How Basil Fawlty taught me table manners
GILLIAMESQUE by Terry Gilliam (Canongate £30) ROGER LEWIS
Of The six chaps who made Monty Python, one is mad, one is charming, one is lucky, one is Welsh and one is dead. That leaves us with Gilliam — the one who is a genuine, carnivalesque creative genius.
I was watching the programme the other day — it is pretty sloppy and strained, except for Gilliam’s lurid baroque animations, which haven’t dated and remain fresh. The Ministry Of Silly Walks and the upper Class Twit Of The Year sketches you can keep.
Gilliam is a great graphic satirist, in fact, in the style of hogarth or Dali or one of those monks who doodled dragons in the margins of medieval manuscripts.
This book — ‘a high-speed car chase through my life with lots of skids and crashes’ — is appropriately beautifully designed, with splatters of ink and paint covering the heavy, creamy pages.
from the welter of re-touched photos, wonky typefaces and angry scribbles, however, it is possible to deduce that Gilliam was born in Minnesota in 1940, was awarded 53 merit badges as a Boy Scout, which surely remains a record, and describes his upbringing as ‘shockingly happy’.
he enjoyed painting and sculpture at school, built sets for drama, contributed cartoons to magazines and spent hours before a mirror transforming himself into a monster. ‘he had all the girls screaming,’ remembered his mother fondly.
Such was his opposition to the ‘hypocritical stupidity of the Vietnam War’, coupled with a disdain for bland American entertainment, that Gilliam knew he had to move to London.
Though he and his girlfriend lived in a flat full of fleas, Gilliam relished 1968 London. The extent of his ‘burgeoning Anglophilia’ was symbolised by his purchase of a hillman Minx.
his cut-out cartoons — Victorian Christmas cards with heads lopped off and feet shoved into mouths — began to appear in the colour supplements.
It was but a short step for him to start turning these into 30second animations.
The Python team assembled itself quickly, and ‘these typically
sneaky, passive-aggressive’ Oxbridge graduates — Cleese, Palin, Idle, Jones and Chapman — treated the long-haired Gilliam as ‘the American interloper’.
His surreal animations were used as the links between the sketches. He also played village idiot roles, very well actually.
A highlight of recording the series was when Gilliam met Maggie, the make-up artist and his future wife, while staying in the very Torquay hotel that inspired Cleese to write Fawlty Towers. Donald Sinclair, the original Basil, publicly ticked off Gilliam for holding his cutlery incorrectly.
Gilliam co-directed the movie spin-offs, Monty Python And The Holy Grail and The Life Of Brian. The shoots were not harmonious, mainly because Graham Chapman was blind drunk. Gilliam secretly crept back to the studio at night to re-edit Terry Jones’s cut. ‘Terry never seemed to notice.’ Well, he might now.
The image we get is of ebullience coupled with spoilt-brat arrogance. Gilliam never doubts that he is in the right, and if he always exists (creatively) on the brink of chaos, perhaps he needs this to ensure vibrancy.
Don Quixote was abandoned when the sets were washed away in a flood, the lead actor fell ill and the crew were buzzed by warplanes. The worst moment of all was when Heath Ledger died in the middle of making The Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus. ‘It was impossible, unbelievable, unbearable.’
Nevertheless, calamities like this would never have befallen Richard Attenborough, say, or Steven Spielberg. They are (or were) mega-prepared, like tank commanders. But then Gilliam is the only movie director left alive who has a turbulent Romantic mind, filled with waterfalls and volcanoes.
As he revealingly says, regarding a battle with a budget-conscious producer: ‘I set out to make the whole thing as difficult and expensive as possible.’
Chip out that in granite and you have Gilliam’s perfect epitaph.