"The BBC would like to announce that the next scene is unsuitable for family viewing." "It contains scenes of violence involving people's heads and arms getting chopped off." "There are also naked women with floppy breasts." "Also, you can see a pair of buttocks, and there's another bit where I swear you can see everything." "Maybe it's just the way he's holding the spear." "A lot of American humour from the fifties in television was based on sort of, kind of real social situations and real relationships," "And Python takes that basis and just explodes it." "Yieee!" "They were cruel, but I found it hilarious." "I'm a bit of a cruel twit myself." "He also nailed your wife's head to a coffee table." "Isn't that right, mrs." "O'Tracey?" "Oh, no." "No, no." "Yeah, well, he did do that, yeah." "He was a cruel man, but fair." "For us, they defined English comedy." "Since then, I've learned there's another kind" "A sort of music-hall comedy, but for us, they were always" "They were English comedy." "What's going on here, then?" "Ah, "You have beautiful thighs."" "What?" "He hit me." ""Drop your panties, sir William." "I cannot wait till lunchtime."" "Right!" "My nipples explode with delight." "Monty who?" "Monty Python?" "Oh." "Monty Python?" "Oh, you mean the rock group." "And now... [clang]" "[sound slows down]" "[humming theme]" "[poot]" "Oh, my god." "Your roses or your life." "Hey." "Your costumes didn't do you any good." "Oh, my god, there's some documentary" "This is a fly on the wall." "That's club shit." "This is a fly on the wall." ""Fly on the wall" camera." "They're doing a documentary." "They don't want us to notice they're here." "Just be perfectly natural." "Be absolutely natural." "Um..." "How are you?" "[in German accent] I live in Germany." "That's right." "I do comedy in Germany for a living." "Stop it!" "Does anybody know the way?" "Yes, I believe you." "Hello." "George Harrison has always" "His theory is that we took over the spirit of the beatles, 'cause we started just as they finished." "Whatever that spirit was, we were the ones that carried it on." "There's a lovely anecdote told to us about a man who'd been in the northeast." "In early Python days, we weren't necessarily networked, and he sat down, and the Python show he was watching started with this man walking along one of the Roman walls up in Cumbria and going on about it." "He was a particularly silly man with a particularly silly voice, and this guy laughed and laughed and laughed." "Then he began to think the sketch was going on rather a long time." "Eventually he realized it wasn't Python at all." "It was a local program." "It seems to me that it was a..." "It was basically getting out hatreds and dislikes of a certain bourgeois structure of life with which one had grown up" "The repressive English upbringing where you weren't really supposed to laugh and make fun of things." "It wasn't satirizing individuals in government or in politics." "Um, if there is any satire in Python, it's in a more sort of general sense, you know, a sort of generalized human level rather than specifics." "Last week on party hints," "I showed you how to make a small plate of goulash go around 26 people, how to get the best out of your canapes, and how to unblock your loo." "This week--what to do if there's an armed communist uprising near your home when you're having a party." "All the Pythons came from very comfortable middle-class existences, and so the rebellion, such as it was, was not a curse against madly off-key and probably into becoming sort of, uh... kitchen-sink dramatists with a very short life." "Um, and sort of our, if you like, our sort of reaction was against a sort of rather stifling world." "It wasn't necessarily oppressive." "It didn't hurt us." "It wasn't unpleasant or unkind." "It just was very, very conventional." "We know our place, but what do we get out of it?" "I get a feeling of superiority over them." "I get a feeling of inferiority from him, but a feeling of superiority over him." "I get a pain in the back of my neck." "We were all writers for The Frost Report, so we'd met over a long period of time and had worked on the same sort of shows." "The Frost Reports were very good shows, very well written." "They had a theme." "Like the first show, the theme was authority." "A comedy show about authority?" "It had three more syllables than most comedy notions." "So it wasn't a sort of "Hello, darling." "I'm home."" "In a courtroom, of course, authority is in its element." "My lord, in this case, my learned friend appears for the defense, and I appear for the money." "The first television was writing sketches with Graham." "We used to write one, or sometimes two, three-minute sketches each week." "I sometimes performed them, but not always," "And Mike and Terry used to write the filmed piece." "And Eric used to often write, a rather sort of witty-type verbal" "His kind of style stuff, which Ronnie Barker often did." "We were all meeting then." "We'd write what he called his cdm" "His continuous developing monologue, which John and Graham used to call ojaril" "Old jokes and ridiculously irrelevant links." "So I learned there's a power in being a writer." "I used to live in Notting Hill Gate, and my jokes were sent by the BBC by taxi, and I had to go by tube." "This taxi would arrive, and they'd be hot off the press." "It was an interesting stage." "The Frost Report went out live." "I would write in this pub," "The Sun And Splendour, in Notting Hill Gate." "I'd spend my lunch there writing some jokes off the newspapers, send them in the taxi." "The next day, I'd