Monty Python Speaks! Revised and Updated Edition. David Morgan
Terry Jones: very excitable, being a Welshman very emotional, quite fiery at times. I was never present at the writing sessions or the business meetings but I’m told that he was the one that had been known to throw things. And he, along with Terry Gilliam, were the two looniest of the lot, who would cause the most havoc and confusion during the rehearsal period.
Terry Gilliam, also very excitable, very visual, very loud! And you never quite knew what was going on in his head, until you actually saw the animations – and when you saw the animations you really got quite worried about what was going on there!
Graham always did everything to excess, everything he did: obviously his drinking, and the way he flaunted his homosexuality, which wasn’t the done thing in the early Seventies certainly, and caused a certain amount of embarrassment at the time. Personally I felt quite embarrassed by some of his behaviour. I don’t know quite how to describe Graham; I sort of describe his behaviour rather than his personality. He was a lovely man. I think because of his drinking and his homosexuality, everyone felt they needed to take care of Graham a little.
John: the most logical, definitely moody, like all comic geniuses a complex man but he was the only one who really changed during the course of Python. When he was going through his questioning period with his psychoanalysis, he was actually at times quite unpleasant to be around. He was unfriendly and difficult – certainly that’s what I noticed. Fortunately, by the time we were doing Life of Brian he was back to being his fun self.
And as for Michael, well, Michael has never changed. He’s the one that’s never changed at all, and he remains the same charming, shy, sweet, helpful person that he is, and he is of course the only one who’s actually quite shy, and that’s very appealing, which is why all the women adore Michael. He was always the ladies’ favourite.
IF THEY CAN’T SEE YOU, THEY CAN’T GET YOU
MACNAUGHTON: This was a very strange thing because when I’d done four or five Monty Python shows which had not yet gone out, I was called to the head of entertainment, who said to me, ‘I don’t think we’ll be renewing your contract.’ I had a year’s contract. So I said, ‘Oh, really? Why not?’ He said, ‘Well, this Q5 show of yours was a bit of a cult success, but only on BBC2. [!] And who really wants to see the Monty Pythons?’ They were ready to drop me. It wasn’t that they were going to drop the Pythons; they just didn’t think that the way we were doing it – which meant me as producer and director – was what was wanted. Fortunately I think their public became of a different mind – the Pythons went out and became a cult success.
Promotional item in the Radio Times:
MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS
is the new late programme on Sunday night.
It’s designed ‘to subdue the violence in us all’.
The first Python show, broadcast on October 5, 1969, demonstrated quite clearly that the group was after something quite uncategorizable. It presented a surreal mix of violence (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hosts a programme depicting famous deaths); television parodies (‘We find that nine out of ten British housewives can’t tell the difference between Whizzo butter and a dead crab.’ ‘It’s true, we can’t!’); occasions where all propriety is ripped to shreds (an interviewer proceeds to address his guest as ‘sugar plum’ and ‘angel drawers’); some intellectually tainted comic bits (Picasso paints while riding a bicycle, followed by Kandinsky, Mondrian, Chagall, Miró, Dufy, Jackson Pollock, ‘… and Bernard Buffet making a break on the outside’); and a loopy premise allowing for both some slapstick and social commentary (the tale of the World’s Funniest Joke, appropriated by the army as a weapon against the Nazis, who fail miserably at developing a counter-joke of their own). Running throughout the programme were gags and animations about pigs.
In the weeks that followed, the programme became more fragmented, more surreal, more violent. Sheep nesting in trees gave way to a man playing the ‘Mouse Organ’ (namely, some rodents trained to squeak at a certain musical pitch accompanied by a pair of heavy mallets), to a cartoon of a pram that ingests the doting women who lean too closely. Kitchen-sink melodramas were turned on their heads, as when a young coal miner returns home to his playwright father, who rants about his son’s values (‘LABOURER!’). A scandal-mongering documentary examines men who choose to live as mice (‘And when did you first notice these, shall we say, tendencies?’). And a confectioner is investigated for fraud in labeling his latest product, Crunchy Frog (‘If we took the bones out it wouldn’t be crunchy, would it?’).
How was the series sold originally by the BBC?
TOOK: Well, it’s this ‘new wacky series, these wacky kids, these bright new Cambridge graduates and Oxford lads who delighted us for years with their merry antics, now together at last in a brand-new series’. I suppose that’s what they did. That’s what they do about everything else!
GILLIAM: The BBC I think were constantly uncomfortable with us. They didn’t know quite what we were, and I think they were slightly embarrassed by it, and yet it was too successful, it was making all this noise out there. When they took us off after the fourth show (this was the first series), we were off for a couple of weeks, I think there was a serious attempt to ditch it at that point. But there was too much noise being made by us. The most wonderful thing was everybody tuning in when Python was supposed to run and it was the International Horse of the Year Show; in the middle of it, they were doing their routines to music, it was Sousa’s ‘Liberty Bell’ – our theme music. It was like Python was even there, you couldn’t keep it down!
But in the beginning they would put us out at all these different times, and change it, but somehow the word got out and they kept us on.
TOOK: The BBC split up into different areas, and the option was to take the show or not to take the show, and half the regions didn’t take the first series. So if you lived in London you’d get it; if you went down to Southampton on the south coast you wouldn’t be able to see it because they put on Herring Fishing in the North Sea or something. It was very irritating that the regions had that kind of autonomy; there was nothing you could do. But the word started to go around that this was very good and very new, and something they ought to have. So one after another came back into the fold, and by the time the second series was done, the complete network had it.
CLEESE: I had a friend who was trying to watch the series, and he sat down in his hotel room in Newcastle and switched it on and there was this hysterical start to Monty Python about this guy wandering around being terribly boring about all the ancient monuments around Newcastle. And he watched it falling about, and said it’s real nerve to do this, it’s really terrific and what a great start to the show. And about twenty minutes in he realized it was the regional off-time.
The nicest thing anybody ever said about Python was that they could never watch the news after it. You get in a certain frame of mind and then almost anything’s funny!
HE WANTS TO SIT DOWN AND HE WANTS TO BE ENTERTAINED
How was the public’s response to your work different from what you’d experienced on your previous series?
PALIN: I suppose the difference was that, partly because of its programming and the time it went out, Python clearly was seen as very much for an adult audience, which is very interesting because nowadays the spirit of Python burns on in ten-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds. So many children love Python. But at the time it was seen as an adult show. I’d never really been involved in an ‘adult’ show, kind of X-rated comedy show, and this seemed to be the image of it.
And