"(Buzz of conversation)" "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage" "Mr John Cleese." "♪ Monty Python theme tune" "(Rhythmic clapping)" "Thank you." "Thank you all so much for coming to the show tonight." "It's just a fan show but I really hope you enjoy it, and, again, thank you for coming." "I know what you're all thinking." "You are thinking:" "I had absolutely no idea he was so old." "What is the poor man doing performing, when he should be at home lying down, resting?" "I'll tell you why I'm here, my friends." "I'm here, frankly, because I need the money." "I have fallen on hard times." "Not because I am now on the far side of romantic leading roles but because I've just been through a costly and ac.... acrimonious divorce." "Instead of being able to slow the pace of my legendary career to a distinguished, gentle and elegant stroll - presenting awards, advertising cruises and giving gracious interviews at obscure Italian film festivals - l'm forced instead to hit the road again to rack up a few grand there" "and a few hundred here." "I call it The Alimony Tour, Year 3, or Feeding The Beast." "And here is a recent photograph of my ex-wife at a London ATM, helping herself to some of my money." "Look at the..." "So I have to pay Alyce Faye Eichelberger the most recent holder of the title Mrs John Cleese, $20 million." "Yes, that's right." "The Californian judge ordered me to pay $1 5 million down and $1 million each year for the next five years until I am 76 to a woman whom I believe to be the spiritual godchild of Blackbeard the Pirate and Heather Mills." "$20 million." "Apparently, I got off lightly." "My lawyer points out how much more I would have had to pay my ex-wife had she contributed anything to the relationship." "If we'd had children, or even a two-way conversation." "Let me explain what this means to me." "This beautiful scene represents the serenity I felt when I was first married." "And this... ..represents my life since the divorce." "Do you realise what I could do with $20 million instead of stimulating the Botox industry?" "I could purchase 7,020 Bowflex machines." "(Laughter)" "Or, if I wanted to go bigger, I could buy 1 9 Leopard 2 military tanks, making me better equipped for battle than the current British Army." "For $20 million, according to my friend Dick Cheney, I could buy an election." "I could buy 1 2 million things at one of those UK pound stores." "I could purchase for personal transplanting hundreds of black-market organs." "A true stockpile of spare parts." "Just in case." "I could have hired much better writers for this show." "$20 million." "For that amount, based on their divorce settlements, I could have married Brigitte Nielsen 3.3 times." "I could have married Pamela Anderson 8.5 times." "And I could have married anyone from the Isle of Man... ..2,276 times." "Anyway, let's see how my ex-wife earned her 20 million." "If we do the math, we were married from December 28th 1 992 to January 4th 2008." "Oh, blessed memory." "So, 5,486 days of marriage brings in $20 million, so Alyce Faye has earned herself $3,650 for every single day she was married." "That's over and above everything being paid for, of course." "Every time she went to sleep at night she has received compensation of $1 ,200." "Imagine waking up every morning - 800 quid on the bedside table." "If she made herself a cup of coffee, that racked her up another £4.50." "Every time she spent one hour trying to remember where she put her memory pills... 95 smackers." "She's making money just lying there wondering which day of the week it is." "I, on the other hand, must soldier on and tell you the sad, sad tale of how I have been reduced to these tragic circumstances." "Condemned by Californian law to spend my twilight years attempting to amuse a bunch of antique dealers and rugby football fans." "Here is my tale." "I was born in England on 27th October 1 939, just after the outbreak of World War Two." "Of poor but honest parents and that is the worst of all possible combinations." "My parents had married 1 3 years earlier and had decided not to have children, so I was a mistake, as my mother occasionally reminded me." "I think she was worried it might slip my mind." "My father was born Reginald Francis Cheese " "Cheese really was the family name - in Bristol in 1 893." "He left school early to work in an insurance office until 1 91 5 when he volunteered to go to France to fight in the First World War." "But he enlisted as Reginald Cleese because he was fed up with the teasing." "He was soon made a junior officer but was immediately wounded by shrapnel." "However, after recovering from his wounds he re-enlisted as a corporal and continued to fight bravely until the end of the war." "I always thought this was a charming eccentricity until I discovered years later that the average life expectancy of a junior officer in France in 1 91 5 was three weeks." "So, Dad survived as a corporal and after the war he travelled to India, Hong Kong and mainland China, selling marine insurance until 1 925, when malaria forced him to return to England, where he met my mother, Muriel Cross," "who lived in Weston-super-Mare." "They fell in love and he proposed." "However, my mother's father, a Weston-super-Mare auctioneer called Marwood Cross, objected to the marriage on the grounds of social class." "You see, my father's father, John Cheese, was a solicitor's clerk." "So Dad was lower middle middle lower middle class whereas my mother was middle middle middle lower middle class, so my mother was forced to elope, and they married and went and lived in Golders Green until Marwood had become less cross" "and they could return and settle in Mother's home town." "Weston was always referred to as a seaside resort." "Actually, it was more of a seaside last resort, where the working class from Birmingham and South Wales came and sat in the ice cream parlours and the amusement arcades, waiting for the rain to stop." "Nothing ever happened in Weston, which suited my parents and their friends very well." "At that time, the main aim in life of the English lower middle class was to get safely into their coffins without ever having been seriously embarrassed." "So any display of emotion of any kind was a threat to their way of life." "Consequently, there was no sex in Weston-super-Mare at all." "All births were virgin births." "Later on, when I started going to church, I couldn't quite understand why there was so much fuss about the mother of Jesus." "Now... I once wrote a poem about Weston-super-Mare and..." "..I would love to read it to you this evening if I may." "I do not care for Weston-super-Mare" "And so I'm glad that I'm not there." "Thank you." "And so it was in this tedious little town that my mother was born into a large Edwardian family in October 1 899, and she died in Weston at the age of 1 01 in October 2000, her life having spanned the entire 20th century." "From the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo through the First World War, the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler and Stalin, World War Two, the atomic bomb, the foundation of Israel, the Cold War," "the space age and the collapse of communism." "She lived through it all." "Without really noticing any of it." "She knew that there was a war with Germany and a man called Hilter was in charge of the Germans." "Frankly, she had more pressing things on her mind." "Namely, her worries and her phobias." "She was an award-winning worrier but it was her phobias that brought real colour to her life." "I once listed them." "She had all the obvious ones - fear of heights, fear of water, fear of the dark, fear of crowds, fear of fire, fear of snakes." "Then