come in and hear my jokes being told at the bar." "Gilliam wasn't alive then." "He was still in America." "He hadn't made the great odyssey across the atlantic." "Then Eric and Terry were asked to do a show called Do Not Adjust Your Set by Humphrey Barkley," "And I think they asked," ""We'll do it if my friend Mike can do it."" "Mrs. Johnson, I wonder if your husband's in." "What do you want him for?" "Can he come out and play?" "He's just had his dinner." "He's got to sit down an hour while the food goes down." "But we've got to go in soon." "I can't help that." "He was late." "Do Not Adjust Your Set was a way of doing what you wanted because nobody was looking at kids' shows." "The executives weren't watching this stuff." "You could get away with murder." "I was doing that sort of thing in the states and getting nowhere." "When I came to England, this was like finding people on the same wavelength." "They spoke the language better than I did, but as far as the way the mental processes were working, it was--"We're home."" "He came to us on Do Not Adjust Your Set with some sketches he brought." "Michael and Terry were very sniffy to him." "Who is this awful American with his long haircut coming in?" "And I liked him." "He wore this sort of Afghan coat." "It was like a woolly old sheep." "It was love at first sight." "I fell in love with his coat." "I love you." "Ugh!" "Indians!" "[humming]" "Aah!" "The Complete And Utter History Of Britain," "Which nobody saw at all, was a series Terry Jones and I wrote." "The whole essence of the complete and utter histories was to look at history" "As if television had existed at the time, so we were reporting on historical events as if it was modern television." "There'd be an interview with the victorious Normans in the showers after the Battle of Hastings." ""Boys, how did it go?"" "When were you sure you were going to win?" "You can never be sure of a thing like that, when they were 2,000 down." "Great fun, these lads." "Well, now what about that incident?" "You mean when Harold was knocked down." "Very nasty business, David, and we're all sorry about it, but I think it was fair." "Certainly gave our lads a laugh." "That was the good bit." "I remember John ringing me in what must have been April of 1969, and he said," ""Oh,I've seen The Complete And Utter History."" "He said, "Um," ""you won't be doing any more of those, will you," "So why don't we do something together?"" "Meaning your lot and our lot." "Barry took, who was then, you know, and still is a highly respected writer who had worked with Marty and all that, was acting as a sort of entrepreneur of comedy at the time." "In 1969, I was the advisor to the comedy department at the BBC," "And we'd just finished a very successful second series of Marty, starring Marty Feldman." "The BBC asked me, "What comes next?"" "I'd been looking around at the various people who were extremely good writer-performers." "There were a lot of them, and I, in my mind's eye, put together a group of four which subsequently became six." "They were John Cleese and Graham Chapman," "Michael Palin and Terry Jones," "Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam." "When you look back, it was an amazing act of courage." "I was the only one who'd been much on as a performer, except that the others-- Mike, Terry, and Eric, and Terry Gilliam's first animation-- first appeared on Do Not Adjust Your Set," "but nobody knew that." "It was the funniest thing on television, but it went out at half past 4:00." "It was extraordinary they went straight into a series without asking for a pilot." "I thank them for that." "They used to meet and argue first at my home, then go to their homes, then through the evening they'd phone me and say," ""Am I ruining my career" ""by being a part of this new thing?"" "Nobody knew what to call it." "The first title was "It's"." "We thought the idea of somebody saying "It's"" "And then being immediately cut off before they could announce the program was funny." "It's..." "The BBC said, "Why don't you just have something really wacky or off the wall like... like somebody's flying circus?" "how about that," "John Cleese's flying circus or something like that?"" "John, commendably, didn't want to be associated that closely with the show." "And it wasn't any one person's show." "That was something we didn't want" "The David Frost Show, the John Cleese Show." "We merged our identities as much as possible." "John suggested Python, and I suggested Monty 'cause in my pub in Warwickshire, there was this guy wore a bow tie." "Monty was the guy-- slightly overweight, was always there in his corner and had his own pint mug." "It was this wonderful, warming sort of name." "We had subtitles for the shows, the early ones." "The first one was called Whither Canada?" "A silly send up of a documentary subtitle." "Sex And Violence-- we liked that." "The BBC said, "We hope there won't be any sex and violence."" "Weren't we naughty?" "Gosh, we were naughty boys." "Aah!" "[clang]" "Monty Python's Flying Circus." "[poot]" "It was important to us to have control because even when we'd been writing for other people and had become well- established writers, artists would change a line." "Producers would change a line." ""We think this is better."" "We'd say, "No, it isn't."" "They might have been right, but we wanted to say we do know." "The six of us know what is right." "We started off having group meetings." "We'd meet and talk about what we wanted to do, what we should avoid," "The shape of the show" "Get based, then a Gilliam cartoon" "It would go through