"For those of you who may have just missed Monty Python's Flying Circus, here it is again." "Up there!" "Up there!" "I just think the fact that six people got together and did what they wanted and really were working purely for the quality of what we were doing..." "Oh!" "Our only aim was to be as funny as we could possibly be." "It was as simple as that." "We just wanted to make people laugh as much as we could" " FORCE them to!" "This is the story of Monty Python's Flying Circus." "Though it ran for only four series at a variety of times in the early '70s, its influence on TV's comic landscape can't be measured." "Imagine an era when dead parrots, cheese shops and nudge nudge, wink wink weren't part of the English comedy language." "Know what I mean?" "Say no more." "Know what I mean?" "I beg your pardon?" "To understand how it all happened, we have to go back to the early '60s, the height of the satire boom, when Michael Palin and Terry Jones met at Oxford University and John Cleese and Graham Chapman" "had become friends in the Cambridge Footlights." "We were starting from scratch." "I mean I hadn't the slightest idea when I was at Cambridge that I would go into this business because there was no tradition of that in those days." "I thought I'd become a lawyer." "So when I started out I was incredibly naive." "Avoiding getting a proper job led John and Graham to the States in 1965 with the Footlights Cambridge Circus." "In New York, John met Terry Gilliam, an editor on Help!" "magazine." "We did fumetti, which were like comic strips but with real actors." "You have a photo shoot in which you play a character and there's a story." "But the dialogue is all done in speech balloons." "It was about a man who fell in love with his daughter's Barbie doll and consummated the relationship." "So we became friends at that point." "When I went back to England, he had my number and he contacted me when he got to London, and I think I was instrumental in introducing him to some of the other guys." "# He's a real nowhere man... #" "At Oxford, Michael Palin's comic flair led to an invitation to join one of the university's Edinburgh Festival shows with Terry Jones, where the two were spotted by David Frost on a talent scouting mission." "Michael Palin also picked up a presenting gig on the ITV pop show Now!" "The great thing about Now!" "was that it paid me a lot of money, it was £35 for one day's work." "£35 then were a lot of money." "And that enabled me to actually write scripts with Terry for The Frost Report, which paid absolute peanuts." "Palin and his new writing partner Terry Jones found themselves in good company competing for peanuts." "Helping to pop witticisms into the star's ever-welcoming mouth were such wags as Marty Feldman, Barry Cryer and Eric Idle, not to mention Graham Chapman and John Cleese." "If I had to kind of date a moment when it began to come together," "I would probably say it was 1966." "March." "When we all sat down in a room somewhere in the Baker Street area to talk about writing The Frost Report." "The Frost Report was a weekly satirical look at the state of the nation, a bit like Panorama only with John Cleese and the Two Ronnies in place of Richard Dimbleby." "Eric Idle was the latest addition to the stable of writers." "Frosty came up and said, "I'll give you 10 guineas a minute."" "That was the big time for me." "I was 23, I was writing The Frost Report, the biggest show on British TV at the time." "John was of course in it." "Yes, I see what you mean." "Interesting, isn't it?" "Yes, indeed." "Hmm." "Very interesting." "What?" "What's interesting?" "Nothing to worry about. .." "So you think...?" "Hmm." "Yeah. ..." "Tell me..." "MICHAEL:" "I'd heard about this rather legendary character called John Cleese, and then on The Frost Report I met John for the first time." "He was a pretty sort of awesome figure, really." "Very tall and seemed very confident and strode around much more slowly than everybody else." "So it gave the effect of us scurrying along behind this man who had these great, long, loping strides." "The Frost Report would be a breeding ground for all manner of exotic new TV comedy, like At Last The 1948 Show, where Cleese and Chapman performed with Marty Feldman, future Goody Tim Brooke-Taylor, and the lovely Amy McDonald." "Cake!" "Do what, darling?" "Get into the cake!" "Ooh!" "JOHN:" "And when Graham and Tim and I and Marty got together for the 1948 Show, we were already doing something that was less conventional than the Frost Report." "It was already a little bit stranger and a little bit weirder and we weren't ending sketches in such a conventional way." "So we were beginning to move on." "House!" "Well, when I said house, I mean t'were on an 'ole in t'ground covered by a couple of foot of torn canvas." "But it were house to us!" "We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground." "We had to live in the lake." "And then when Mike and Terry and the others started doing Do Not Adjust Your Set, then they were doing more of that kind of stuff and we were moving into what I call wilder comedy." "Do Not Adjust Your Set's creator, Humphrey Barclay, who had also produced Cambridge Circus, recruited Eric Idle, who brought along Michael