It made my life hell, but I still love Python’s Brian
WHAT has monty Python’s Life Of Brian ever done for me? Nothing much, apart from delight, amuse and torment me. Torment, because by November 1979, when it was released in the UK, the Brian the Snail gags at school had finally dried up.
if you’re old enough, you’ll recall Brian the Snail as an impressionable mollusc on The magic Roundabout, a popular children’s TV programme which began in 1965, when i was three. For years i was teased accordingly, but by the time i was 17 i had at last got the wretched snail off my back.
Then the monty Python team, already celebrated for their madcap BBC TV series, went and made a film about an ordinary man in the Galilee area widely mistaken for the son of God. For some reason, they called him Brian.
Suddenly, my name became the object of laughter again. One day, even a teacher, echoing Brian’s mother (shriekingly played by Terry Jones), told me i wasn’t the messiah, i was a very naughty boy.
Still, the ribbing was a fair price to pay for the actual pleasure of seeing Life Of Brian. i adored it when i first saw it in march 1980, according to the Letts Schoolboy diaries i still have chronicling the, well, you know what.
Not everyone shared my enthusiasm. in the U.S., where the film had been out since August, there were marches, protests and sit-ins. Across the country, and particularly in the so- called Bible Belt, many cinema managers refused to show it for fear of violent reprisals.
in Britain, chief film censor James Ferman took a boldly liberal view, suggesting ‘Brian could not reasonably be taken to be AND a caricature of Jesus Christ’. THAT’S the point the Pythons themselves laboured again and again; Christ is represented respectfully in the movie. Brian is somebody else altogether, a victim of mistaken identity. They weren’t satirising Christ, they said, but the zealotry he inspired among his followers.
Fittingly, that did nothing to dampen the zeal of Life Of Brian’s critics. They were enraged by the concluding crucifixion scene, and the jaunty song Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, which they said mocked Christ’s suffering.
They even hated michael Palin’s parody of Pontius Pilate, who couldn’t pronounce his Rs. ‘i’ve had enough of this wowdy webel sniggewing . . . call yourself Pwaetowian guards!’
Ferman sided firmly with the Pythons, adding that ‘a faith which could be shaken by such good-humoured ribaldry would
be a very precarious faith indeed’. He recommended an AA rating, meaning anyone over 14 could see the film, unaccompanied.
Nonetheless, district councils made up their own minds. Some, influenced by morality campaigner mary Whitehouse, slapped an adults-only X-rating on Life Of Brian.
Hereford and Harrogate said no altogether. most councillors who vetoed it, hadn’t seen it. One of them explained that he ‘didn’t need to see a pig-sty to know that it stinks’.
The Association of District Councils of Cornwall banned it from the entire county.
The most infamous denunciation of Life Of Brian came from the veteran TV presenter and born-again Christian malcolm muggeridge, in a televised debate between him and the Bishop of Southwark on one side, and Palin and John Cleese on the other. Readily available on YouTube, the confrontation remains one of TV’s most cherished ding-dongs.
So how had the subject of this tremendous hoo-hah actually come about?
Life Of Brian had, if not a miraculous conception, certainly an exact one. in April 1975, at the New York opening of monty Python And The Holy Grail, a journalist asked eric idle what the team’s next film would be. ‘Jesus Christ, Lust For Glory,’ he replied.
it was an edgy, off-the-cuff joke, yet it took root. Soon, idle and the other Pythons — Jones, Palin, Cleese, Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam — were working out how they might lampoon religion without ridiculing Christ.
The answer was to send the Three Wise men to pay homage, by accident, to the occupant of the manger next door. And what better comedy name for this Jesus surrogate than Brian? That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. At the time, i’d have favoured Kevin.
emi agreed to finance the project. Sets were built in Tunisia, using the same locations director Franco Zeffirelli had chosen for his epic TV series Jesus Of Nazareth a year or two earlier. ‘All those Arab extras were quite used to coming along and playing Jews for a day and a BUT half,’ Palin later recalled. then, disaster struck like a biblical thunderbolt. emi chairman Bernard Delfont, whose brother Lew Grade had produced Jesus Of Nazareth, read the script and thought it offensive to Christianity and Judaism alike. emi hastily withdrew and the film looked doomed, until idle had the bright idea of approaching his friend, ex-Beatle George Harrison.
Harrison loved Python humour. it tickled him that the Pythons formed just as The Beatles split up, because he felt they had somehow absorbed the band’s iconoclastic spirit.
Harrison assured idle he would find the money (almost £5 million) which he did by ‘pawning my house and the office to get a bank loan’. He called his new company Handmade Films, and it went on to produce some of the most memorable British pictures of the next decade, including The Long Good Friday and the cult classic Withnail And i.
Production finally began in September 1978, with Chapman in the title role. Cleese had wanted to play Brian but the others told him he’d be funnier
in a multitude of parts, including the Judean freedom-fighter who keeps being forced to readjust his furious grievance with the occupation forces, until finally he cries ‘all right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health … what have the Romans ever done for us?’
That is one of many classic moments in Life Of Brian, which was directed by Jones, now sadly stricken with dementia. The Pythons didn’t recognise it at the time but all came to realise it was their masterpiece, starting with Gilliam’s animated opening-credits sequence, which looks spectacular even now. They have fond memories, even, of the way all hell broke loose when it finally reached cinemas.
After all, then as now, there was no such thing as bad publicity. As a result of the ban in Cornwall, people flocked across the Tamar to see it in Devon. In Exeter it did terrific business for weeks. As for Life Of Brian’s 40th anniversary revival this week — brilliantly advertised on posters as a ‘we-welease’ — it’s hard to imagine it provoking any righteous spluttering at all.
For better or worse, times have changed. And I’ve changed, too, in 40 years. Now, I couldn’t be prouder to share my name with a film regularly cited as one of the greatest comedies of all time.
MONTY Python’s Life Of Brian was re-released yesterday.