she suffered badly from claustrophobia, but also from agoraphobia." "Getting the right size of space for her could be quite tricky." "She had a morbid dread of horses, fire engines, albinos, fireworks, crabs, combine harvesters, church bells, thunder, dwarfs, goats, Belgians..." "Low-flying aircraft, Henry Moore sculptures, sharks, brass bands, raccoons, chariots, chiming doorbells, people wearing eye patches, fog and Princess Margaret." "Basically, she experienced life as a booby trap." "And then, in 1 940, something happened that confirmed her world view." "The Germans bombed Weston-super-Mare." "English historians have devoted much time trying to understand why the Germans, a logical and efficient people, would have bombed Weston, which was quite obviously a waste of bombs since nothing that the Germans could destroy in Weston" "could possibly be as valuable as the bomb that destroyed it." "Was it just high spirits, perhaps, or did Joseph Goebbels have a relative in Weston he particularly didn't like?" "Or did the Luftwaffe mistake Weston sea front for the Western Front?" "My father's theory was that the Germans bombed Weston to prove that they really do have a sense of humour." "Whatever the reasoning, my father had had enough of loud bangs in the First World War, so 24 hours after that first raid, he, my mother and I were living in a tiny farm 1 5 miles outside Weston," "and we stayed there throughout the war." "But when the war ended in 1 945, I had to go back to Weston to start school to learn how to become a comedian." "Of course, I didn't know at the time that that's what I was doing." "In Weston you were as likely to become a matador as a comedian." "Comedians have traditionally come from exceptionally boring towns." "Being born in Weston got me off to a flying start." "Secondly, I had the advantage of being ridiculously skinny and tall." "I was six foot when I was 1 2." "And socially awkward - the only child of older parents." "All of that helped me to discover very rapidly that I could make myself a lot more popular if I could make my class mates laugh." "And thirdly, I was somehow intrigued by comedy." "I used to write new jokes down in a little book, and I'd try to understand why things were funny." "For example." "When I saw a performer called Stanley Unwin who talked complete nonsense that sounded like English I figured out how he did it." "And, at the age of 1 6, I wrote the following." "Good evening and riston thirby." "I don't know if you've ever walder gony." "If so, you'll know that the carts and the tempertonies mote the group posers and overcol at the mergatusers." "There's to be parta-visor crews together the andapedity for the same shows datavision and auditory slopifaction according to Hugo Pavert's super-credity multi-peratory equation" "E=2R." "So don't eat them." "Not bad for 1 6." "When I got to Cambridge to study law, I joined a club called the Footlights, which produced revues." "That's funny sketches, monologues, comic songs, that sort of thing." "In my last year I was asked to be in that year's annual Footlights Revue, which played for two whole weeks in the professional theatre in Cambridge." "And it was really good that year." "But not, truthfully, because of me." "There happened to be two very talented people in the cast, whom you will know from The Goodies." "The stars of these shows were Bill Oddie, who wrote some very good parodies of pop songs and sang them really like a professional." "And Tim Brooke-Taylor here, who was a very high-energy comedy performer, very very physical and very precise in his movements." "These were the two guys picked out by everyone - the critics and the audiences." "The rest of us?" "Well, we weren't really noticed much." "The reviews said we were OK, but Bill and Tim were the stars." "So, the day that the show opened in Cambridge in 1 963 I was going to become a lawyer with Freshfields, solicitors to the Bank of England." "By Tuesday I was in show business." "Cambridge Circus went to the West End, where we played for five months, then we toured New Zealand and we finished up doing a short run on Broadway." "I was wondering what to do next when something very odd happened." "You see, at school I'd always been an OK student, except at one thing - singing." "I was so hopeless that the singing teacher, Mr Hickley, had me physically removed from singing class and made to do extra Latin." "So I felt rather vindicated when in 1 964 I became the only pupil Mr Hickley had ever had to appear in a Broadway musical." "And here's how it happened." "One day, out of the blue, I got a phone call inviting me to audition for a musical that Tommy Steele was about to do on Broadway." "It was called Half A Sixpence." "I thought this was hilarious." "Me, the most unmusical man in Europe, auditioning for a Broadway show, so I went along just for a giggle." "When I got there they gave me some pages of dialogue." "I read them out and I made the producers, who were sitting in the stalls, laugh and then they said, "Could you sing something?"" "I said, "No."" "They said, "Just sing anything."" "I said, "l don't know anything." "I cannot remember the tune to anything."" "They said, "Could you sing your national anthem?"" "I said, "Certainly." "How does it go?"" "I went home giggling." "The next morning the phone went and they gave me the part." "(Laughter) - l didn't know what to do." "A couple of days later, when rehearsals started, I got there very very early and I ran over to Stanley Lebowsky, the musical director, and I said, "Stanley, I want you to know I told them at the audition that I cannot sing."" "Stanley said, "John, I've been on Broadway 40 years." "Everybody can sing."" "Well, 20 minutes later he'd changed his mind." "He said, "You're right." "You can't sing." "Learn the words and mime."" "That was fine." "Every time I was up on stage singing I was in a chorus number." "So, who's to know?" "There I was every night. (Mouths)" "One night, after about six weeks, I started singing very very quietly." "Just for fun." "(Growls) Half a sixpence ls better than half a..." "That night Stanley was waiting for me outside my dressing room door." "He just said, "John, are you singing?"" "I said, "Just a..." He said, "Don't."" "So there I was in a Broadway musical, doing about 1 2 lines of dialogue every night, not being allowed to sing, and displaying no noticeable talent of any kind, when one morning I got the phone call that changed my life." "It was from David Frost, whom I knew from Cambridge." "David at this time was a huge star in English television." "Political satire had just become hugely popular and he was the key figure in the satire boom." "He said (As Frost):" ""Hello, John, it's David. I'm at the airport." "I'm doing a television show next year for the BBC. it's just sketches, with a couple of people you won't have heard of called Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett." "Would you like to be in it?"" "And I said, "Er..." "Yes, please."" "He said, "Super." "Super, super." "They've called my flight." "Talk to you soon." "Bye."" "And that was it." "How lucky can you be?" "David was the only person in English television who knew anything about my writing and performing." "Just weeks later I was appearing in The Frost Report, which we used to do every Thursday evening live to 1 4 million people." "The sketch that everyone remembers is this one." "Probably because it's about England's national obsession." "I look down on him because I am upper class." "I look up to him because he is upper class." "But I look down on him because he is lower class." "I am middle class." "I know my place." "I look up to them both." "But I don't look up to him as much as I look up to