Palin and Terry Jones." "The choice of musicians was pretty wild too, considering this was a children's show - the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, fronted by Neil Innes and Viv Stanshall, proved oddly inspirational." "You're wanted in the Twilight Zone now, sir." "Thank you, Rigor." "MUSIC: "Beautiful Zelda" by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band" "# She's broken all the super hearts... #" "ERIC:" "We were very Cambridge Footlighty." "We did smart sketches, tight, funny, witty things." "And I think they had a tremendous influence on us subconsciously, and when Terry Gilliam came along and joined Do Not Adjust Your Set, he was sent along by John Cleese." "After hitchhiking round Europe," "Terry Gilliam made use of the contact numbers John Cleese had given him." "Arriving in London, he demonstrated his unique visual and graphic skills to producer Humphrey Barclay, who used him on Do Not Adjust Your Set." "The brash American wasn't universally welcomed by the young gentlemen." "Even though Mike and Terry felt I was invading their territory," "Eric I think was fascinated by my sheepskin coat." "I immediately liked the afghan coat and he had a very cute girlfriend, so I said, "You should let us..." "he's very..." "I don't know why..." ""I just thought he should join us."" "With Terry Gilliam providing offbeat animations for Do Not Adjust Your Set, a proto-Python gang of four found a home at teatime on ITV." "After At Last The 1948 Show," "Cleese and Chapman moved on to It's Marty, then helped the future Goodies with Broaden Your Mind." "Cleese then invited Palin to join him on How To irritate People, but it was after seeing Palin and Jones' next collaboration that Cleese got back in touch." "My name is Thomas and I make wheels." "And I'm therefore known as Thomas the wheelwright..." "John rang me up and said," ""I've seen your Complete And Utter History Of Britain and you obviously won't be doing any more of those." "Why don't we try and do something together?"" "Cleese was the great whore." "He'd go around with everybody..." "but he was also the big attractor." "The BBC certainly found Cleese attractive and wanted to keep him on their books." "Palin was keen to work with him too, but was waiting for the word from ITV to start on a new show with the Do Not Adjust set." "But the word was that they couldn't start for 18 months, so when Cleese called again, TV history was in the making." "It was really a collapsing of the 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Set into one show." "And the BBC said, "Well, we can do it right away."" "So we said, "We'll do this one first, then we'll go and do our one for ITV."" "And of course..." "we never got to do that one." "So by 1969, the gang of six were all here, agreed on one manifesto - to make everyone, especially themselves, laugh as much as possible." "But where were they going to go looking for the laughs?" "I think we knew that we did not want to do political contemporary satire." "We were the first generation of the children of television, and so naturally you see..." "the way we look at things is always through the eyes of television." "We'd sort of been encouraged by, of course, the great eminence grise of Python which was Spike Milligan." "Spike had done a series called Q5 just before," "I think 1958, early '69, and we'd loved the free form of that." "Good evening." "And..." "# Pi-om...bah-bah bom... #" "Puzzled?" "Let me explain." "Not only were we the first children of television but our childhood was radio." "So that gave us all these surreal images of the radio comedies which were so great which allowed the mind to go off in all sorts of different weird directions." "I think you can trace that through Python too." "And..." "GUNSHOT ...they're off!" "Practically we poached Spike's producer, Ian McNaughton, and in terms of inspiration, we looked to a show which would be a kind of stream of consciousness." "I remember this was discussed very early on." "And the team was working in a very different BBC." "In the 1960s, the Director General, Sir Hugh Carlton Greene, encouraged a hands-off approach and creative people were left very much to their own devices." "Ah, such an unsophisticated time!" "The two people most responsible for bringing it on air are sadly no longer with us." "One was Michael Mills, who was head of comedy at the time, and the other was Barry Took." "I was incredibly impressed with the risks they'd take." "We went in to see Michael" " Michael Mills - and we explained extremely inadequately what we had in mind." "There were huge gaps absolutely everywhere, and at the end of a thoroughly unsatisfactory meeting from Michael's point of view, he said, "Just go away and make 13."" "The BBC was a much more laidback place." "It was a bit more like a retirement home from the RAF filled with people who are having offices and going off smoking their pipes and having beer." "So they were very laidback about it." "They said, "Look, here we are, we've got 13 of them." "You're on the air in September and see you then."" "And they sort of left, they didn't really care." "It was fabulous." "It was the golden age of executives - there weren't any!" "So the creative climate was just right