and I were shopping somewhere, and someone all excitedly started shouting, ‘Hey, hey, look who’s here!’ Oh fuck. It’s this piece of meat that is being attacked by all these excitable people who had just seen you on television the night before. And then you realize, ‘Thank God I’m not John.’ It’s an awful job to walk down the street and be John Cleese, because you can’t escape from it!
CLEESE: You know when you do something and it catches on, and everybody likes it, then for the next eight years as you creep out of your house at half past eight in the morning: ‘Oi, do your funny walk there, John!’ Just so painful!
THE PYTHONS THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
APART FROM THAT HE’S PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT
I asked each of the Pythons what they thought the greatest contributions were of their fellow members to the group, and then to describe how the disparate personalities (sometimes in conflict with one another) merged to become a thriving whole which in many ways was far greater than the sum of its parts.
Cleese, the icon.
It Certainly Wouldn’t Be Worth Your While Risking It Because I’m a Very Good Shot; I Practice Every Day … Well, Not Absolutely Every Day
PALIN: Well, John’s quality, apart from just being very, very focused and disciplined as a writer, was a great economy in his writing – very funny and very tight – and that I think comes from his legal background.
Apart from the superb sense of comic timing – the ability to deliver a line – John was able better than any of us (apart from perhaps Graham) to show this wonderful process of an Establishment character undermining the Establishment. The rest of us could be dismissed as being your sort of irritants, the smaller person getting in the way; or the way our characters were played could sort of be dismissed. [But] the great thing about John’s characters was he epitomized the ruling establishment of Britain; he looked like the bishop or bank manager, a man of authority. He looks just right, and to be able to undermine it as successfully as he did from that perspective was really wonderful and I think the greatest strength of John. It meant that people were really genuinely taken aback when John would be in full blow of invective. His is not just a purely comedic character; this is an archetypal English, respectable, responsible person physically attacking from within. It seemed to me that was an ability that John had, because we all felt he wasn’t acting the part, he was it. That’s the best analogy – he was a headmaster who had