and link and flow, and it wouldn't have stop-starts." "Terry Gilliam had done this stream animation of consciousness." "[poot] [poot] [poot]" "It was definitely a conscious idea that we create a whole show that was a stream of consciousness." "All the kids really wanted to hear was that we were heavily into drugs." "Nothing else interested them." "We were all by then pushing 30." "We'd all been working for a very long time and were disciplined, hard-working guys doing a terrible, boring business of trying to make people laugh." "They would be terribly, bitterly disappointed that we're not sort of" ""Hey, wow, let's do this." "Let's do that."" "You can't get a knight in armor and a chicken just like that." "You've got to plan it." "We cheated slightly in that we stuck to our own usual writing groupings" "Terry Jones and myself," "Eric Idle writing on his own," "Terry Gilliam doing his animations on his own," "And John and Graham writing together." "Graham is a very, very clever writer and the best judge of whether something's funny that I've ever come across." "If ever I was not sure," "I would always take Graham's opinion." "He seemed to be a sort of perfect litmus paper with just extraordinary judgment." "And that was unbelievably valuable, I think, to the group and to me as a writer." "John always has to write through someone." "He needs to focus his ideas through someone." "The Graham-John partnership worked extremely well 'cause Graham was always able to throw in this really bizarre..." "Now and again he'd say "Mongoose,"" "which would set the whole thing careering off in another direction." "Funny that penguin being there." "What's it doing there?" "Standing." "I can see that." "Perhaps it comes from next door." "Penguins don't come from next door." "They come from the Antarctic." "Burma!" "Why did you say "Burma"?" "I panicked." "The "Nudge-nudge" sketch," "I'd actually written for Ronnie Barker for a Frost On Sunday." "I thought it was a funny character." "It was only afterwards I realized why he never did it." "Because the script says," ""Know what I mean?" "Know what I mean?" "Nudge nudge." "Say no more." "Know what I mean?"" "There's no jokes in it or anything." "I read it out very tentatively at one of the early Python meetings, and they laughed like crazy at the character." "Is your wife, uh, a goer?" "Know what I mean?" "Nudge nudge." "Nudge nudge." "Know what I mean?" "I beg your pardon?" "Your wife, does she..." "Does she go?" "Know what I mean?" "Nudge nudge." "Say no more." "She sometimes goes, yes." "I'll bet she does." "Know what I mean?" "Nudge nudge." "I don't quite follow you." "Oh, follow me." "That's good." "A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat, eh?" "Are you selling something?" "Selling?" "Selling?" "Very good." "Very good." "Oh, wicked!" "Wicked!" "You're wicked." "Know what I mean?" "Nudge nudge." "Know what I mean?" "Nudge nudge." "Nudge nudge." "Say no more." "Basically we were laughing at the authoritarian figures that we grew up under, and observing." "I think if you're at a boarding school for 12 years, your vision of authority is very much of this looming nonsense, and you're not allowed to laugh at it except privately amongst your gang." "But you know it's nonsense, this assumed authority that's being given to you by teachers, by military figures" "We always had to do the ccf" "By police, by judges." "And it's all pretending we know what's going on on this planet and this is the way it is, and it's all bullshit." "Python was quite good for getting rid of those inhibitions." "That's why it's still appealing to the young." "Come in." "Is this the right room for an argument?" "I've told you once." "No, you haven't." "Yes, I have." "Just now." "No, you didn't." "I did." "You did not." "Is this a five-minute argument or half hour?" "Oh, we'd always disagree." "I mean, you know, Python was..." "Reading, writing, and arguing, really." "The three rs." "A lot of arguing went on." "Typewriters were thrown." "People would stomp out of rooms." "There'd be shrill voices, all sorts of aggravation, which was important." "It was important I only threw a chair once." "I think John, you know..." "I think it bothered John more 'cause he's a man who has to maintain his control more," "And being older-- we were like four years younger than John, some of us," "And still are." "Let's face it." "And I don't think he liked arguing with Terry, and he'd tend to bait Terry just a little bit, see how far he could get him to explode, 'cause once he made a man blow up," "he'd won the argument, you see." "Not an easy thing to do with Terry, anyway." "I was still Welsh in my feelings, my emotions," "But I was talking with a "South of England" accent." "If you get excited in Welsh, you go up at the end of the sentence." "But if you do it with an English accent, you always go down at the end of the sentence." "The more excited you get, the more you go down." "It's a cultural clash." "[glass shatters]" "I came all the way from Oslo to do this program." "I'm a professor of archaeology." "I'm an expert in ancient civilizations." "All right!" "I'm only 5'10"." "All right!" "My posture is bad." "All right!" "I slump in my chair!" "But I've had more women than either of you two." "I used to have a lot of fights with Terry Jones, but they were basically artistic fights." "We're very different character types." "I mean, Terry is welsh," "And is kind of, uh, passionate, and I'm sort of repressed and logical." "And the two of us used to lock antlers a great deal, but it actually worked extremely well because somehow we kind