for the seed of a great comedy to take root and flourish." "All it needed was some glamour." "Coming from series like The Saint and The Avengers," "Carol Cleveland provided the extra ingredient of the phwoar!" "factor." "A REAL woman, not just another Oxbridge chap in drag." "Look, you crumb bum!" "I'm a star!" "Star, star, star!" "'They were looking for someone who was feminine, glamorous,' sexy...but who could also act, be funny, take direction and who wasn't afraid to send herself up." "And they found me." "Oh..." "I've forgotten my lines." "What's her line?" "What's her line?" "'They were all schoolboys, really.'" "And they behaved like schoolboys a lot of the time." "It was all these grown men behaving like schoolboys, laughing at schoolboy jokes." "What's your name?" "Michael." "Michael, do you think you know what a larch tree looks like?" "I want to go home." "Bottom." "They may have seemed like a schoolboy gang sharing the same sense of humour, but when it came to putting it down on paper," "Monty Python split up into several sections." "Terry Jones and myself had written together for four or five years so we wrote together." "John and Graham had a working relationship that stretched right back to university." "Eric wrote on his own..." "and Terry Gilliam on his own." "And those little groups didn't really change." "Eric's written. .." "I've written a sketch..." "And so we'd go away for two or three weeks then we'd get together and we'd read all the material out." "My stuff wasn't so much read out as grunted out." "I'd make some noise and wave my hands and try to explain how...this would go and...this would...and they'd look at me..." "You were better off if you had a partner, he could laugh while you read." "If you were on your own you were fucked." "'But it was very great fun because for the first time, you heard some classic sketches just read over the kitchen table.'" "I want to apologise humbly... deeply...and sincerely... about the fork." "Please, it was only a tiny bit dirty." "Just...couldn't see it." "The meetings were great, because they sometimes got a bit lively when..." "And often it was between John and Terry Jones." "You bastards!" "You vicious, heartless bastards!" "They were almost antithetical, the two of them." "John was at one side of the thing, Terry's at the other." "And the rest of us would watch the battle ensue." "Agh!" "Terry and I would very frequently lock horns and then the others could jump on one side or the other and a good decision would be made." "Lucky we didn't say anything about the dirty knife!" "How about that punchline, eh?" "Ooh, you know what I mean?" "Ho-ho!" "Really!" "So how did the BBC react to a sketch show whose punchlines were often ABOUT the punchlines at a time when postmodernism was still in short trousers?" "We felt here was something totally new, totally different, and we also wondered at the same time how long it would last." "It was mixed in the beginning, but by the end of the first series, definitely we knew..." "we had a following." "It had a fine distinction between something that would be a cult and something that would be funny." "The fact that it was quite often both enhanced it greatly." "Today we look at a vanishing race..." "But the Pythons didn't want cult appeal, they wanted mainstream appeal, and as the children of TV, they knew scheduling was crucial if they were to be seen by large-scale audiences." "They live in a sunshine paradise, the Caribbean dream where only reality is missing..." "The Pythons were difficult because they were unhappy about the way they were scheduled at 10.15 on a Tuesday evening." "And they made their displeasure known." "If things that were of great national importance, such as The Horse Of The Year Show... were on, Python would somehow be kicked off that week." "And now it's Mrs David Barker riding Atalanta, number 3..." "And there's a sketch we did about Horse Of The Year Show and actually..." "Paul Fox was in the show." "I can't imagine anybody else putting one of the highest members of the BBC staff in a show, just because they had some axe to grind over scheduling." "One of our most popular programmes." "That's what you think, Mr Fox!" "They understood what scheduling was about, they understood what television was about, and they wanted to be seen at a time when the whole nation could see them, not just part of the nation." "Oh, sooper!" "What fun!" "The Pythons were passionate about breaking new ground and pushing the comedic envelope, violently if necessary." "Of course, it led to trouble." "Censors don't bother if they think nobody's watching." "As soon as we got decent viewing figures, and Python became successful and had, you know, come second in the Golden Rose, then the BBC began to have a look at it." "What did cause the occasional moment of... to pause about the effect we were having were Terry Gilliam's cartoons." "All right, Terry Gilliam's animations were violent, but I personally like violence in comedy." "I think there should be much more violence in comedy, it ought to be much more dangerous and more people should be killed." "I think the last series, when people were getting a bit desperate, there was an attempt to write more shocking material." "Probably the