him." "Cos he has got innate breeding." "I have got innate breeding but I have not got any money." "So sometimes I look up to him." "I still look up to him because, although I have money, I am vulgar." "But I am not as vulgar as him." "So I still look down on him." "I know my place." "I look up to them both." "But while I am poor, I'm industrious, honest and trustworthy." "Had I the inclination l could look down on them." "But I don't." "We all 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." "(Applause)" "Again, what luck for a young comic like me to be working with performers as skilful and as kind as the Two Ronnies." "Then something happened that had never happened to me before." "When I performed on stage nobody ever really noticed me, but now, suddenly, I heard people saying, "This guy has got something."" "Maybe the camera was picking up something in close-up that nobody saw when I was on stage." "As a result, David Frost soon asked me and Tim Brooke-Taylor if we'd like to make a comedy series for him in the autumn for his production company." "We said, "We'd love to."" "He said, "Who would you like to be in it?"" "We said, "Obviously Graham Chapman." He said, "Obviously."" "Then Tim and I said, "There's one other person we'd like in the show and that's Marty Feldman."" "David was very surprised because at this time Marty was only a writer." "He was a good writer." "He'd been head writer on The Frost Report, but he wasn't a performer at all." "But he was so funny in conversation that Tim and I had a hunch that he'd become a great performer." "David said, "What about the way he looks?"" "Marty's face was his fortune." "The four of us" " Tim, Graham, Marty and I - created a show called At Last The 1 948 Show." "That's "The Lovely" Aimi MacDonald in the middle there, who introduced the show as a wonderful dappy showgirl." "From the very beginning Marty was a huge hit." "People loved him." "The sketches that they seemed to like best were the ones that Marty and I did together." "They were always either Marty driving me mad or me driving Marty mad." "In this first sketch I am interviewing Marty about freedom of speech." "Topic - the frank discussion of a controversial problem." "This week Franklin Trevelyan talks to Dr Rhomboid Goat-Cabin about freedom of speech." "Dr Goat-Cabin, what I want to ask you first is:" "Do you believe that in this country there is freedom of speech?" "Well, I..." "To put it another way, do you believe that there is freedom of speech?" "Well, I think..." "To paraphrase, do you believe that there is freedom of speech in this country?" " Yes, I do..." " Are people in this country free to speak?" " Yes, well..." " That is what I mean." "Perhaps I should say by "free" l mean unrestrained." "By "speech" l mean the act of speaking words and by "in this country" l mean Great Britain." " l do appreciate..." " And Northern lreland." "And the Channel Islands." "But not, of course, abroad." " No, no..." " Let me put it another way." "To what extent do you, as opposed to anyone else... I know the question. I do know the question." " By "feel" l mean believes, holds to be true." " l know the question." " l know the question." " ..maintains... I know the question." " ..that this is in fact the case." " l know the qu..." "Or not." " What, me?" " Yes." " You want to know what I think?" " That's right." " Really?" " Yes." "Well, I..." "I've forgotten the question." " Freedom of speech." " Oh, yes." "What I was asking was, do you feel freedom of speech in this country is an illusion..." " l remember the question." " ..or a reality?" " By reality I do mean the truth..." " l do know the question." "I know the question." "I remember the question." "I do know the question. I know it." "I didn't want to come here." "You made me come here." "I didn't want to come. I'm going now." " l'm going. I'm going." " As opposed to an absolute problem." "I say problem. I do mean an issue that affects all of us at this time." "I always myself feel that while it is universally agreed that some restriction on the right of free speech is necessary, for example, in the case of the law of libel or... (Trumpet blast)" "(Applause)" "Thank you." "I really love that sketch." "Did you notice the way the director shot it?" "There's not a single close-up." "Just two shots." "I've always believed that comedy is about the two-shot, not about the close-up." "That was me driving Marty mad." "Now here's Marty driving me mad." "Good evening." "Here is the news." "President Tito arrived at London Airport earlier this evening on the first stage of his five-day visit to the..." "Somebody's stolen the news." "May I have the news back, please?" "I'm so sorry about this." "Will you please bring the news back immediately?" "As I was saying, it appears that this President..." "The president of um..." " Yugoslavia!" " .." "Yugoslavia... ..has arrived at London Airport to...to... see somebody um...very important about um... something very important." "I imagine." "Apart from that um..." "Excuse me one moment." "Will you give me the news now?" "Give it to me now." "Give it back." "President Tito and Madam Tito..." "Thank you." "At the end of two series of the 1 948 Show a very important thing happened in my life which was that I married dear Connie Booth." "Connie had been living in New York and she didn't know London very well, so I took a decision that for the foreseeable future, which turned out to be about 1 8 months, I wasn't going to spend my time away filming and in television studios." "I was going to stay in our flat and write." "This suited Graham Chapman very well because he was still studying at St Bart's hospital to become a doctor." "Marty and Tim Brooke-Taylor went off to the BBC and had a huge success with Marty's show, which was called Marty." "But Graham and I had a huge stroke of luck early on, which was that we met Peter Sellers." "This was really important because Peter liked our work and we eventually wrote three movies for him." "One was called The Magic Christian, and when it was filmed, this guy played Peter Sellers' son." "Dear old Ringo." "But the best of all was writing for Peter Sellers, who, for me, is still the greatest comedy actor that I have ever seen." "He was so pleased with our script that he asked me to be in a scene with him." "There I was at Sotheby's playing a snotty young auctioneer." "One of the proudest days of my life." "So, Graham and I used to write Mondays to Fridays." "He would come over at about 1 0 o'clock and we'd work until about five, except on Thursdays." "On Thursdays we would knock off early to watch a kids' programme at half past four." "It was only a kids' programme but also the funniest thing on English television at that time." "Hardly surprising, if you look at the cast." "Second from the left" " Mr Michael Palin, next to him, Terry Jones, doing his Gordon Brown impersonation." "And next to him, Mr Eric Idle." "Terry Gilliam had already started to do very simple, crude animations, which he had literally taught himself to do from scratch." "Graham and I loved watching this programme." "After one particularly funny episode, I said to Graham," ""Well, we know these guys." We'd all written together for The Frost Report." "I said, "Why don't we ring them up and see if they want to do a show with us?"" "Because Connie, by this point, knew her way around London." "We gave them a call and they said, "OK."" "About a month later we trooped off to the Television Centre to the office of the Head of Light Entertainment." "A very nice guy, but incredibly important to us, called Michael Mills." "We went in there to discuss making a comedy series for the BBC." "Of course, being Python, we hadn't bothered to