of... neutralized each other." "Then the other guys could dance around, throw their weight into the argument." "John was the head and Terry the heart" "Terry the heart of Python." "And the rest of us would be grouped in-between there." "Eric and myself, I suppose," "Were..." "I mean, rarely disruptive." "We never got so steamed up that we said," ""End of meeting!" "That's it!"" "Um, we would muck in and salvage whatever was around." "Graham would puff his pipe and be rather detached and statesmanlike about the whole thing." "The best moments of Python were those days when we'd sit in my dining room or John's flat and read through the material everybody had written over the last week or two weeks, and we'd read that stuff for a whole day." "It was just wonderful." "I loved those things." "And the fact that it made us laugh was the yardstick, really." "Maybe 25% of the material that was read out worked straightaway." "We'd put that on a pile and say that's fine." "Then another 25% was almost there, but needed a little work." "There and then, people would come up with an idea" "A parrot rather than a motor car for the pet shop sketch." "Look, matey..." "This parrot wouldn't voom if I put 4,000 volts through it." "It's bleeding demised." "It's not." "It's..." "It's pining." "It's not pining." "It's passed on." "This parrot is no more." "It has ceased to be." "It's expired" "And gone to meet its maker." "This is a late parrot." "It's a stiff-- bereft of life." "It rests in peace." "If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies." "It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible." "This is an ex-parrot." "Gilliam wasn't always at the writing meetings, 'cause in order to produce the one to four minutes of animation each week, he was working up in a little attic in hampstead, getting all his little cutouts and snipping bits out of famous works of art" "and sticking funny heads onto them, going," ""Oh, shit!" "I gotta have an assistant."" "Time and time again, it was a matter of leaving one sketch at a point where it had run out of steam and getting on to the next thing." "The scripts would literally say," ""Gilliam takes over and get us to..." ba-boom." "I liked that a lot." "I'm off." "I'm off." "I'm off." "I'm off." "I'm off, dear." "Dead painters--you don't have to pay them." "You can take their ideas, their art work." "I'd go through the National Gallery whenever I'd run out of ideas." "Just walk through, and the paintings would start talking to me." "And came on this one." "The original painting is gigantic." "I was looking at it and thought, "Isn't that wonderful?"" "And out of the whole painting, the only thing that really stuck with me was that little bit down here." "And there it is-- it's the big foot." "I think Bronzino would go crazy." "The guy spend years painting this thing, and some jerk comes along and throws away everything except that little bit on the bottom." "There's something very satisfying about doing this." "You're dealing with really great art that people pay hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars for, and I'm reducing it to that..." "It says something about life," "I think." "[poot]" "I used to sit there with a blanket over my head with all these kitchen utensils, and I'd bang them and..." "Make my own noises-- [phlbrrrt] [pop] [click click click]" "I'd sit there doing these noises." "Excuse me." "I want to powder my nose." "[muffled party chatter]" "[phlbrrrt] [hawking] [retching and growling]" "[nose blowing]" "Ahh, that's better." "The BBC used to send us far and wide to any exotic location for our filming." "This is Teddington Lock about 5 miles from Television Center." "This was where we chose to do one of my favorite of the Python sketches, although it's very, very short, extremely inconsequential, and has very little dialogue." "It's called the fish-slapping dance, and those of you who don't know it," "I brought a couple of fish along, like the cheeky chappies we had in those days." "I would be dressed in a pith helmet and long shorts as worn by british explorers... up to about the 1950s." "Um, I'll put that down there." "John was next to me, uh, the taller one in a pith helmet and long shorts." "I held these two rather slimy fish." "I think we all knew we were doing something different." "We weren't enormously self-conscious about it." "We just used to hoot with delight when we thought of some silly thing to do like run the titles halfway through the show" "Everybody would leave the room and then think, wait a moment" "Then pretend to go on as if BBC news, picking up something." "We actually were very conscious of not trying to be, uh... satirical and--and topical other than using names of funny politicians or the funny names of other politicians." "They didn't mean anything other than politician, and the politician is always with us, and they'll always be the same." "I think a silly election will always be a silly election." "It's interesting looking back on it." "The stuff holds up because of that." "The other shows were more topical and suffered because of that." "But we were rather canny in those days." "Alan Jones..." "On the left, sensible party." "9,112." "[crowd cheers]" "Kevin Phillips Bong..." "On the right, slightly silly." "Naught." "Tarquin Fin-Tim-Lim-Bin-Whin- Bim-Lim-Bus-Stop-F'tang-F'tang" "Olé-Biscuitbarrel..." "Silly." "12,441." "And so the silly party has taken Luton." "What was wonderful in the group is everybody influenced everybody else." "My cartoons were changing." "They were doing more things that were more obviously visual." "It's still" "I