by David Morgan
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 humor. 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, and Ian didn’t really get involved in that aspect of it. On the other hand when we were discussing things like where we would film and how we could best get the effect of a piece of film he would have quite a bit of input. And we’d actually film in Yorkshire and Scotland—that was very often Ian saying, ‘Let’s go out and do that.’
MACNAUGHTON: We used to plan about eight weeks in advance of the series. We knew we wanted an average of, say, five minutes of film per episode (in the first series anyway). The series was thirteen, so we needed time to [shoot] an hour and a half of film. We would plan what sketches or what sequences were better filmed than done in the studio, etc. And as the Pythons went on, they got more interested in the filming side than in the studio side.
Nothing was too ridiculous for us to try. You have a silly sketch like “Spot the Loony” and you happen to be up in Scotland shooting “Njorl’s Saga,” and you suddenly think, “Wouldn’t it be good to have the loony here in the middle of Glen Coe leaping through the thing?” These kinds of things happened. They enjoyed all that kind of thing. And it was not particularly more expensive than filming, say, in London because the permission and the fees we had to pay in filming in Glen Coe or Oban or whatever were much less than what we had to pay at the Lower Courts or Cheapside. So the expense was not so great, [and] the opulence of the locations was there, you didn’t have to build them!
GILLIAM: We weren’t doing drama, we were doing comedy, which fell under Light Entertainment, and light seemed to be required constantly so that you could see the joke! Feel the joke! And I just always had a stronger visual sense than [what] we were able to get on those filmings. There would be all these times I’d get in there: “The camera should be there.” Terry would do the same thing; we were always pushing Ian around! I think we were just frustrated because we wanted to film this, too; we were convinced we could do it better. But the BBC didn’t work that way. They would put a producer/director on the thing. And there was a kind of Light Entertainment direction at the BBC which was very sort of sloppy.
I was always frustrated because it didn’t look at good as it should; the lighting wasn’t as good as it should have been. Everything was done so fast and shoddily, there was very little time to get real atmosphere on the screen, or to shoot it dramatically enough or exciting enough. But you churned it out; it’s the nature of television.
We wanted it to look like Drama as opposed to Light Entertainment. Drama was serious; that’s where the real talents hung out!
They ate at a separate canteen?
GILLIAM: It’s almost like that, it always felt like that; they had more money, they can light this stuff. If you’ve got something beautifully lit and the costumes are really great and the set’s looking good and then you do some absurd nonsense, it’s funnier than having it in a cardboard set with some broad lighting. And especially since a lot of the stuff would be parodies of things—if you’re going to do a parody, it’s got to look like the original.
So when we were able to do Holy Grail and direct it ourselves, it looked a lot better. I think the jokes were funnier because the world was believable, as opposed to some cheap L.E. lightweight. I mean, we approached Grail as seriously as Pasolini did. We were watching the Pasolini films a lot at that time because he more than anybody seemed to be able to capture a place and period in a very simple but really effective way. It wasn’t El Cid and the big epics, it was much smaller. You could feel it, you could smell it, you could hear it.
JONES: Poor old Ian had me [to deal with]. I insisted on going on the location scouts with him and then when we were filming was really sitting in and seeing what Ian was doing all the time. And it was awful for me, too; I used to go out with this terrible tight stomach because we’d see Ian put the camera down and I’d think, “It’s in the wrong place, it should be over there!” So I’d have to go up to Ian very quietly and sort of say, “Ian, don’t you think you should put it over there?” or something like that, and then depending on Ian’s mood at the time, because if it were morning when he hadn’t been drinking he would be very good, but sometimes he got a bit shirty.
Obviously when we were in the studio on the floor you can’t do very much, so Ian had his head then. But in the editing I’d always ring Ian up and say, “When’s the editing?” I could see Ian going, Jesus Christ! Sort of tell me between gritted teeth, and then I’d turn up.
Did he ever purposely tell you the wrong time, to put you off?
JONES: I get the feeling he wanted to do that, but he was too honorable a man! Especially at the beginning, I’d turn up and he’d say, “Look, we’ve only got two hours to do this in.” And I just had to shut out of my head everything about that and say, “Well, let’s just see how long.” We’d end up doing the whole day. I’d see something and I’d think, “Ian, we have to take that out, there’s a gap there.” Usually it was cutting things out, and closing up the show so that it went fast. But it was very hard, because every time I wanted to change something, my stomach would go tight because I knew Ian would go, “We’ve nearly had two hours now and we’ve only done ten minutes!” So we got on a bit like that. And then at the end of the day I’d ring everybody up to have a look at the show. But then as it went on Ian really got very good, actually, because although it was a bit sticky in the first series—and it shows, I think; the first series is not edited as tightly as it could have been—as it went on, Ian got really good at it, and realized that I wasn’t trying to muscle in on his thing; we were just trying to make the best show possible,
making sure the material actually came over. So it was very hard for him, but eventually the relationship got really good, and Ian and I worked really well. Ian got very creative, and once you relaxed he got very creative about it, and then came up with a lot of different stuff.
Ten, Nine, Eight and All That
CLEESE: My memory is that on the whole Ian did not, let’s be polite, interfere much with the acting! We tended to watch each other’s stuff—not all the time because a certain amount of rehearsal is just practice, but we would keep an eye on each other’s sketches, and at a suitable moment somebody might suggest an additional line, or we might come forward and say, “I think that bit isn’t working.” But there was such an instinctive understanding within the group that you probably didn’t even have to say that because people would already know it wasn’t working. It was very much a group activity—not that we were all sitting around desperately focused on each other’s sketches, because people sat around and read the paper and wrote up their diaries.
MACNAUGHTON: We did the usual BBC style of five or six days’ rehearsal. On the sixth day there would be a technical run-through for all the lighting, etc., and then we were one day in the studio. And of course all the stuff we had filmed we showed to the audience in the studio as we did each episode.
From the beginning I had no problem working with them because they’re extremely disciplined as actors, as comic actors.
We honestly had a very good working relationship. I have never from the beginning had one problem with any of them. I felt myself to be a part of the team anyway.
I can remember one time John looking at me after a sketch had been done and saying, “Why aren’t you laughing?” And I said, “Well, there’s something not quite right with this sketch.” He said, “You hear that, gentlemen? Let’s do it again.” They did it again, and he said, “No, I think we’ll find a new one,” and did a new one the next day.
I can’t remember any explosions. Come the second series there was one moment and that was quite fun: we were making the film “The Bishop,” and I’d set up the opening shot with a lower-level camera. The bishop’s car raced up to the camera, stopped, out jumped all the mafia bishops, etc., and ran up to the church. Now Terry Jones said to me, “No, no, you must do this in a high angle.” And I said, “No, I think the low angle’s better for this opening,” knowing 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.
Cleese and Idle in rehearsal, c. 1971.
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 laissezfaire 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 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 centered—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 an genuine outsider, a very straight-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 so quite so interested in taboos.
Was it because, having been journeymen script-writers for hir
e, your previous experience did not allow for taboo material? If you had written taboo material for others, you wouldn’t have gotten 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 behavior, 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 epater 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.