prepare." "Michael said, "Tell us about this show you want to do."" "We said, "Well, we want to do a comedy show, with humorous material, obviously," "making jokes and being as funny as possible to...to... make people laugh."" "He said, "l see." "Are you going to have guest stars?"" "We said, "Are we?"" "He said, "What about music?" "Are you going to use music?"" "We said, "Wh..."" "He said, "What about film?"" "I remember thinking, "l have never been so embarrassed in my life." "Please, God, just get me out of here."" "Then I heard Michael Mills say, "Oh, go away and make 1 3 programmes."" "I want you to understand that we were working in television at the best possible time." "For a start, several of the BBC executives knew what they were doing." " Yes." "(Applause)" "They had not yet started to listen to the marketing people." "(Spits)" "So we were able to produce in Python some genuinely original stuff." "We could take risks." "We weren't under any kind of pressure." "Partly because the show was so cheap to make." "It took about seven and a half to eight months to make a whole series." "That is writing it and then filming it, then rehearsing and recording and editing." "For that eight months' work we each got paid £4,000." "Not a fortune." "The trouble now is that shows are so expensive." "That makes everyone anxious." "When people get anxious they want to control everything." "The modern executives have absolutely no idea what they're doing." "Which wouldn't matter, but they have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they're doing, and that gives them confidence." "That's why it's such a disaster." "They only care about the viewing figures." "I'm going to tell you something extraordinary." "When we were doing Monty Python, we did not know what our viewing figure was." "Nobody talked about it." "We didn't care." "They just let us play." "Let me explain to you about the dynamic of this strange group." "(Laughter)" "You need to understand that we were writers." "We were not primarily performers." "I can prove this to you because there were lots and lots of squabbles but they were always about the material." "Was the script good enough?" "We never squabbled or fought about the roles, who was going to play which part." "If we'd been primarily actors, that's what we would have been fighting about." "As writers, if we'd written something, we knew that it would work best if Graham played that and I played that and Michael played that. lt was obvious." "But there were always big, big fights about the scripts." "I don't know why." "I think we maybe cared too much." "We almost took it too seriously." "One occasion." "Somebody wrote a sketch that was set in a dormitory." "It was a rather rundown, dusty, cobwebby sort of place." "Somebody said, "lt should be illuminated by a magnificent Louis XlV chandelier."" "Somebody else said, "No, not a chandelier." "A dead, stuffed farm animal with a light bulb in each one of its four feet."" "Somebody said, "That's funny." "Obviously a sheep."" "Somebody said, "That wouldn't be funny." "It needs to be a goat."" "Somebody said, "A goat?" "Are you serious?"" "Somebody said, "A goat is funnier." "Goats have horns - a sight gag."" "Somebody else said, "No, sheep are stupider." "Stupid is always funny." "Plus, the wool is funnier, visually."" "Somebody else said, "No, a sheep would ruin the joke." "A sheep is more predictable."" "This went on for 20 minutes." "There were three pro-goat and three pro-sheep." "It got really nasty, I'm afraid." "People questioning each other's parentage, bringing up embarrassing things about each other's private lives, slurs about people's sexual preferences." "I remember thinking, "This is insane." "We have been arguing for 20 minutes." "It's ridiculous." "It's got to be a fucking goat. it's obvious."" "It was tremendous fun because we were free to try anything." "It was so liberating." "We could just be as silly as we liked." "We were a bunch of 30-year-olds behaving like eight-year-olds and getting paid for it." "It was wonderful." "Recently, in New York, we were celebrating our 40th anniversary." "I said to each one of the Pythons individually," ""What was the silliest thing that we ever did?"" "The result was unanimous." "The fish-slapping dance." "♪ Jaunty folk tune" "(Music stops)" "I always feel sorry for some poor students at media studies who'll be asked to write an essay about what that means." "As well as being silly, we also sometimes were rather naughty, I'm afraid." "Well, I don't know why." "We liked the BBC executives, but they were a little bit stuffy." "It was fun sometimes to rattle their cage." "We always used to get naughtier towards the end of a series." "It was like school, the last day of term when you can't behave properly, even if you want to." "I remember one time at the end of the second series" "Graham and I were writing the 1 3th, the last show." "I said, "Come on, Gra, let's write something really naughty."" "Graham, of course, being a doctor said, "Something about a dead body."" "So we wrote the undertaker sketch." "I walk into the undertaker's and Graham's behind the counter with a stovepipe hat and black sash." "He says, "Good morning, sir." "Can I help you?"" "I said, "Yes, I do need your help because my mother has just died and I don't know what to do."" "He says, "lt's simple, sir." "There are three options." "We can burn her, we can bury her, or we can dump her."" "I said, "Dump her?" He said, "We put her in a builder's skip, or take her to the Thames, slip her in, water takes her away." "Easy, quick and very cheap."" "I said, "No, no, no. lt's my mother." "I want a proper funeral."" ""Oh." "You want a proper one?" "I see."" ""May I ask, where is the dead body?"" "I said, "Actually, it's over here in this sack."" "He looks inside and says, "She was quite young."" "I say, "Yes, she was."" "He says, "Fred, I think we've got an eater."" "I said, "What did you say... about eating?"" "He said, "Well..."" "I said, "You're not seriously suggesting eating my mother?"" "He said, "Well, not raw. I mean cooked." "Cooked properly."" ""Some parsnips, green peas."" "I said, "Well, I am a bit peckish."" ""No, no, what am I talking about?" "We are not eating Mummy." "Eating Mummy is right out."" "He said, "Look, I tell you what." "Here's a suggestion." "Let's cook her and eat her and..."" "And Graham wrote this next line." "It is the naughtiest line that has been written since the cosmos began." "He said, "And then, if you feel guilty afterwards, we'll dig a grave and you can throw up in it."" "And the dear old BBC let us do the sketch." "Isn't that wonderful?" "I want to talk about naughty or black humour." "I was thinking of something to show you to get us started, and then I remembered one of the movies - The Holy Grail." "I want to show you the Black Knight." "You fight with the strength of many men, Sir Knight." "I am Arthur, king of the Britons." "I seek the finest and the bravest knights in the land to join me in my court at Camelot." "You have proved yourself worthy." "Will you join me?" "You make me sad." "So be it." "Come, Patsy." "None shall pass." " What?" " None shall pass." "I have no quarrel with you, good Sir Knight, but I must cross this bridge." "Then you shall die." "I command you as king of the Britons to stand aside." "I move for no man." "So be it." "Hi-yah." "Hi-yah." "Hi-yah." "Hi-yah." "Now stand aside, worthy adversary." "Tis but a scratch." "A scratch?" "Your arm's off." " No, it isn't." " What's that, then?" " l've had worse." " You liar." "Come on, you pansy." "Yargh." "Victory is mine." "We thank thee, Lord, that in..." "Aargh." " Come on, then." " What?" "Have at you." "You are indeed brave, Sir Knight, but