by David Morgan
When the show was airing, PBS brought the Pythons over. They did a mini-promotional tour, I think to five or six cities.
They were quite amazed by the fervor of it. I think American fans have always been more devoted—“fanatical” is a good word. Starting with the FM radio listening audience, you got people who were really listening carefully to everything. People who discovered Python felt they had made a major discovery.
In England the series had just played once, then was repeated, and that was it. Here they’ve never really been off the air for any length of time, the shows did keep appearing. Plus you had everything available: you had the records, and we did the deal for the first books, Monty Pythons Big Red Book and The Brand New Monty Python Bok. People would memorize sketches; I’d get people coming up to me quoting bits of sketches all the time.
A friend of ours who happened to be staying in our apartment several years ago who was English got off the plane and got a taxi into New York City. This young guy who was the driver, the minute he heard his English accent, he goes “Hey, you’re from England? I really like those Monty Python guys!” The whole trip into New York he did nothing but quote Monty Python sketches. John said had he known he was coming to an apartment that had some vague connection with Monty Python, he never would have got out of the taxi.
I spoke to a screenwriter by the name of Ed Naha; he wrote Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Ed used to be a journalist, he was a real early Python journalistic convert. We were catching up, he’d since been married, and he said his whole relationship with his wife was based on the fact that she “got” Python. They couldn’t have gotten together had it not been for that!
The Pythons were always pretty impressed with the devotion from American fans, a small but select group to begin with. They were very responsive to that right away, [and] quite encouraged by that; I think that’s probably why they did that last series, which was a surprise to everyone, including them, I think. They had seen this wonderful support for Python which they hadn’t felt to that extent in England. I think England enjoyed and got into it, it was a sort of cult thing over there, but that was it.
JONES: When Holy Grail came out, we came over and did some publicity for that, and it was a very different sort of feeling. We sort of felt, “Yes, our audience had found us,” totally different from the Joey Bishop/Johnny Carson audience. And of course in the States it’s a big enough audience to make a difference.
I’m not sure whether fanatical is the word, but it was a much more enthusiastic response. I think much more generosity. I mean, in England people were always wanting to qualify things, saying, “Oh yeah, really love it, didn’t like that bit, though!” They can always find bits they didn’t like. Whereas in America if they didn’t find something funny, I always got the feeling that American audience made allowances and thought it was because they didn’t understand it rather than that it wasn’t funny.
Did the passion of fans surprise you at all?
CLEESE: I kind of understood it because when I was young I had a similar passion for The Goon Show. I’ve come to the conclusion that what it’s really about is that younger people looking at the adult world that they’re about to enter can’t quite believe that it is to be taken seriously—as least as seriously as the people in the middle of the adult world take it! And I think over and above the fact it makes people laugh (and you always feel great affection for anyone who makes you laugh, even if they do so with an appalling persona, like W. C. Fields or Basil Fawlty), I think the emotional connection is something saying, “You know, there are people out there who are simply telling us not to take it all seriously.” And I think that strikes an unbelievably loud chord, and that is what people respond to.
And I think the fact that it has been successful in countries that I hadn’t even heard of when I wrote Python was that we somehow seem to come across archetypes that occur in all the different cultures. Despite the enormous number of specifically British mentions (like Reggie Maudling and Dawn Palethorpe and Brian London), and the fact that Graham and I would sometimes spend ten minutes on which of two or three words to use because of the connotations, it travels so well, which is very heartwarming and very pleasing.
GILLIAM: It was fantastic; we were like rock stars. What’s so weird about it, it was at a time when becoming a rock star was the dream—everybody wanted to be a rock star. And we kind of did it in a different way. It wasn’t like we set out to do it; but we ended up on those American tours, and it was like that. Having the Hollywood Bowl with 15,000 people sitting out there doing the lines with you, it was good fun. But the other good thing was, it ultimately wasn’t that thing that one needed desperately; one could do it and walk away from it, as opposed to a lot of people who just have to get more of that feeling.
But there were really some silly times. Graham often was the center of it, Graham and his outrageous behavior. It always became a weird kind of catalyst for the rest of us. We were silly, but we wouldn’t actually go out into the world and behave in this bizarre and dangerous way. He did. Like when we were doing the German shows, every morning there’d be another tale of some outrage the night before, some awful, “What, you did what with who?” So we’d wake up in the morning curious to see what state Graham was going to be in.
Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam at KERA in Dallas, Texas, doing weird things with a stuffed armadillo in a blatant attempt to raise pledges for public television.
Or in America, which State Graham would be in.
GILLIAM: Yes, exactly! And the stage shows, the Canadian tour was very strange. It must have been in the late fifties, early sixties, when they built all these new theaters around Canada, but they were all built to the same plan; it’s like they had one architectural drawing that they moved from province to province. And we were doing these tours, we’d travel for a thousand miles, and end up with the same dressing rooms! It was the most weird, déjà vu–ish experience.
