Monty Python Speaks

by David Morgan

  GILLIAM: That Aspen thing, it was like aspic. We were up there, I thought we were almost mummified! There’s a crowd down there, three or four rows back, the entire cast of Cheers, Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson, grinning with these beaming Moonie smiles: “It’s the Pythons!” And we’re just talking like, [imitating old fogey]“Well, in my day when we used to do comedy…” And the audience was so happy, they loved it so much. We didn’t have to do anything; we were feeding them, they were inhaling us. I don’t know if you can do that night after night, week after week, city after city, and have any self-respect left! Any soul left, anything.

  It was really interesting, because the HBO people were coming with all these ideas, they were going to do the urn and everybody was going along with it—this was in the planning stage—and I just thought there’s something awful about this pretending that Graham’s there. I just thought, “I’m going to knock the urn over.” And then suddenly it’s all right, because this pretense led to something outrageous. But it was weird.

  We once had an offer to do an HBO thing in Las Vegas, and I wanted to show it with showgirls, still doing the sketches in the middle but with girls on the sides—just something awful. But if you’re going to do it in Las Vegas, then you’ve got to deal with Las Vegas in one form or another. It’s not Drury Lane.

  I was talking to Mike—what we should be getting is the Pythonettes. You get six young beautiful girls who would do all the sketches. “This parrot is de-ceased!” And they have nice tits and everything, and we’d sit there on the side of the stage: “Yes, these are the girls, they’re doing great. Well done, girls!” Do the whole show like that, and we’d take the bows at the end of each scene! I don’t think we’d make many cities before the word was out.

  IDLE: Aspen was very beneficial for us. We got a chance to see each other again—apart from Terry Gilliam, who was still in his fascist “I’m a Director” stage and wouldn’t have dinner with us but went running off to hang out with Hunter S. Thompson. What a lapse of taste! Still, he’s a Yank, you know.

  Whether we will ever be able to agree on anything ever again is moot. I think groups use up all their agreements early and then all that is left is to disagree. But I’m not sure whether I agree with that…

  How do you think Graham’s absence affects the workings of the group now?

  PALIN: I think it’s very significant. I think it makes it extremely difficult to write new material, and in an odd way I think Graham will be missed more as a writer than as a performer; although he was very important for Grail and Life of Brian because he took the leading roles. He had the ability to play the leading man, and we don’t have anyone quite like that. But he and John really created some of the best stuff Python’s done; without Graham there, I don’t think it’s as easy for John to produce the material on his own. I think you’d find the same if I was writing with Terry and Terry wasn’t there. I think a very, very important part of the balance was Graham’s input—take him away and it isn’t the same. There’s no denying it; whatever we do now as Python, Python without Graham, you’ve either got to say, “Well, we can still do something which people will enjoy without Graham,” or we can take the view, “Rest it there; he’s not replaceable, therefore anything we do without him will be slightly weaker,” in the way when we did the six shows without John they were show for show probably weaker than the rest of the series. We did miss John; we still produced some great stuff, but you can’t say, “This is still Python.” One has to go onward.

  It’s like having Paul, George, and Ringo perform as the Beatles without John.

  PALIN: Yes, exactly. I’ve never gone along with that, either; I never really wanted to see the three remaining Beatles play. How could the Beatles be the same without Lennon? So you have to admit the same would happen with Python; we’d be different.

  But I always feel you should never be led by the fans, much as one is grateful for them. Or television people [who] say, “We can make some money out of it.”

  I think there are quite interesting parallels between Meaning of Life and the idea of a Python tour next year, both led largely by outsiders thinking they could make money out of us, which means also we can make a bit of money. They’re just not organic. We are told, “There is that market there, yes; we love Python, you must get together.” Fine, I accept that and I’m very grateful for it, but I don’t think we can get together at all costs.

  But on the other hand, Python’s a sort of strange, resilient force. Despite all the years that have gone by, it’s still something which we shared and which we feel we created and only the group of us created. We may have our differences about things, [but] undoubtedly as a group we’ll be there. It can be something which is still considered to be valuable and successful, and that’s an animal which you can’t ignore! It’s like, the fire is not burning brightly but the embers are still there; you just blow on them and the flames will come up again. That is why the Python project’s still around, still in the air; there is something there that could be used. And I think it’s a very interesting debate as to whether we should use it or not.

  GILLIAM: I think we’ve gone much further apart than we think we have, that’s what worries me. We can get together and work for a day or two and we can feel it all, or we can get on stage (although with the HBO thing it was nothing but talking), and when we do get together, ideas start coming up, it gets really funny, it’s really nice. But I don’t know where that ballast is that Graham was. And Mike and Terry are not a writing team in the way they were; Eric is still fine, but he hasn’t done anything really for a while.

  I don’t know how, I almost feel I would have to end up being in there writing with John and being Splunge!, and I don’t want to do that, because I can’t stand writing with John! Writing with John is one of the most boring things in the world because he’s so methodical. We did it on Meaning of Life. Because we were all out in Jamaica, we split into two groups, and I got stuck with John and Graham, and I couldn’t stand the pace. One can throw in ideas fast and furious but then [it’s] this nitpicking, and I couldn’t deal with it. You need someone like Graham sitting there sucking on his pipe [while] John nitpicks.