the fight is mine." "Oh, had enough, eh?" "Look, you stupid bastard, you've got no arms left." " Yes, I have." " Look." "It's just a flesh wound." " Look, stop that." " Chicken." " Chicken." " Look, I'll have your leg." "Right." " Right, I'll do you for that." " What?" "Come here." "What are you gonna do, bleed on me?" "I'm invincible." "You're a loony." "The Black Knight always triumphs." "Have at you." "Come on, then." "All right...we'll call it a draw." "Come, Patsy." "I see." "Running away, eh?" "You yellow bastards." "Come back here and take what's coming to you." "I'll bite your legs off." "Since we made The Holy Grail in 1 97 4, I've watched that scene with audiences just like you about 1 5 times and that is always the scene that gets more laughs than any other scene in the movie." "And that is the scene all the producers wanted to cut." " (Laughter)" " So what's going on here?" "I think I can explain it." "When we started to show Fish Called Wanda, the test screenings to audiences, we used to ask the audiences to fill out what we call an evaluation card." "They would be asked, "What did you think of the music?" "Did you like the ending?"" "One of the questions was, "What are the three funniest scenes in the movie?"" "We added up the votes - the funniest scene was killing the dogs, the second funniest was Michael with the chips up his nose, and the third was me dancing around naked speaking Russian." "Then at the back it said ,"What were the three most offensive scenes in the movie?"" "The three were - killing the dogs, Michael with the chips up his nose and me dancing..." "What is going on?" "I think when you get into taboo areas, that is, areas like dead bodies, limbs coming off or anything sexual, there's always a little bit of anxiety, cos it is taboo." "But for some people, just a few, there's a lot of anxiety." "So when the subject is raised, they kind of freeze up and they feel very uncomfortable." "They hate it, and they hate the fact people around them are laughing so much, and they say, "l've been offended."" "However, most people just have a little bit of anxiety." "So what happens is, if you make them laugh, you get an even bigger laugh than you do normally." "Because you get the normal laugh and then you get the extra energy that comes from that bit of anxiety being liberated." "So you get huge laughs when you deal with taboo subjects." "That's one reason why my humour has a pretty black quality to it some of the time." "There's a second reason." "That is that comedians do what works." "If I come out here and I do a joke to you guys and you laugh, I do more of those kind of jokes." "So a comedian's style is kind of built up by the interaction with the audience, you see." "I noticed at the start that the people in charge are always scared of the more hard-edged joke." "In fact, when I started working in radio, before the recordings, the producer would say to me, "John, I think we ought to cut that line."" "I'd say, "No, no, let's just record it, OK?" "And then, if the audience doesn't laugh, we can cut it out before we transmit it." "But at least let's try it."" "And what I discovered was, nine times out of ten, the audience liked this kind of hard-edged humour." "But I have to say, there's a third reason why I like black humour." "It's more sort of psychoanalytic." "It goes back to my relationship with my mother." "Now, as you probably already gathered, our relationship was not an easy one." "I always used to say there were only two things my mother and I had in common." "One was that we were both not raised by wolves, and the second was that we both had a very black sense of humour." "Now, Mother was obviously a very depressed woman." "People who are anxious and permanently scared, well, they're obviously depressed." "And our telephone conversation over the decades would go like this:" "I always made the call, and I would ring her up and say, "Hello, Mum, it's John."" "(Falsetto) "Hello, John, how are you?"" ""l'm fine, Mother, how are you?"" "She would say, always with just a hint of surprise," ""l've been just a little bit down this week."" "I don't know why she was surprised, because she was "just a little bit down this week" for 50 fucking years." "So she'd start telling me all the things that made her life miserable and I'd often finish up more depressed than she was." "One day, inspiration struck." "She was carefully listing all the reasons that she didn't want to go on living." "I heard myself say, "l have an idea, Mother."" "She said, "Oh, what's that?"" "I said, "l know a little man who lives in Fulham." "And if you're still feeling this way next week, I could give him a call, if you like - but only if you like." "And he could come down to Weston-super-Mare and kill you."" "(Laughter)" "(Applause)" "Silence - and then she cackled with laughter." "It was a major breakthrough." "From then on, any time she started saying how unhappy she was, well, I'd listen for a couple of minutes, of course I would." "Then I'd say, "So, should I call the little man in Fulham?"" "And she'd laugh and it would completely change her mood." "She'd say things like, "Oh, no, because I've got a sherry party on Friday."" "It's probably the single most creative thing I ever did, coming up with that little man in Fulham." "It relied on this very black sense of humour that we both shared." "On another occasion..." "Actually, it wasn't a single occasion." "She was always saying to me, "You'll miss me when I've gone."" "She told me that throughout my life." ""You'll miss me when I've gone."" "Who knows?" "One day, she may be proved right." "Anyway... on this occasion, I think I was a bit bored." "Because I said, "No, I won't."" "And she said, "Why not?"" "And I thought, "Whoops, I've crossed the line here."" "I said, "Because, Mother, when you die, I am going to take you to a taxidermist and have you stuffed." "And I'm going to put you in a glass case by the door." "When I go out in the morning, I'll be able to wave to you." "So I will not miss you."" "She was really pleased." "She boasted about this to everyone in her retirement home." "She said, "When I die, my son's going to have me stuffed."" "I think it gave her a great prestige in the home." "I shouldn't complain about Mother." "I'll tell you something - my main interest is psychology." "And many psychologists and psychiatrists have studied a very interesting phenomenon." "Which is that if you look at many of the great geniuses, both scientific and artistic, of our Western civilisation, you will discover that an enormous proportion of them had very, very difficult relationships with their mother." "They lacked steady, consistent maternal love." "So I often think to myself, "lf only my mother had been just a little bit worse, I could have been huge."" "Ah, well." "is that Mother or Marty?" "It's Mother." "Muriel Evelyn Cross." "Well, we all have one to bear." "(Laughter)" "Between ourselves, despite Monty Python's love of black humour," "Mother never really got Python." "But she did love Fawlty Towers, because, of course, it was set in a town very like Weston-super-Mare." "So growing up in Weston had taught me all that I needed to know about seaside towns with lots of little hotels, all of them run according to the basic British hotelier's motto:" "We could run this place properly if it wasn't for the guests." "Because although I set Fawlty Towers in Torquay, really it was Weston-super-Mare in every important way." "However, the actual hotel that it was based on was a real hotel in Torquay, called Gleneagles, where Connie and I stayed in the spring of 1 970." "Actually, all the Pythons were staying there." "We'd gone down to Devon to film for the television series." "The rest