The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘John was my favourite Python. But that changed’
As the comedian confirms he is cutting the crucifixion from his stage version of Life of Brian, Carol Cleveland, who starred in that scene and many other sketches, talks to Chris Harvey
Carol Cleveland is remembering what it felt like to be crucified in the final scene of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, alongside Graham Chapman’s unwilling messiah. “It wasn’t very comfortable,” says the 81-year-old actress, who is often considered to be the seventh member of the comedy team. “We had these tiny little bicycle saddles. It was pretty hot.”
The scene ends with those on the cross breaking out into the iconic song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. Cleese has confirmed that he has axed it from a new stage version he has been writing, leading to a Twitter spat. The song’s writer, Eric Idle, revealed he has had “nothing at all to do with this production”, adding, “apparently Cleese has cut the song. Of course”. Cleese at first denied the reports, but has now said it would be too predictable, and that “nobody is going to be shocked now – the joke is 40 years old”.
Cleveland thinks it was “a fun way to end the film”. “We oldies are not going to be shocked,” she says. “But I guess there’ll be a lot of people seeing the show who may be too young to have seen the film.” She had been enjoying the idea of the audience singing along at the show’s finale, but isn’t overly disappointed. “I’m looking forward to seeing how [Cleese is] going to end it. Obviously, it’s going to be something completely different.”
Which seems apt as Cleveland has been watching the Pythons create things that are “completely different” for her – and their – entire career, having appeared with the team in all of the original TV series and films. She was also there at the moment that Cleese first had a germ of an idea for his most famous solo project: Fawlty Towers. It was 1970, and the Pythons were filming in Devon, lodged at Torquay’s Gleneagles Hotel, where the manager proved to be barbarously uncivil.
He’d begun by telling Cleveland off for asking for more than four coat hangers (“Other people need them too!”), then exploded at Terry Gilliam for the way he used a single utensil at the dinner table (“You’re in England now sir, and the British use a knife and fork”). Gilliam, Michael Palin and Terry Jones elected to find another hotel. Cleese, though, wanted to stay so he could study the proprietor. Cleveland stayed, too.
Their inhospitable host would become the inspiration for Basil Fawlty in the revered sitcom, which Cleese and his younger daughter, Camilla, are rebooting. The new incarnation, Cleese says, will begin with news of the death of Fawlty’s wife, Sybil. Camilla, he suggests, will play Basil’s illegitimate daughter from an affair with a guest at the hotel; her character has been written as a hotelier running what Cleese has described as a “slightly posh boutique hotel in the Caribbean with a multicultural staff ”.
Cleveland is as intrigued as the rest of us at the notion. “It’ll be interesting to see how John gets round today’s political correctness,” she says as we talk at her home on the south coast of England. The original series included casual violence, racist language and a scene of Cleese goose-stepping, giving a Nazi salute at a German guest.
Updating any old Python properties are fraught with PC dangers. I ask about the “Loretta scene” in Life of Brian in which the “People’s Front of Judea” argue over Idle’s Stan and his desire to be a woman – “From now on I want you all to call me Loretta. I want to have babies.” Palin’s socialist revolutionary decides that they should fight for his right to have babies, as symbolic of their struggle against oppression; Cleese’s character scoffs: “Symbolic of his struggle against reality”.
Cleese has kept the scene in the proposed stage version and said on social media recently “all the actors advised me strongly to cut the Loretta scene. I have, of course, no intention of doing so.”
“I don’t see why it should be cut,” says Cleveland, but she wonders whether Cleese might have second thoughts if it goes down badly with a preview audience: “I guess it would depend on how that goes”.
Is it foolish to revisit the past? Cleveland believes not, explaining that Monty Python has lasted for decades. “People haven’t got tired of it,” she says. “Fawlty Towers was extremely popular. I’m sure it will be a big success.”
It won’t, obviously, have Spanish waiter Manuel, played by Andrew Sachs who died in 2016, nor Prunella Scales, now 90, who played Sybil, nor Cleese’s former wife Connie Booth, who was the waitress and chambermaid, Polly. But could there be room for Cleveland? She says that she’d love to appear in the new show as “a fading Hollywood actress, who was in the area filming” and imagines a woman “who has seen better days but still dresses far too young, in a miniskirt, and is expecting to get the full star treatment”.
In real life, Cleveland is far more low-key, greeting me in a T-shirt and sweatpants, her blue eyes matching the unlikely blue of her hair. She makes mugs of tea, and tells her Jack Russell/King Charles spaniel cross, Tallulah, to stop barking at me – “She’s 14, which in our years is 90, but she shows no sign of slowing down”.
Cleveland was born in 1942. Her English father, an actor and a conscientious objector, and mother, a “glamour girl” who acted too, divorced when she was three. Her mother remarried, to an American serviceman, and they moved around different US air force bases for a number of years. Back in the UK, Cleveland won a place at Rada in 1960, where her peers included Anthony Hopkins. After graduating, she worked as a model and beauty pageant queen, played saucy roles in TV comedies and “those old stage farces that you don’t see anymore” in between other acting work. She’d even had a stint as a bunny girl at the Playboy Club in London in 1966.
And then came the Pythons, who “wanted a pretty girl to play those pretty girl roles”. She rejects the idea that this was sexist: “I wasn’t offended by it then, and I’m certainly not offended by it now.”
Off screen, the Pythons took her seriously. Upon realising that she’d only been booked for four episodes, they saw to it that her contract was extended and she became the only female regular, and part of the inner circle on tour. So all these years later, which of the surviving Pythons is she in contact with?
She rejects the idea her parts were sexist. ‘I wasn’t offended then and I’m not now’
“Michael,” she says. “I spoke to [him] recently, when I heard Helen, his wife, had died.” Chapman died of cancer in 1989; Cleveland was touring with a stage show at the time. “I wasn’t able to go to the hospital, but his partner rang me to tell me that he was going, so I was able to speak to him.” Jones, who directed the film and played Brian’s mother was diagnosed with dementia in 2016 and died in 2020. Cleveland had been reunited with him and the other Pythons in 2014 for a series of shows at London’s O2 Arena.
In her 2014 autobiography, PomPoms Up! Cleveland suggests that, like many others, she found Palin very attractive. “He was the cutest. Well, in the very beginning, John was my favourite Python. But that changed over the years.”
Cleese became more remote, not socialising with the others, and on one occasion, when they gigglingly followed him home, ducking into doorways, preparing to leap on him, he turned round and said, ‘F--- off, the lot of you!’”. She also admits she “didn’t get on as well as I’d have liked with Eric, when he was directing the O2 show”.
It’s a slightly sad end to a story that began with the Pythons telling her, “We don’t want anyone else”. But her time with the team, she insists, has been “full of joy and magic”. Just as one would’ve hoped.