most shocking material is the undertaker sketch." "But they didn't stop that." "Morning." "Ah, good morning." "What can I do for you, squire?" "I wonder if you can help me." "You see, my mother's just died." "Oh, yeah, we can help you." "We deal with stiffs." "What?" "JOHN CLEESE: 'The undertaker sketch was a very naughty one.'" "We were coming to the end of the series and said," ""Let's write a naughty sketch." We thought," ""What would be the naughtiest sketch you could do?"" "Something about eating your mother seemed to be fairly near the edge." "Are you suggesting..." "eating my mother?" "!" "Um yeah." "Not raw!" "Cooked." "What?" "!" "You could hear all these different reactions, but a lot of, "Oh!" "OH!" "Oh!" going on." "Well, I do feel a bit peckish." "Great!" "Can we have some parsnips?" "I thought the BBC were terrific because the BBC could easily have said, "No way!" "We can't let this..."" "What they said was, "Well, we have to kind of show at the end that...that there's some sort of disapproval."" "I really don't think I should." "Look, tell you what." "We'll eat her." "If you feel a bit guilty about it afterwards, we can dig a grave and you can throw up in it." "Oh!" "Stop it!" "'So long as the people are talented, the BBC can cope with talented people,' even if they're difficult." "There's no doubt the Pythons were difficult." "After two series and 26 episodes, coming up with something completely different was getting harder all the time." "John Cleese, who had been working in TV sketch comedy for ten years, was starting to feel the strain, though he was persuaded to stay for the third series." "I thought we were beginning to repeat ourselves." "I thought we were doing variations or combinations or permutations of sketches that we'd already done." "Mr Ted Johnson of the NED..." "'And in a way, just as important was the fact that I was the one writing with Graham and at that point Graham was a fully fledged alcoholic." "Graham often couldn't remember in the afternoon what we'd written in the morning.'" "I felt, "I just don't need to do this any more", and I remember saying to them," ""I said let's do a series together, I didn't say we'd get married."" "So with Cleese divorcing himself from the rest of the group, there were five Pythons writing the fourth series." "But could they manage the full 13 episodes?" "It seemed to me that without John, there was not just a talent, but there was a tension missing in the creative process." "So we stopped, we didn't do any more." "We said, that's it." "Six was enough." "That was good because then we slipped into the movies." "Though the Flying Circus was now defunct, an ex-TV programme, the Python brand continued to plant a big foot in other media like books and records." "But its greatest impact - apart from nerds doing Python at work - was in movies." "In Monty Python And The Holy Grail," "Jones and Gilliam made their directing debut." "Well, it's a dogsbody job, actually, directing." "It's a..." "You've got to organise things, work out what you're doing in the morning, and it's a thankless task." "We were constantly complaining about the lack of aesthetic quality on the BBC shows, so when we were in a position to direct Holy Grail,. we had the money," "Terry and I said, "Anybody named Terry gets to direct this film", and off we went." "Now, look here, my good man!" "I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal!" "I fart in your general direction!" "After leaving the show, John Cleese wrote something completely different with his then wife Connie Booth, a perfectly constructed sitcom about a hotel manager." "With former Python director John Howard Davies also involved, it would become a legend in its very short lifetime." "Any messages?" "Three, I think." "Three!" "Everybody wants you, don't they?" "!" "I wouldn't say that!" "Oh, you're only single once!" "BASIL:" "Twice can be arranged!" "What, Basil?" "Nothing, my dear!" "We got enough bananas this week, dear?" "Fawlty Towers was all about storytelling." "The humour was quite different." "The humour was humour of character, and humour of plot, but not really humour of ideas." "It was the most wonderful series to work on." "It was so funny, from day one." "And I looked forward to it every day of my life." "In 1975, Eric Idle was given a corner of a small BBC weather studio to make his own series in." "There was just enough room for one man and a Bonzo Dog." "We did this thing called Rutland Weekend Television, which was a parody of a TV station." "The smallest county in England." "But it was fun." "We did a lot of very strange things with Neil Innes." "Um, hello." "Um, um, um..." "NEXT!" "Oh." "I didn't want to be seen to be doing just more of Python." "I needed something that was different." "Tonight, we examine the legend of The Rutles..." "I got the idea of this narrator doing a documentary on The Rutles, the Beatles of Rutland, and I just had this one gag and I remember it's rare in my life I write something that makes me laugh out loud," "it's the gag where the interviewer is talking about The Rutles, and the camera is moving away, just bit by bit, it leaves him on his own." "We examine some of the problems that made them what they are today." "We also ask the