mean, their strength still is words and performing." "I mean, John, luckily, is very visual as a human being." "It would be hard to draw something as funny as that." "He was blessed." "Mike had to put wigs and mustaches on to be as silly-looking as John." "And, uh..." "But it got more like that." "At times we were almost making the characters more and more cartoonlike as it went along." "Things got stranger and stranger." "And quite early on, I'd get into wigs because I had blond hair down to here, and it took them years before they realized." "And I found out" "I was much more comfortable wearing more disguises." "I could act better if I was in mustaches and make-up and costume." "I think Mike's like that, too." "We were kind of into the make-up jar." "John always hated make-up." "The most he'd do was plaster his hair down and wear a packer mac, really." "Although he was always wonderful in drag." "Just occasionally John in drag" "He's just a crack-up." "Dinsdale was a gentleman." "What's more, he knew how to treat a female impersonator." "The problem on Python about the women was I don't think we knew much about women," "And you can only write what you know about, so we'd write about show girls." "You can imagine the stereotype." "We used to write about these ridiculous pepperpots who made us laugh a lot." "I don't know who they were" "A cross between parrots and our mothers." "Pepperpots were inventions of John and Graham's, but they were people" "They were ladies of sort of late middle-age, I would say, with a shopping basket," "Um, and usually a rather heavy coat on and a scarf who would stand in small groups in supermarkets and talk very loudly about things they didn't like." "It was always, "I don't like him," ""I don't like him." ""Ooh, hate that." "No, don't like it." "Ooh, not very nice, no." "Ooh, smells a bit."" "They were all negative people, but they were shaped like pepper pots" "Probably what John and Graham had in the house." "Oh, hello, mrs." "Premise." "Hello, mrs." "Conclusion." "Busy day?" "Busy?" "I just spent four hours burying the cat." "Four hours to bury a cat?" "Yes, it wouldn't keep still." "Wriggling around." "Howled its head off." "Oh, it wasn't dead, then?" "Well, no, but it's not at all a well cat," "So as we were going away for a fortnight," "I thought I'd better bury it." "What makes me squirm about that first series," "I think, are some of the, uh," "Some of the camp stereotypes, you know." "There's some very, you know, limp-wristed, uh..." "Camp stereotypes around, which certainly we wouldn't do now." "Um..." "And, uh, I-- certainly you can say there's not an awful lot of depth to Python's character of female characterizations." "The fellas were always apologizing to me for not having more for me to do." "Michael was always coming up and saying "I'm sorry, darling." "We don't have a lot for you."" "But as he said," ""We're just not very good at writing parts for women."" "Um, and I suppose in that way they were a bit chauvinistic as far as their view of young women." "They did write very well for the older women, which they played themselves so well, far better than I could." "When it came to young women, they couldn't write funny parts." "Oh, my god!" "What a mess!" "Here, did you do this?" "Uh, no." "No." "I didn't do all this." "Uh, it--it did it all." "Oh." "Well..." "Here." "Hold this." "I'll get started." "Huh." "It's jolly nice." "What is it?" "Hmm?" "Oh, it's a Brazilian dagger." "Whoop!" "Ooh!" "Oh..." "Oh!" "Oh!" "I certainly think, uh," "One of the things that Python introduced or accentuated in comedy was aggression, the comedy of aggression." "I think that's so much John's input there." "But I think the kind of deaths we're having are what I call cartoon deaths, and I think the nearer deaths get to cartoon, the more people see it the same way that they see with Tom and Jerry," "when Jerry runs over tom with a steam roller." "There's always two people who think," ""Oh, poor cat." "That must have hurt." "I hope the cat's all right."" "But they're in a minority." "Now stand aside, worthy adversary." "'t Is but a scratch." "A scratch?" "Your arm's off." "No, it isn't." "Well, what's that, then?" "I've had worse." "A lot of comedy seems to be like poetry." "It's getting its kick out of conflict, out of contrast of ideas." "Um, in poetry, it's what Browning said, when you get two metaphors" "When you bring two ideas together" "They produce not a third idea but a star." "That's kind of magic." "The same thing with comedy" "You bring two conflicting ideas together," "And you produce a laugh instead of a star." "Look!" "It's just a flesh wound." "Look, stop that!" "Chicken!" "Chicken!" "Look, I'll have your leg." "You'll what?" "Come here!" "What will you do, bleed on me?" "I think with the Black Knight sequence in Holy Grail, you're getting this horrible thing" "Somebody's having his limbs chopped off, but his total unconcern of this and his total indominability in the face of such odds and such disaster." "All right." "We'll call it a draw." "Come, Patsy." "Oh, well, I see." "Running away, eh?" "You yellow bastards!" "Come back and take what's coming to you!" "I'll bite your legs off!" "I wouldn't say there was any subject at all that I would immediately think of not making jokes about." "A lot of comedy is about seeing deeply" "I mean, seeing actually under the surface, into sometimes the darker areas, but being able to make a joke of it." "It's the only way you can cope with something that's very unpleasant, all the nastiness in the world." "Sometimes joking is the only way to cope." "Well, I remember