  Even Eric would find it difficult. Everybody would find it difficult writing with John because you just have to work at a different pace. And John’s brilliant, there’s nothing less than brilliance there, but it’s again a work pace or habit.

  My gut tells me the group doesn’t work, and then I keep thinking when we start [talking about new projects], hopefully we can resurrect a lot of old stuff, but number one, who replaces Graham in the performances? You can spread it out a little bit, but it’s still not quite the same, and I can’t fill a gap that’s as big—I can take a little bit, but it’s not what I’m good at, I don’t want to do that, really. And I mean Terry got excited about the stage show and started writing some stuff, but this doesn’t excite me. Maybe it would have felt like a good idea twenty-five years ago, but now it doesn’t. It feels like an old idea, and it seems to me if we were to work we would have to come up with new and fresh ideas to excite us all, and if we can’t do that…

  We started talking about doing a film a year ago, and it got very funny. It was about another crusade, the Last Crusade, we try to gather these old knights together who are all married and settled down—us!—which is a smart thing. And then we had this great idea about Graham coming along as a holy relic, a box with these bones in it. And he could talk because we’ve got old material from Graham, from records and things, we’ve got his voice, and so Graham could be there doing stuff and he’s in this terrible box we’ve got to drag around.

  A stage show might be easier, because it’s just a couple of sketches. We’d need some new sketches—John’s probably got a few stuck away in a drawer somewhere! But I can’t personally think of anything worse than getting up there and reciting that old stuff again. So I’m not being very positive these days!

  I think the smartest thing we did was getting out when
we got out. We sort of became Comedy James Deans—we killed ourselves. I’d rather the legend be kept alive with the few remaining artifacts rather than, “James Dean is alive and onstage?” Oh fuck, we don’t want to see that, do we? I mean it’s good just to see, “Oh, that’s what he looks like now—he’s bald?”

  I just thought we did the smart thing: we killed ourselves and that was the end of it. We always said it was the six of us or nothing. And the only reason for doing the stage show it seems to me is greed, and that’s not motivating me much nowadays.

  Having established a career for yourself, what responsibility do you still feel towards the group?

  GILLIAM: Hmm, I don’t. I think the responsibility is to make sure we don’t sell out what we’ve done, that’s my feeling. I think we did rather well at controlling stuff and not compromising it.

  The fact that we own the television shows is still one of the most extraordinary things because nobody owns their own shows. Except maybe us and Lucille Ball! She was shrewd, she was a real sharp lady.

  It may be that’s why on the tour there’s a sense that I don’t want to sully something we’ve done more than we already have. We could exploit things more, but they have to be done well, and there’s a lot of stuff, merchandising, we’ve let go out that’s mediocre, which bothers me. It’s kind of like the responsibililty to say, “That’s not good enough.” But I don’t feel strongly enough to go out there and do it myself, so that’s a very lax responsibility!

  I don’t know. We sort of argue about, “Should we let the stuff go out and let commercials be put in now that’s it’s been seen enough times and it’s on videotape?” It’s like this greed that’s creeping in: okay, we’ve controlled it long enough, now let’s just let it go out and make as much money as possible. There’s a tendency for that argument to rise, and it worries me.

  What would Lucy have done?

  GILLIAM: I don’t know, that’s kind of it! To me, so much is in the past, and yet it’s always here. I mean, we’ve got the organization, these companies and things, it’s kind of our pension fund, and our children’s and children’s children’s futures, so you’re sort of torn between “Make more money for the kids” and all that, or do we just keep Python what it always was and protect that little thing, that little gem, however flawed it might be?

  Some of the things that I haven’t paid much attention to I think are pretty shoddy. With the CD-ROMs, that was one of the things [where] we were trying to keep the quality up, being involved in those. I think the CD-ROMs are the best kind of reinvention of Python because it’s a new format—you can juggle it, and it becomes even more nonlinear than it was, and that’s kind of interesting. They stand up on their own.

  It’s funny, I think Terry’s still much deeper in Python than I am. I think Mike and I and John have probably moved away more. Terry’s much more nostalgic about it, I think.

  Is that because you had established a solo career away from Python earlier than perhaps Terry Jones has?

  GILLIAM: It may be that, but the solo careers may be the product of us trying to escape, get away from Python! Terry has lingered in it longer. And Eric in a strange way has as well. John I know wanted to escape from it first, and I sort of, and Mike’s been escaping from everybody! If he were living in a flat world, he could go and that would be the end of it. Now he’s home again: “Oh, shit! Let’s go another way!” The world is round, that’s the problem! It’s been quite interesting to watch Mike be the most determined to keep moving.

  IDLE: Like everyone else, I prefer my solo work, because it is mine. You cannot take credit for Python because it is group effort. I like my play, my books, my songs, the Rutles, so much stuff. Python was just a part of my life; it isn’t my fault people won’t let it go! I have learned you cannot run away from it, you cannot hide from it, and to be polite at all times, but it ain’t me, mate. Perhaps having a Beatle for a pal helped me somewhat come to terms with it all.