question whether these people shouldn't really have been doing something better for their money..." "So when I went to do Saturday Night Live in America, they played that clip, and the response was fantastic!" "They had letters to the Rutles." "And this lead to a full-length film of The Rutles, All You Need Is Cash." "A spoof documentary which Eric proudly claims to be the first mockumentary." "Meanwhile, Michael Palin and Terry Jones were also keen to shed the Python skin, while making the most of the succes it had brought." "At Terry's brother's house, they found inspiration in a schoolboy's adventure book." "MICHAEL:" "We all read the comics of the 1930s, 1940s," "Roy Of The Rovers, escape stories, endless war stories that are ubiquitous after the war, and sending them up somewhat, or doing a little slant on them seemed to be what fitted the bill, and what gave us a distinctive quality," "but we were very conscious of not trying to be Python." "What is that, Tompkinson?" "!" "It's a model icebreaker, sir." "It's a bit big for a model, isn't it?" "It's a full-scale model, sir!" "There was always this feeling, post-Python, that we kept an eye on what everyone else was doing and in one despicable corner of our being, wanted them all to fail." "For some reason!" "It was like a marriage ending!" "You didn't want the partners to go off and find someone else!" "I think there was a sort of sibling rivalry between the Pythons." "I don't think anyone wanted anyone else to fail, but they'd have preferred it if nobody did anything TOO brilliant." "We wanted our friends to be successful, but not overwhelmingly successful." "By now Graham Chapman had a film career, and Terry Gilliam had directed Jabberwocky on the big screen." "But despite all their individual successes, the team were happy to reunite for two more movies, and happier still to cause trouble." "It's so digcusting." "A lot of people go away happy, their faith not touched one jot!" "APPLAUSE" "MICHAEL:" "The Life Of Brian is, I think, my single favourite piece of Python work." "I think that..." "We did what we always hoped we could do." "Which was to change from 30 minutes' TV to a 90-minute movie." "Crucifixion?" "Yes." "Good!" "Out of the door, line on the left, one cross each." "Next!" "Crucifixion?" "Er, no." "Freedom." "What?" "Freedom for me." "They said I hadn't done anything, so I could go free, and live on an island." "Oh, well, that's jolly good!" "Off you go then!" "Only pulling your leg!" "Crucifixion really." "Oh, I see!" "I find Life Of Brian a little didactic and a little hectoring, at times, and it's not my favourite movie, in fact, I'm very fond of The Meaning Of Life, which still looks savage." "And still has things that can make people quite upset." "Even 20 years later!" "Sadly, Graham Chapman's career line stops in 1989, when in the words of his old writing partner John Cleese," "Graham left the building." "The rest have gone on to sustain successful careers as movie stars, directors and TV presenters, the whole media circus." "Not bad for a gang of naughty schoolboys." "With my later films, I don't see many Pythonic connections." "There's always a sense of humour in them - the surrealism is probably similar to my animation." "Some get very jokey." "but ultimately I don't really see the connection." "MICHAEL:" "A director called Clem Valiance said," ""You could be a presenter, and I've got a new project." "Around The World in 80 Days." "Would you present it?" "You're the only man who can do it." I was quite flattered!" "Only later, when stuck on a boat in Madras did I realise" "Alan Whicker, Miles Kington and Noel Edmonds had been asked to do it!" "But what the heck!" "I did it, and that changed everything for me." "For the last 300 years, actually, three years," "I have been adapting the Holy Grail as a Broadway musical." "We just hope to be very, very silly on Broadway." "And John Cleese is the voice of God." "Although the last Basil Fawlty was '79, what, 25 years ago " "I'm still Basil, cos they've repeated that and it goes on." "In America," "I'm much more remembered for Monty Python." "People go crazy about Python who've never even heard of Fawlty Towers." "So in different places, one's known for different things." "And with a whole new generation of fans now enjoying Monty Python's Flying Circus, their surreal comedy lives on." "A unique concoction of laughs, shocks and violence, in which the only expected element is the Spanish Inquisition." "We hung on to any kind of dent we could make in this establishment." "Sometimes it wasn't always funny - it irritated them." "That was fine." "It brought them to life, forced them to come back and react to us, and that was what we wanted." "We stopped doing Python when we reached a point where we didn't feel we were being inventive any more, that we started repeating ourselves." "We stopped." "That doesn't happen very often, and I'm proudest of that!" "There's some great laughs." "I remember Cleese laughing and laughing!" "He'd fall on the floor and laugh if something got him." "He'd just go for hours!" "The best stuff was funny, and had the effect of making people think that the world is kind of - ha!" " in an insane way, OK." "Nobody expects the Spa..." "Oh, bugger."