the first time that John read out the, uh..." "The sketch about the undertaker, about arriving with his mother in a sack, the undertaker proposing to eat her." "And he read this, and we all laughed." "And..." "And then I thought, we can't do that." "I mean..." "Just..." "We can't do that." "I think my mother was very ill at the time." "Uh, I don't know." "She might have just died, actually." "And then I remember going into the kitchen and buying some-- uh, making some coffee," "And as I was making the coffee," "I thought, why can't we do it?" "I mean, it's, uh," "It's not encouraging people to eat-- eat their mothers." "Excuse me." "Um, are you, uh, are you suggesting..." "Eating my mother?" "Um..." "Yeah." "Not raw." "Cooked." "What?" "Roasted, a few french fries, broccoli, horseradish sauce." "Well, I do feel a bit peckish." "In fact, when--when the show went out, there were..." "Deep questions asked, and I think Ian was hauled over the coals by the heads of department." "There was quite an uproar at BBC about it." "It became the kind of excuse for sort of the hierarchy keeping a slightly tighter, closer look at Python." "When we came to do the next series, people wanted to start reading scripts beforehand." "There was a joke about the policeman." "He comes in, and he arrests Nigel Somebody, the pop star, and produces this brown bag, and they-- "Well, what's in it?"" "And he says, "Ah.", he says, "Dope."" "And he opens it up, and he says, "Oh." "Sandwiches." "Blimey." "Whatever did I give the wife for lunch?"" "And they accepted that, but then they catch the wife saying, "It was better than lunch."" "The BBC wouldn't have that." "They cut that." "Well, there was a sketch." "All the other Pythons thought it was pretty funny." "I didn't think it was funny enough to justify what I thought was the slight tackiness involved." "I remember that I found myself on the side of the establishment." "Bill colton, I think, wanted to cut it." "But the Pythons always quite correctly referred to me as being fuddy-duddy, a bit establishment and all that stuff." "And I am, and proud of it." "There was one silly sketch which John always hated and collaborated with the BBC to cut, I think." "It was a thing Michael and I wrote." "It was about wine tasting, and it--mmm." "Mm." "It's very [sniff] smooth," "It's flavorful, it's, um..." "It's--it's probably some k" "Savi--oh, is it a..." "A Sauternes, perhaps?" "No, sir." "It's wee-wee." "Ah." "Yes." "Well, try this." "Ah." "This is obviously much fuller," "Fuller, rounder flavour." "Probably south side of the hill." "Would it be a Medoc?" "No, sir." "That's wee-wee, too." "It just went on relentlessly, and they cut that." "I don't know why." "It was--John found that totally distasteful." "Which it is, but that's half the point of it." "It's a silly, childish sketch." "That's the fun of it." "♪ sit on my face" "♪ and tell me that you love me ♪" "♪ I'll sit on your face" "♪ and tell you I love you, too ♪" "♪ I love to hear you oralize ♪" "♪ when I'm between your thighs ♪" "♪ you blow me away" "♪ sit on my face" "♪ and let my lips embrace you ♪" "♪ I'll sit on your face" "♪ and say I love you truly" "♪ life can be fine if we both 69 ♪" "♪ if we sit on the face" "♪ and it's ah, such a pleasure to play ♪" "♪ till we're blown away" "I saw them at Hollywood Bowl, and the audience..." "It was sort of what I used to do." "That of that rock 'n' roll idolization." "I saw that at the Hollywood Bowl." "There was only one thing we ever all agreed on" "That the show would never work in America." "We were all solid on this." "And it was a total surprise." "It was amazing how we were treated in America." "We were treated like pop stars." "It was quite incredible." "At the Hollywood Bowl and even in New York." "At the end of the show, they would be screaming and yelling, and girls would throw things on the stage" "Home-baked cookies, flowers, presents, their knickers." "Uh, nobody ever threw any jock straps for me, unfortunately, but all these knickers were thrown on the stage." "When we left the theater, the first night, we opened the stage door, there were the hordes of screaming females." "And the fellas didn't know what to do." "I remember one female came up to Michael saying, "Ah, Michael, Michael!"" "Threw herself at him and promptly fainted in his arms." "There was Michael with this female going, "Uh..." "W-w-w-what do I do?"" "Michael Palin is the only one" "I could still die for." "Michael, if you're wondering who sent you that Duke Ellington tape, it was me-- yours truly." "I love you." "I think Python is funny!" "Eric Idle's really cute." "I'm available, Eric." "Um..." "I don't know." "I like them all, really." "I can't." "I'm sorry." "I can't." "I won't." "I won't choose." "I want them all." "I love Hazel Pethig." "I think she does great costumes." "Hazel!" "Hazel!" "Hazel!" "Hazel!" "Hazel!" "Hazel!" "Hazel!" "Hazel!" "Hazel!" "Oh, I think, uh," "The real fans are so-- can be slightly strange." "I think people adopted this sort of thing and learned the words, it's maybe just slightly mad." "♪ oh, I'm a lumberjack, and I'm o.K. ♪" "♪ I sleep all night, and I work all day ♪" "♪ he's a lumberjack, and he's o.K. ♪" "♪ he sleeps all night, and he works all day ♪" "♪ I cut down trees, I eat my lunch ♪" "♪ I go to the lavatory ♪" "♪ on wednesdays I go shoppin' ♪" "♪ and have buttered scones for tea ♪" "♪ he cuts down tree, he eats his lunch ♪" "♪ he goes to the lavatory ♪" "♪ on wednesdays he goes shopping ♪" "♪ and has buttered scones for tea ♪" "♪ he's a lumberjack, and he's o.K. ♪" "♪ he sleeps all night ♪" "♪ and