PBS was great. PBS was really important, finally getting on the air in America. I mean, if it hadn’t been for PBS, we wouldn’t be sitting here. What I’ve always liked about putting it on PBS is we didn’t make any money. People thought we were making a lot of money because we were on television. You don’t get any money from PBS, but we were being seen and building an audience, which paid off for the movies. And it was the one place where they would show it without commercial breaks, the way we wanted it.
LEWIS: In those days they refused any kind of marketing or merchandising. They’ve changed their mind very recently!
As a group they refused to do commercials, always. And just two weeks ago I had a phone call, because I was working with Michael and he was in town, from a woman saying she had a HUGE offer from a soft drink company—she wasn’t prepared to tell me who—who wanted to do a massive TV commercial with the Pythons, at least three of them, and John and Eric had agreed, and she said, “Can you ask Michael?” Terry Jones had already turned her down, and Terry Gilliam doesn’t do that sort of thing, so Michael was her last hope. Michael said “Good luck” to Eric and John if they wanted to do it, but he wouldn’t consider it. He said, “We do not do Python commercials.” It was a vast amount of money, apparently; I was never told but they’d said, “Money was no object,” that sort of thing. Michael always loves to hear about commercial offers, he’s always being offered commercials; he’s always refused them, but he wants to hear about them.
It’s very funny, he once accepted to do some TV commercials for an FM radio station in Chicago, which was mind-blowing. Of all the ones he’s been offered, that was the least likely. It just sort of appealed to him in a perverse way, a little local FM radio station. It wasn’t much money, and it wasn’t a product endorsement as such. I think he actually didn’t enjoy and wish he hadn’t done it, [but] it was no big deal.
What’s one of your oddest stories from those days?
LEWIS: There was a sleazy club in downtown Manhattan that called itself “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” We couldn�
��t believe it. Then they went out of business, and we started getting odd bills, things they hadn’t paid!
THE FOURTH (AND FINAL) SORTIE
I Don’t Think We Had Enough of the Really Gross Awfulness That We’re Looking For
Following the filming of Holy Grail, Chapman, Gilliam, Idle, Jones, and Palin agreed to another series for the BBC, which was recorded in the fall of 1974. Although Cleese begged off participating, some material which he had cowritten with Chapman (including some Harrods material originally earmarked for Arthur King) ended up in the shows, hence his writing credit.
The series of six episodes is generally viewed as uneven by fans (and by the Pythons themselves), but it contains some stellar material, including the “Light Entertainment War” (in which the military bemoans that “the enemy are not only fighting this war on the cheap, but they’re also not taking it seriously,” armed as they are with fairy wands); “Mr. Neutron,” in which a supposed alien agent of world domination must put up with tiresome suburban housewives; and “The Most Awful Family in Britain 1974 Competition.” The level of surrealism was also quite high, as in a bit in which a post office official, dedicating a new mailbox, delivers a long speech, which he then repeats in French, then German.
A marked difference from the earlier series was the length of sketches; “Mr. Neutron,” “The Golden Age of Ballooning” and “Michael Ellis” (in which a distraught department store customer tries to return a defective ant) nearly consumed the full running times of their respective shows. Even though none stuck to telling a story per se, it was evidence that the Pythons were more interested in examining the possibilities of character development and less in a stream-of-consciousness flow of disparate material.
CLEVELAND: Everyone started getting rather serious then and concerned, because everyone really wanted to continue with Python, and it was a period when John had decided that he really didn’t want to go any further. The friction was noticeable and he was not an easy person to be with. The most difficult period I remember was when we were touring the stage show in Canada, and he was just so unfriendly to everyone. I hadn’t realized quite what was going on with him until we got there and I was taking it personally at first—I thought, “Oh, no, he doesn’t like me anymore, what have I done?” And they were, “No, Carol, he’s going though one of his questioning periods in his life,” like what’s life all about, and of course he was going through his divorce with Connie.
I remember one evening he wouldn’t socialize with any of us, we would all go and have a meal after the show and John didn’t want to talk with anyone after the show—he just would go off and do his own thing. I can remember one evening when the rest of us all went off to a restaurant and at the end of the meal we were just getting ready to pay our bill when we noticed over in the corner there was John, he had been there all the time, and he was just getting up and leaving. So we quickly paid up our bill and went after him, about five or six of us. I remember going down this road, down a hill, and he’s sort of striding along as he did and we were sort of tip-toeing, having had a few drinks we were all giggling: “Oh, let’s all pounce on John!” We were tip-toeing up behind him and he’d suddenly hear something and he’d stop, and we’d all jump into a doorway and hide and then quickly tip-toe up behind him. He’d stop, we’d stop in another doorway. He was obviously aware by now that we were coming, and we got about four feet from him and he turned on us and pulled himself up to his greatest height and looked out and—I have never seen such an evil look! He just screamed and abused us and we’re all shaking in pure terror, thinking, “We better not do that again!”
No, it was not an amusing time for him, he was not amused by anything. And I was very glad when he’d got through all that.
