Monty Python Speaks! The Complete Oral History by David Morgan
William Cook
I have a shameful confession to make: I was one of those infuriating people who used to recite Monty Python sketches at parties. In mitigation, m’lud, I was only a teenager at the time.
During my twenties, thirties and forties, I thought I was far too grown-up to enjoy such frippery but, watching
Monty Python’s Flying Circus in my fifties, I find it hilarious – and so do my teenage children. I reckon this reveals a good deal about what makes Python so appealing – not so much its erudition as its childlike sense of fun.
Plenty of people have come up with more long-winded explanations for its enduring popularity, but most of them merely confirm E B White’s wise dictum: ‘Analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog – few people are interested, and the frog dies.’
So when David Morgan set about writing this history of Monty Python, he sensibly decided to put (almost) all of it in the Pythons’ own words. The result is a chatty, discursive tome which reads like the tipsy transcript of a protracted dinner party, in which the five surviving members discuss every conceivable aspect of Monty Python in exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) detail. Whether such a dinner party sounds like heaven or hell to you is probably a pretty good test of whether you’ll enjoy this book.
If reading this review is giving you a strange sense of déjà vu, I should point out that this is actually a revised edition of a book first published in 1999. The flimsy excuse for this new version is the 50th anniversary of Monty Python’s TV debut in 1969. Quite a lot has happened, Python-wise, since that first edition appeared, including Spamalot (Eric Idle’s musical of Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and the reunion stage show One Down, Five to Go (Graham Chapman having died of cancer in 1989, aged just 48). Sadly, Terry Jones has since succumbed to dementia; so there’s enough new material to warrant an update, even without that somewhat spurious anniversary.
This new material is interesting – and, in the case of Terry Jones, very moving – but, as in all showbiz biogs, the best stuff is about the early years: how Barry Took combined two comedy duos (Terry Jones and Michael Palin, who’d met at Oxford, and John Cleese and Graham Chapman, who’d met at Cambridge) with the absurd animation of Terry Gilliam and the quirky wit of Eric Idle to create a comic ensemble of almost boundless imagination.
‘Gilliam is one of the most manipulative bastards in that group of utterly manipulative bastards,’ says Idle, describing the group dynamic. ‘Michael is a selfish bastard. Cleese is a control freak, Jonesy is shagged out and now forgets everything, and Graham, as you know, is still dead. I am the only real nice one!’
Over the next ten years, this surrealist sextet produced a plethora of books and records, several brilliant films and 47 episodes of the most original sketch show ever broadcast by the BBC. ‘We don’t really laugh with anyone else the way we laugh together,’ says Cleese, and it’s the spectacle of six men amusing themselves and each other rather than pandering to an audience that makes their humour so intimate and so infectious. As Morgan observes, ‘Python was not about jokes. It was really about a state of mind.’
Should they have carried on any longer? I doubt it. Like the Beatles, they said all they had to say within a decade. They’ve done some great things on their own – Time Bandits, Ripping Yarns, A Fish Called Wanda, Fawlty Towers – but, as with the Beatles, it’s the things they did together that will outlive them.
Life of Brian was their masterpiece – a profound, devout movie (as Jones says, heretical but not blasphemous) which will still be enjoyed long after the last Python has snuffed it.
Cleese is especially perceptive about what made Python special, and the others chip in with lots of pertinent and amusing observations. However, the last word should go to Took (RIP) who brought the team together in a stroke of accidental genius: ‘I said, “Python will not be a major success, but it will be very influential.” And I was utterly wrong, because it wasn’t influential at all – nobody else apart from undergraduates copied it – and it was enormously successful! One of the most successful things ever made in this country. Talk about the Department of Cloudy Crystal Ball…’