he works all day ♪" "♪ I cut down trees, I wear high heels ♪" "♪ suspenders, and a bra ♪" "♪ I wished I'd been a girlie ♪" "♪ just like my dear mama ♪" "♪ he cuts down trees, he wears high heels ♪" "♪ suspenders, and a bra" "♪ I wish I'd been a girlie ♪" "♪ just like my dear mama ♪" "Oh!" "How perverse!" "I thought you were so rugged!" "By the time we got to New York to open Holy Grail, it was hugely hip." "There were lines around the block when we opened." "The theater started with a 10:30 show, and there were lines around the block of Americans waiting to get in." "We had to sign coconuts." "Somebody had a good idea of giving them" "The first thousand people-- a free coconut." "And then we had to-- somebody said, you should autograph them." "They never tried to autograph a coconut." "It's impossible." "Ah, Lord Pinkney, here's the young boy Miles you sent for." "Ah..." "Young Miles, is it?" "What a fine lad you are." "Sit down, boy." "Sit down." "Oh, we shall get on handsomely you and I." "You shall be clothed and fed and--and..." "Oh, dear." "It's happening." "I hope miss Paine told you about this." "Oh..." "Oh, dear." "I'm terribly sorry." "I just" "Whenever the Pythons came in and gave us, like, license to kind of really, uh, take off and, uh..." "And expand even the limits of what we were doing, and we were perceived to have been out there at that time." "A lot of people have that sort of schoolboyish or schoolgirlish attitude towards things, and they take it to the point where it's not petulant anymore." "It's just very funny, and it gives" "I mean, you sort of experience it vicariously from watching them." "They influenced me a great deal." "They influenced Saturday Night Live," "I think, a great deal." "The difference was" "And this is something we rarely said about" "Was they could edit, we couldn't." "So, uh, we had to write endings to our pieces." "And, uh..." "They just went from one concept to the next." "And for main course, sir?" "Uh, I'll have a whiskey for main course, and I'll follow that with a whiskey for pudding." "Yes, sir." "And what would you like with it, whiskey?" "No." "A bottle of wine." "This is the silliest sketch I've ever been in." "Shall we stop it?" "Yeah." "All right." "I got fairly bored with television somewhere around about the middle of Python, partly because I'd done an enormous number of shows in that short period of time." "You know, I'd done, uh... 40 that were either Frost Reports or 1948 Shows, before I'd ever got to Python." "And after we'd done about 20 of Pythons," "I, and I alone, felt that we were beginning to repeat ourselves and sort of being derivative of ourselves, and I never enjoyed that, so I remember getting a bit bored, even by about '71." "By then, there was a lot more fights going on." "I don't know why, really, but it just..." "It's like a marriage." "John's not very good at marriages, either." "And, uh..." "If you actually probably looked at his timetables, they'd probably worked out the same." "He was married to Python as long as he was to however many wives he's had." "Morning." "Are you the registrar?" "I have that function." "I was here on Saturday getting married to a blonde, and I'd like to have this one instead, please." "The other one wasn't any good, so I'd like to swap." "I have paid." "I paid on Saturday." "Here's the ticket." "Ah." "No." "That was when you were married." "Yes, to the wrong one." "I didn't like the colour." "This is the one I want, so just change the forms." "I think that there was a certain amount of antagonism in the third series," "About 1973." "Um, and I know that I was unpopular, although they were nice to me, basically, uh, face to face, and then they'd sort of go off pissed off and say rude things about me behind my back" "when I said I wanted to drop out of the group for television purposes." "Uh, but I think that most of that rancor was really isolated." "Um, it was late '73, really, which is a pretty short period." "We didn't feel angry with John." "We'd known for years that he didn't want to do it, so you couldn't suddenly feel... feel anger at it." "Um..." "I think the decision of the five of us to go on and do the fourth series without John, um... was kind of interesting..." "Um..." "Ah..." "And surprising in a way because we always said Python was the six of us." "Take away anyone, it wouldn't be the same." "We did six, and BBC wanted another seven, and at that stage I said no, and Michael tried to talk me into it, and I said, "It's not working,"" "Because there was this lovely tension between John and Terry." "There was a series of tensions and balances that allowed it to work." "And without the full group, it never works--it never worked quite as well." "Apart from the sheer performing, the writing didn't work quite as well." "Naturally, British journalists, being the rather unhappy creatures that they are" "And I'm being quite serious" "Are fascinated by negative emotion and not interested in much else." "So those few months, sort of 6 months in a period of 20 years, tend to feature quite strongly in all the things that they write about us." "But other than that, um..." "I think we got on astonishingly well." "My recollection of The Holy Grail was that even a few months after that" "Holy Grail was '74" "We were getting on well." "And the sketch Terry and I had written about people going along with, uh..." "They're knights, not being on horseback, but holding, uh, coconuts, which they banged together as horses, became the beginning of, uh... uh, of The Holy Grail." "Suddenly the idea of The Holy Grail seemed terrific." "You've