How did the rest of the Pythons feel about continuing the series without John?
JONES: I guess we announced to him that we were going ahead with a new series even if he didn’t want to get involved. But John proffered some material he and Graham had written. There was no bitterness.
MACNAUGHTON: We obviously missed John on the first episode of the fourth series; I think any show that had John in it would miss John when he goes, because he’s an enormous personality. But when you’re working together solidly and constantly, well, that disappeared and we didn’t miss John anymore; we just went on our own way.
Cleveland and Jones stopping traffic on Westminster Bridge, under MacNaughton’s watchful eye.
Eric Idle picked up quite a lot of the slack there, in terms of the writing, and also he played a lot more characters; naturally, they all had to increase their output a little bit. Terry Gilliam—I would put it this way: even Terry Gilliam appeared more often! Acting is not really Terry’s top thing. But he’s always great fun and that’s the point. As the man eating beans, sitting slobbering on that sofa with that huge thing of Heinz beans, farting—ah yes, he was splendid at that! Funny enough, always a slightly childish thing comes into some of the humor. And I think that’s great.
GILLIAM: They had given me some parts, and it was really disastrous. For “Mr. Neutron” I had to be an American voice-coach and say, “No, no, no: O-kay! O-kay!” And I couldn’t do an American accent! It was just bizarre.
I don’t know, the fourth series was funny because, for all the screaming and shouting [with] John, the balance wasn’t there in the same way [with him gone]. Graham was a sort of ballast in there, he was somebody we would complain about—he was always late, he didn’t know his lines—so that was great! I think it’s absolutely vital that there’s a scapegoat that we could all agree isn’t pulling his part of the whole thing.
Why was the fourth series only six episodes?
MACNAUGHTON:I think it was the choice of the Pythons, basically, and I think they were absolutely right. Because you know when these series go on and on and on, they don’t often get better. You take any series; the only one I know of that I think kept an absolute top standard all the way through was Johnny Speight’s Till Death Us Do Part, which became All in the Family in America.
[After Python ended,] I found it very difficult to go back to doing normal sitcoms and supposed comedy shows with other supposed comic actors, because I found the others not as funny. You see, I used to laugh a lot while the Pythons were in rehearsal; it was of course serious but never, Oh God, I’ve got to do this job. Never. It was always far too much enjoyment, far too much fun. I think we were lucky there.
Our Ratings Gave Us 97,300,912, and ITV Nought
GILLIAM: When you turned on Python it was kind of a dangerous experience—you didn’t know what would happen. The element of surprise is essential to what Python’s about, this refreshing original, outrageous thing. [But] we reached a point when we weren’t being outrageous, we became predictable—people could guess where we were going most of the time. So you have to wake people up from the predictability that Python had become, and it was that I kept wanting to do.
I had this theory about starting a new series and doing the dullest, most awful shows ever written—boring, not funny, just bad. And the first one goes out, “What’s happened to Python?” And you need to run about two or three before people would all stop watching them. You run show after show and, “Oh, fuck, it’s awful!” So by the time there’s only maybe ten people left in England who are watching, you then do the best show you’ve ever done. And they run and tell their friends, and everybody won’t believe it! I thought that’s what we should be doing: you just lower the expectations so low then you suddenly build them up again. It would require a bit of self-sacrifice! But nobody else went along with that.
I was always pushing, I suppose more than the others, to shock; I really wanted to keep shocking people, waking people up and not just be funny all the time—even at the expense of being funny.
One of the kinds of shit I was thinking about was to do a sketch, and as it’s going on we actually lower the volume of the sound—you’ve got to do it slowly so people are leaning forward having trouble hearing, give
them time to get up and turn their volume up a bit and then they go back to their chair and slowly the volume starts dropping again. And they get up, turn up the volume again. And you keep doing that till they’ve got it full blast. And then of course you’d make THE LOUDEST NOISE YOU CAN, and blow out all the television sets in England!
That’s where my mind was!
It was just trying to break through complacency and all of that. Television I just think has a soporific effect, it’s a deadening medium if you allow it to be (and most people do). I find the minute I switch on the television, I can just be there for hours once it starts. There’s always something to watch and it’s easier than going out and doing things. And so maybe it’s just me that I’m fighting against, my ease of seduction, the ease with which TV seduces me.
It Says Something About Filling My Mouth In with Cement
As Monty Python’s Flying Circus entered its second year on PBS, ABC sought to bring the show’s humor to its late-night umbrella of music and variety specials, Wide World of Entertainment Since the fourth series of Python had not been sold to public television, ABC purchased the rights for the six half-hours, intending to use them to fill two ninety-minute time slots in the fall of 1975.
Unfortunately for them, the Pythons did not have total control over the sale of the shows to commercial television and (as it turned out) even less control over how they were edited, for ninety minutes of original Python material had to accommodate nearly twenty-four minutes of commercial advertising and the red pencils of the network’s Standards and Practices Department.