  GOLDSTONE: There was nothing that would really naturally bring them together; Gilliam had unquestionably established his position as a serious filmmaker, and John had gone on to his own businesses and ultimately A Fish Called Wanda, which surpassed everybody’s expectations.

  And yet what was extraordinary was seeing the Aspen show: the chemistry that still remains is unquestionably still there, the way they play off each other is very funny.

  TERRY BEDFORD: Python offended the Establishment in terms of the humor. Throughout that period of time there was a real tightening of the conservative background, which really brought about the Thatcher Era—I think they were just closing ranks and making sure it didn’t happen again, basically!

  I think one of the really scary things about the British film industry is that it should have embraced the Pythons wholeheartedly as being a really great asset. But they were shunned by the film industry; the Pythons offended them. Because truthfully, if they had carried on making those films we would have had a great tradition of film comedy here.

  “Offended” because the Pythons were outsiders and rather fiercely independent?

  BEDFORD: Yes. I think the British film industry at that time was really the Bonds and those kind of films. When I was doing Jabberwocky, you had George Lucas coming in and making Star Wars, and the stories that were coming back from the Lucas set down at Shepperton Studios were equally uncomplimentary as what the industry was making about Jabberwocky: “These are amateur films that will never cut together, they’ll never be sucessful.” And look at that!

  GILLIAM: I don’t think Python exists in the film world. You read the history of film, Monty Python’s a footnote at best. And when you talk to film buffs in Europe, we were the films of the seventies to them. But we are not taken seriously in the world of filmmaking.

  In a way it’s probably a good thing, because if we were, we’d just be pretentious. But it does shock me how comedy is not allowed to be treated as serious filmmaking, and what we were doing, some of it I think is amazingly revolutionary, playing around with the medium: “Pirandello takes over the cinema” in some cases. Nobody ever seems to write about it that way: “It’s just a bunch of funny sketches—some of them work, some don’t.” We were playing with the medium and shifting it around, in the way we were playing with television, and we get no points for that.

  I’m surprised because one can actually get one’s academic intellectual teeth into this stuff. If there were a Cahiers du Comedy around, they could have a field day with it. But they don’t. I’m actually glad that it doesn’t get too carried away, but I also think it’s crazy that they can’t accept that we’re serious filmmakers when we’re doing stuff which just isn’t following the rules.

  CLEESE: Sometimes I switch on the BBC and find old Python shows on by accident. I watch them and some of the material, two or three things in every show, seem to be so utterly hopeless that I have no idea—and it’s not just that they’re not funny, but I don’t know how we could have ever thought they might have been. All I know is that we were playing games with convention which no one had ever done before, and it was very startling the first time you do it. But once people get used to a convention being broken it’s not startling at all, and then there’s nothing left.

  In fact, there were some Americans who when they saw Monty Python said, “These guys are ripping off Saturday Night Live.” Whereas of course we were pre-Saturday Night Live. But if you’d seen Saturday Night Live and you hadn’t seen Python, and then you see Python, those conventions had been broken already for the audience, even though we were doing that stuff first.

  NANCY LEWIS: It was so exciting, because it was comparatively revolutionary what Python did. I know when Saturday Night Live was starting up, their premise was sort of based on a Monty Python-type approach. I don’t know what happened to that, but it was never repeated, strangely. People tend to go back to blackouts at the end of sketches again.

  Occasionally in advertising they’d try to do a Python-type thing. I’ve seen very Gilliamesque
animation done in advertising; very little of general Python has been tried. It was unique; I think you need that web of disciplined writing, because you know the Pythons were very disciplined. The first time Michael or Eric, whoever did Saturday Night Live first—I remember getting the reaction from them to Saturday Night Live where it was, “Hey man, let’s hang out all night, do whatever, and we’ll turn out some funny stuff!” Which is so different, it wasn’t a real disciplined approach. It takes a lot of work, I think, to be as consistently funny as Python.

  BARKY TOOK: My big error, to be absolutely honest with you, was that I said, “Python will not be a major success, but it will be very influential.” And I was utterly wrong, because it wasn’t influential at all—nobody else apart from undergraduates copied it—and it was enormously successful! One of the most successful things ever made in this country. Talk about the Department of Cloudy Crystal Ball, my word!

  THE PYTHON OEUVER

  The Television Series

  (with original U.K. transmission dates and highlights)

  Monty Python’s Flying Circus—Series I

  Episode 1 (Oct. 5, 1969)

  Arthur “Two-Sheds” Jackson; The Funniest Joke in the World

  Episode 2 (Oct. 12, 1969)

  Flying Sheep; Working-Class Playwright; Carnivorous Pram and Rodin’s Kiss; The Mouse Problem

  Episode 3 (Oct. 19, 1969)

  How to Recognize Different Types of Trees from Quite a Long Way Away; Bicycle Repairman; Storytime; Seduced Milkmen; Nudge Nudge