got these six main characters, six main knights going along." "Nobody really knows the stories." "No one's going to say, "They went wrong there."" "They're looking for the grail." "On the way, there's all sorts of jokes, and it's an area where you can make sort of modern references in a historical period, which is a nice area for comedy." "How did you become king, then?" "The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad is the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur." "That is why I'm your king." "Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government." "Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony." "Be quiet!" "You can't expect to wield supreme executive power because some watery tart threw a sword at you." "Shut up!" "And somebody said "What's going to be your next film?", and I said, "Oh, Jesus Christ, Lust For Glory."" "And uh..." "I liked to get into trouble in those days." "And then after that, this became a joke we were going to do this, and then we thought, this is an interesting area." "Nobody's ever done comedy about this entire area and what--and then what's funny about this area?" "And so we researched it first." "We all read-- we read all the bible," "And we read the histories of the area and the dead sea scrolls." "We spent some serious time seriously researching it, and then got together and discussed things for quite a long time and realized that in fact" "You can't really make fun of J.C." "Because he's actually saying quite good things." "Although it wasn't meant to be a parody of Christ's life, it was a story, but it could take its shape from that, I suppose." "There wasn't a story in that." "The story actually emerged from the writing." "We still did it as sketches really, and magically, a story emerged." "A miracle!" "A miracle!" "He hath made the bush fruitful by his words." "They brought forth juniper berries." "Of course they brought forth juniper berries." "They're juniper bushes!" "What do you expect?" "Show us another miracle." "Do not tempt him, shallow ones." "Is not the miracle of the juniper bushes enough?" "I say, those are my juniper bushes." "They're a gift from god!" "They're all I've bloody got to eat." "Clear off those bushes, go on!" "Clear off, the lot of you!" "Lord, I am affected by a bald patch." "I am healed!" "The master healed me!" "I didn't touch him." "I was blind, and now I can see." "A miracle!" "A miracle!" "A miracle!" "What we wanted to attack was the sort of people who listen to church leaders and have to be told what to do." "If you look at Brian, it's actually the most moralistic film." "It actually suggests positive behavior" ""I must be an individual."" "It embraces a philosophy which is actually not present in the other films." "I remember Life Of Brian as being an enormously happy experience because, by coincidence, we all had the same kind of views and feelings about the subject, and I think that's our masterpiece, you know." "That's what I would like to be judged by." "I'm warning you!" "If you say Jehovah once more" "Right!" "Who threw that?" "Come on, who threw that?" "Him!" "Him!" "Him!" "Was it you?" "Yes." "Well, you did say Jehovah." "Stop!" "Stop!" "Will you..." "Stop that?" "Stop it!" "Now, look, no-one is to stone anyone until I blow this whistle." "Do you understand?" "Even--and I want to make this absolutely clear-- even if they do say Jehovah." "Good shot!" "[clapping]" "If you've done a film about" "The Meaning Of Life, the bible," "It's really quite hard to know where to go next." "I think probably people are happy now to just sort of be friends without the pressure of feeling you have to get something done," ""We've got to re-form," or anything like that." "Really we never had sort of greedy managers or people saying," ""Come on, lads, you've got to get out there" "And do another show." "Money, money, money," all that." "The greed has come from within the group." "I think it would be very difficult to all get back together again." "For a start, we're all older and fatter, more lined." "It would look a bit pathetic." "And there's still a lot of competitiveness in the group." "It's sibling rivalry because we are siblings." "We're very much contemporaries, very much product of a particular time, and we all want the others to do well, but we don't want them to produce total masterpieces, 'cause that would be rather annoying," "But at the same time, we don't wish the others bad." "We want them reasonable-size success, you know, but nothing too annoying." "I like what I'm doing now, and--and the idea of doing more Python gives me the feeling it's going to be more of that in a strange way." "It's not what I want to do." "I've done all that." "It's done, past." "Several of us felt the door is finally closed now." "This is a perfect way to end it." "Walk away from it." "It probably means we'll do a film next week together." "The great thing about Python is we could never believe our luck." "We were like a group who met at school, still allowed to do these old schoolboy jokes, misbehave, do silly voices, before we got self-conscious, before people started making critical interpretations of Python's work" "How we thrust aside the barriers of comedy." "We're just a sniggering little group who had a terribly good time giggling at humanity." "Suddenly we've broken comedic barriers." "We went a bit quiet then." "Thank you very much, young man." "Ladies and gentlemen, the World Of History is proud to present the premiere the Batley Townswomen's Guild reen- actment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor." "[toot toot]"