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