of the Pythons left the next morning because the service was so terrible." "The first night we got there, we were all having dinner together at a big table, all the Pythons and Connie." "For the first time, I noticed the owner, a Mr Donald Sinclair, who was the model for Basil Fawlty." "He was walking around the dining room like this." "He was monarch of all he surveyed." "As he walked past the Python table... he stopped..." "..and stared at Terry Gilliam." "Because Terry had ordered a steak, and Terry was doing what Americans do when they eat a steak, which is they cut the meat up like this, then they put the knife down and they take the fork in the right hand" "and they spear the meat and eat it like that." "Mr Sinclair just watched." "And then he said," ""We don't eat like that in this country."" "Unbelievable." "So all the Pythons were off the next morning to stay at the Imperial Hotel." "But Connie and I stayed on." "Perhaps it was inertia, perhaps it was curiosity." "Mr Sinclair was the most gloriously rude man I have ever met." "He would sit at reception, staring into space, and then he would sense a guest coming, and immediately become very, very busy." "The guest would have to walk up to the reception desk and stand there, and he would continue as though the guest was invisible." "Eventually the guest would say, "Ahem, excuse me." He'd say "Oh, what?"" "One morning, I left my briefcase by the front door, because the taxi came to take me for filming." "I just forgot about it." "When I got back, of course, I wanted to get it back." "I walked in, he was staring into space, saw me coming, immediately was busy." ""Excuse me..." "Oh, what is it now?"" "I said, "Well, I left my briefcase..."" "He said, "Yes, yes, it's over there behind the white wall."" "He pointed out of the front door." "There was a swimming pool... and then about 70 yards away, there was a white wall." "(Laughter) I said, "Why do you..."" "He said, "What do you want now?" "I'm trying to run a hotel here."" ""Why did you put it behind the white wall?"" "He said, "We thought there might be a bomb in it."" "And I said, "A bomb?"" "He said - and I promise you, he really did say this " ""We've had some staff problems recently."" "You know, I'm glad we stayed." "Because it gave Connie and me all the material we ever needed for two whole series - almost the only thing we had to change was Mr Sinclair's size." "He was actually quite small and his wife was huge." "So when Connie and I wrote the series, we made Basil's fear of Sybil his single strongest motivation, much more important than his bad temper or his snobbery or his rudeness." "To illustrate that, one of my favourite sequences is when an attractive Australian girl, played by Luan Peters..." "Oh, you know." "Here we are, this is your room." "I hope it's to your liking." "A view of the English Riviera, down there behind the trees." "This is your bathroom, here we are." "Oh, the light's not working. I'll just fix it." "Have you..." "Have you had a tiring journey?" "Uh...seven hours in the coach." "is the dining room still open?" "The chef leaves at nine, I'm afraid." "We could always do you sandwiches." "I'd like a hot meal, really." "is there a restaurant near here?" "There's a good little Welsh place, Leek House, about five minutes' walk." " You'd have to go straightaway." " That'll do fine." "Just turn left out of the gate and straight on and it's on your right." "You left this downstairs." "Tell her I was doing the switch." "Sybil." "Sybil." "What I love about Basil is the sheer speed with which he comes up with excuses." "Unfortunately, they're always bad excuses but that's because Sybil causes him to panic." "So watch what happens a moment later when Basil comes back to apologise to the girl." "Erm...excuse me. I do apologise, but I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to..." "(Knock at door)" "Come in." "Sorry to bother you. I thought I'd better apologise for my husband's behaviour." "No, please, really, Mrs Fawlty." "He's going through rather a disturbed time at the moment." "I don't quite understand, he does seem a bit worked up about something." "I'm sure there's some innocent explanation." "Basil?" "Hello, dear." "Just checking the doors." "All right, what's going on?" "I was in the bathroom." "Yes, she was, dear." "So I just popped in to have a look at these hinges..." "Do you really imagine, even in your wildest dreams, that a girl like this could possibly be interested in an ageing, Brilliantine stick insect like you?" "Thank you." "People used to ask me if I enjoyed making Fawlty Towers." "I used to tell them there wasn't time to enjoy it." "The average BBC sitcom, 30 minutes long, a script is about 65 pages." "Fawlty Towers' scripts used to be 1 40 pages." "We did twice as many pages as the average sitcom." "An average sitcom would have 200 camera cuts, we used to do over 500." "So it was an incredible amount to learn in four days' rehearsal and then one day in the studio practising with the cameras." "During the whole of Fawlty Towers, all 1 2 shows, we never completed a single dress rehearsal." "So the only reason that it looks as good as it does, is that we used to spend an extraordinary amount of time editing it, just taking out a little pause there and a line there, and just making it quicker and sharper." "I want to show you an example of that." "It also happens to be my favourite moment in the whole series." "This might surprise you." "It's the fire drill." "And the reason for me is that there's always been something ridiculous about staging a fire drill exactly when everyone knows it's going to happen." "And then Connie and I added an extra idea." "That is that the burglar alarm on the safe goes off by accident just before the drill is due to begin." "..so she has to come along and move the damn thing... (Alarm rings)" "What's she put that on..." "I might have guessed." "Sorry, Major." "Only the burglar alarm." "Sorry." "What?" "Sorry, Miss Tibbs." "That was the burglar alarm." "The fire drill's not for a couple of minutes." " Burglars, Fawlty?" " No, my wife left the..." "Excuse me." " Yes?" " Sorry, that wasn't the fire bell, just the..." " l thought there was a drill." " There is, at 1 2 o'clock." "Not yet." " But it is 1 2 o'clock." " Not quite." "Thank you." "Excuse me." " Yes?" " Well, I make it 1 2 o'clock." " That wasn't..." " What time do you make it, Major?" "Burglars about, I think." "It doesn't matter what time he makes it, it hasn't started yet." " What?" " lt hasn't started yet." " But that was the bell, wasn't it?" " No." "He means the drill hasn't started yet." "We didn't hear a drill." "No, no, look..." "That was the burglar alarm." " See?" " The burglar alarm?" " Yes." " Are there burglars?" " Evidently." " What's the matter with you?" "It's simple." "We have the fire drill when I ring the fire bell." "That wasn't the fire bell, right?" "How are we supposed to know it wasn't the fire bell?" "It doesn't sound like the fire bell." " lt did." " lt didn't." " lt did." " No, it didn't." "The fire bell is a different..." " lt's a semitone higher." " A semitone?" "At least." "Anyway, the fire drill doesn't start till 1 2 o'clock." "It is 1 2 o'clock." "Well, it is now, because we've been standing about arguing about it." "Look, how on earth can you expect us to tell which bell is which?" " Oh." " We haven't heard them yet, have we?" "You want to hear them?" "Suits me." "Here's the burglar alarm." " (Alarm rings)" " Oughtn't we catch them?" " There aren't any." " Then why does the alarm keep going?" "Got that?" "Right." "What's happening now?" "Now, here's the fire bell, right?" "It's a completely different sound, listen." "(Alarm rings)" " Well, where are you