Library reveals treasure trove of full Monty
It is hard to imagine how a movie about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table filmed in the damp landscape of western Scotland could include a scene set in a Wild West saloon.
Yet buried and forgotten in Michael Palin’s archive, in a file marked ‘‘unused material’’ for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is just such a sketch.
A parched man stumbles out of the desert, desperate for a beer in the scorching heat, only to hear that they do not serve drinks because it is actually a bookshop. ‘‘The last bookshop before you get to Mexico,’’ the man behind the counter drawls proudly.
This sketch, published for the first time yesterday in The Times, is part of a trove of documents created by Palin and his fellow Monty Python writers that shows the group’s working methods, their occasional quarrels and the often risque nature of their raw material.
Last year Palin, 75, handed over his private archive to the British Library, which is cataloguing the documents covering his life and work from 1965 to 1987 before making them available to library users. Fans will also be able to see a small selection at the library’s Treasures gallery from next week. The incongruity of the Wild West sketch shows how little conception the comedy group had of how their first film would look when they began writing it in 1973. The sketch’s title appears on a pair of handwritten documents from March of that year under the heading ‘‘film list’’. A polished version was typed out but was unused.
Palin said that he had little memory of the sketch, although he knew it was written mostly by Terry Jones, his writing partner in the group, whose other members were John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam.
Early drafts for the 1975 film featured extensive material set in the present day that was later cut, including a sequence with the Shakespearean character Hamlet, who has abandoned life as a Danish prince to take up a career as a particularly foul-mouthed private detective.
Jones has dementia and was unable to comment but his family has approved publication of the sketch.
Alison Telfer, who was married to Jones when he wrote the sketches, said: ‘‘It would be nice if they saw the light of day.’’
Palin said that the group liked to produce an excess of material before winnowing it down. ‘‘We did produce an awful lot of material when we were on song,’’ he said.
‘‘Sometimes you have things like that. I can’t think why it wasn’t used. The Holy Grail took shape gradually and at the beginning it had far more ideas in it than ended up on screen because you had to have a narrative. In the end the story of the knights was strong enough.’’
The archive also contains numerous boxes devoted to their 1979 film Life of Brian, including a handwritten sketch that would have given ammunition to those seeking to have the Pythons’ film banned. –