going?" " There's a drill, isn't there?" "No, no, no." "This is so you can hear the bell so you know the moment when I ring the bell." "What are you doing?" "Will you come back." "We're going outside." "Don't listen to it, you old fool." "Listen to it." "Fire, fire, everybody out." "No." " Will you shut up?" " ls fire." "is not fire, is only bell." " Where are you going?" " Upstairs." "There isn't a drill yet, I'm just showing them what the bell sounds like." " Go in there, go help Chef." " Chef not here." " Go and start the chips." " Chips?" "When bell go again, stay." "No fire, only practice." "Tell him, Polly." "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen." "Thank you so much." " Perhaps they're upstairs?" " What's happening now?" " Now..." " (Phone rings)" "(Screams down phone)" "Now, are we all agreed on what the fire bell sounds like?" "Yes." "Splendid." "Now that's settled, we'll have the fire drill, which will commence in exactly 30 seconds from now." "Thank you so much." "What are you doing?" "I mean, are you just going to stand there?" "What do you suggest?" "Couldn't one or two of you go in the bar or in the dining room?" "Use your imagination." " Why?" " Well, this is supposed to be a fire drill." "There's only a few seconds." "Right, stay where you are." "Obviously, if there was a fire, you'd all be standing down here like this in the lobby." "I don't know why we bother." "We should let you all burn." "Finally, I just want to tell you how accurate our portrayal of Mr Sinclair was." "Ten years after Fawlty Towers was first transmitted, I finally let slip to an English journalist that it was based on this real hotel," "Gleneagles in Torquay." "Within the week, the Daily Mail had tracked the poor man down to his retirement home in Miami and he, of course, wouldn't speak to them." "But they persuaded his daughter, who'd never seen the series, to watch two episodes." "After she'd watched them, she just said," ""That's Dad."" "(Laughter)" "About six or seven years ago, Mrs Sinclair, by now, sadly, a widow, was interviewed by a national newspaper and she finally spoke out." ""The portrayal of my husband was a travesty," she said." ""He was a perfect English gentleman and a war hero and ran the hotel very efficiently." "He was nothing like Basil Fawlty at all."" "The next day, the letters started pouring into the newspaper, not just from former guests but the Sinclairs' old employees, each letter saying, "No, no, he was exactly like that."" "So almost everything that you know me from that I performed, I either wrote myself or with someone." "I wrote Fawlty Towers with Connie, and a lot of other things with Graham Chapman." "So it was a terrible shock when I heard the news that Graham was in hospital, dying very bravely from cancer of the throat, caused by many years of smoking that wretched pipe of his." "He and I had written, on and off, for 25 years." "We were friends rather than intimates, and, as with my mother, we were closest when we laughed." "He was a talented chap, and a strange man, making an extraordinary chap-man." "He was funny, he was eccentric and he was extremely lazy." "When I was working with Graham, there were two kinds of days - the days when I did 80 per cent of the work and the days when Graham did five per cent of it." "He did have one uncanny ability." "If Graham laughed, it meant that the audience was going to laugh." "He was never wrong." "He was the greatest sounding board that I've ever come across." "He was also famously unpunctual." "At Gra's memorial service," "Michael Palin told how he would drive to Graham's house every morning to give him a lift to rehearsal, because Gra didn't drive in those days." "And Michael would arrive and walk up the garden path, and press the front door bell." "And wait and wait, and then press the bell again and wait." "Eventually, the bedroom window two storeys up would open, and the head of a young Chinese boy would look out and disappear, and the head of a young Indian boy would look out, and then the head of a young Malaysian boy would look out..." "Eventually, Graham would look out and say, "Sorry, Mikey, overslept." "Down in a moment."" "Michael would go back down the path, get into the car and do the Times crossword for 35 minutes, and then Graham would appear, get into the car - always without a word of apology." "And off they would go to rehearsal." "When Michael was speaking at Gra's memorial service, he said, "Although Graham died three months ago, I like to feel that he is here with us now..." "..at this very moment." "Or, at least, he will be in about 35..."" "What a great joke." "And, of course, I had to speak too." "But I just couldn't figure out what I was going to say." "The night before, I was sitting at my desk, sweating blood, and I could not get an idea." "So I conjured up the spirit of Graham as my muse." "And he began to remind me of certain incidents." "For example, when Python started, we began to get invited for the very first time to these rather posh BBC cocktail parties." "And Graham would arrive at these parties for once on time, and always looking very smart, because he was six-foot-four-inches tall." "He always wore a beautiful suit, because he was a doctor, so he had to have a nice suit and a fob watch." "He looked very impressive." "After about ten minutes, I'd look round the room for him." "I couldn't see him anywhere." "And then I saw people going, "Ohh."" "And "Yeaugh."" "And if you looked through the forest of legs, you could see Graham crawling along on all fours, biting people's ankles." "Aargh." "But it was all right, because he was a fully-qualified doctor." "On another occasion, he was asked to speak at the Oxford Union." "I don't know if you know what they're like." "Oh, God, they wear black tie and they put their thumbs in their waistcoat pockets and they pontificate." "The debate was about nuclear disarmament." "And Dr Chapman turned up dressed as a carrot." "(Laughter)" "He'd found this wonderful bright orange carrot costume that covered him right like this, and then a little green sprig hat which he wore." "All the speakers were supposed to speak for 1 2 minutes." "When it came time for Graham's turn, he stood up..." "..and refused to say a word." "And after a time, people started shouting at him." "But he just stood there for 1 2 minutes, absolutely silent." "And then sat down again, thrilled that he'd ruined the debate." "As Graham's spirit reminded me of these splendid moments, I realised that what Graham really loved best was bad behaviour on formal occasions." "So when I finally got up to speak, I made sure that I did not let the old fella down." "(Laughter)" "Graham Chapman, co-author of the parrot sketch, is no more." "He has ceased to be." "Bereft of life, he rests, in peace." "He's kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, hit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last and gone to meet the great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky." "And I guess that we're all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent and of such capability for kindness," "of such unusual intelligence, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the age of only 48," "before he'd achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he'd had enough fun." "Well, I feel that I should say, "Nonsense"." "Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries."" "And the reason I feel I should say this... ..is he would never forgive me if I didn't, if I threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf." "Anything for him but mindless good taste." "I could hear him whispering in my ear last night as I was writing this," ""All right, Cleese," he was saying, "You're very proud of being the very first person ever to say 'shit' on British television." "If this service is really for me, just for starters, I want you to become the first person ever, at a British memorial service, to say 'fuck'."" "I actually spoke first that morning and 1 1 speakers followed me." "I am proud to be able to report to you that every single one of them said "fuck"." "(Laughter)" "So Graham was the prince of bad taste." "In fact, he embodied everything that was most juvenile and offensive in Monty Python." "Bless him." "Now it was around this time it occurred to me I was the only Python who'd not yet written a film." "Graham had written The Odd Job and Yellowbeard," "Michael Palin had written The Missionary, Terry Gilliam had made Jabberwocky." "So I thought it was time I had a go." "I wanted to work with a wonderful old English film director called Charlie Crichton, who'd made his first film for Ealing Studios in 1 946." "But before that, he'd been a film editor for 1 4 years." "So all the time he was directing actors, he knew up here exactly how he was going to cut the footage together." "And that's why he was so good." "And I'd worked with him on some small projects." "Although he hadn't made a feature film for 21 years, I thought he was wonderful." "I told him I wanted to make a movie with him." "One day, we sat down, I said, "What will our movie be about, Charlie?"" "(Plummy) Charlie had this enormous jaw, he used to talk like that." "He said, "l don't know, do you have any ideas?"" ""l have only one idea, Charlie. I want to have a scene where someone with a terrible stutter is trying to tell somebody something very, very important very urgently, and they can't get a single syllable out."" "And Charlie said, "All right, and I want to run someone over with a steam roller."" "(Laughter)" "So from this rather thin start, two-and-a-half years later, we produced A Fish Called Wanda." "I have to tell you, I rewrote it 1 3 times." "That took a pretty long time." "About four months before we started to shoot," "Kevin and Jamie both happened to be in London, by coincidence, at the same time." "So I invited them over to our house along with Charlie and Michael and we had a read-through of the script." "And an odd thing happened, which was that Jamie's part worked straightaway." "She just nailed it immediately." "Kevin's part worked because he and I had worked about a month before for two whole weeks and he'd improvised all sorts of stuff like..." "Remember sniffing under the armpit?" "I put that in the script." "Michael's part worked because Michael's dad had had a terrible stutter." "So he had kind of studied having a terrible stutter all his life." "And my part... didn't work." "And it was embarrassing and very anxious-making." "But they were all very sweet." "They said, "You're just pushing too hard." "Don't force it." "Just make your character a little bit more real."" "And one of them said, "Put a little bit more of yourself in it."" "And I'd never done anything like that before, so I said, "All right, I'll give it a whirl."" "And I want to show you now the scene that's the most personal thing I've ever written." "It's where Archie tells Wanda about what it's like to be English." "Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like being English?" "Being so correct all the time, being so... stifled by this dread of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone, "Are you married?" and hearing "My wife left me this morning"." "Or saying, "Do you have children?"" "And being told they all burned to death on Wednesday." "You see, Wanda, we're all...terrified of embarrassment." "That's why we're so... dead." "Most of my friends are dead, you know." "We have these piles of corpses to dinner." "But you're alive, God bless you, and I want to be. I'm so fed up with all this." "Thank you." "Talking about Weston, I talked about the fear of embarrassment." "The English, my generation, anyway, they were terrified of being embarrassed." "It meant that they were always sort of holding back, making sure they didn't say something foolish or wrong." "That just meant they didn't have as much fun as they might." "The problem with film comedy is this:" "If I'm playing a scene with Michael Palin up here, and you give us a big laugh, we just improvise something for a moment so that the laugh can peak and come down and you can hear the dialogue." "We take our timing off you, you see." "You can't do that in movies." "You have to rely on these test screenings." "And that's how you find out how funny the audience thinks each individual scene is." "And after 40 years of doing comedy, I kind of know that an audience will think something's funny, but I really don't know if they'll think it's a bit funny or a lot funny." "One evening, after we'd finished shooting Wanda, I went to see rushes - all the film from the previous day, completely uncut, nobody's seen it." "I have never been so happy in my chosen career as a comic." "Because the stuff up on the screen was unbelievably funny and it was Michael Palin with the chips up his nose." "I said to Charlie Crichton, "This is the funniest thing I've ever been connected with."" "I went home on a high." "Later on, we finished shooting, we started editing the movie." "We got to this scene, we edited it together, we thought it was unbelievably funny." "We showed it to an audience..." "and they didn't laugh." "We thought, "What is going on?"" "Eventually, we got a focus group." "We said to the focus group, "We think this scene is hilarious." "What is the reason you're not laughing?"" "And they said, "Oh."" "They said, "We're worried that Michael Palin can't breathe."" "I said, "What?" "It's a movie." "At the end of the take, we take the apple out and the chips and Michael can breathe." "When he's got his breath back and he wants to do it again, we put the apple back in and give him a nice clean pair of chips and off we go again." "What do you mean, he can't breathe?"" "They said, "Well, obviously he's a very nice guy." "We don't like the fact he's so uncomfortable."" "I said, "Wait - he's a really nice guy?" "Oh, yes."" "I said, "He's just spent the previous hour and a half trying to kill an old woman."" "And they said, "Oh, yeah, but she wasn't a very nice old woman."" "You see, that's partly the problem of using Palin." "He's so nice, isn't he?" "Isn't he nice?" "If he played Hitler in a movie, we'd all finish up supporting the Nazis." "The other big problem was the killing of the dogs." "I was very scared about that." "I didn't know whether the audience would take it." "But when we showed the movie for the first time in New York, I went backstage afterwards to meet some of the audience." "The first person I saw was this tiny old New York lady, about 80 years old." "She saw me and her eyes tightened." "And her mouth tightened and she walked across the room." "She said, "Why didn't you kill more dogs?"" "Let's kill some dogs, shall we?" "(Dog snarling)" "(yapping)" "Now...kill." "(Tyres screech)" "(Rumbling)" "Oh, God." "Thank you." "It took me about two screenings to work out why the audience didn't mind us killing those dogs." "It was, of course, because the dogs were Yorkshire terriers." "Everybody knows they're not proper dogs." "They're stupid little yapping, hairy fucking mosquitoes." "We should put the lot of them in the microwave." "If those had been German shepherds up there, I would not be here to tell you the tale." "And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes the night's performance." "Thank you for being the nicest Saturday night audience we've had all week." " Thank you." " (Cheering)" "Hello, up at the top." "Thank you." "♪ Monty Python theme tune"