The BBC would like to announce
that the next scene is unsuitable
for family viewing.
It contains scenes of violence
involving people's heads and
arms getting chopped off.
There are also naked women
with floppy breasts.
Also, you can see a pair of buttocks,
and there's another bit
where I swear you can see everything.
Maybe it's just the way
he's holding the spear.
A lot of American humour from
the fifties in television
was based on sort of,
kind of real social situations
and real relationships,
And Python takes that basis
and just explodes it.
Yieee!
They were cruel, but
I found it hilarious.
I'm a bit of a cruel twit myself.
He also nailed your wife's
head to a coffee table.
Isn't that right, mrs. O'Tracey?
Oh, no.
No, no.
Yeah, well, he did do that, yeah.
He was a cruel man, but fair.
For us, they defined English comedy.
Since then, I've learned
there's another kind--
A sort of music-hall comedy,
but for us, they were always--
They were English comedy.
What's going on here, then?
Ah, "You have beautiful thighs."
What?
He hit me.
"Drop your panties, sir William.
I cannot wait till lunchtime."
Right!
My nipples explode with delight.
Monty who?
Monty Python?
Oh.
Monty Python?
Oh, you mean the rock group.
And now...
Oh, my god.
Your roses or your life.
Hey.
Your costumes didn't do you any good.
Oh, my god, there's some documentary--
This is a fly on the wall.
That's club shit.
This is a fly on the wall.
"Fly on the wall" camera.
They're doing a documentary.
They don't want us to
notice they're here.
Just be perfectly natural.
Be absolutely natural.
Um... How are you?
I live in Germany. That's right.
I do comedy in Germany for a living.
Stop it!
Does anybody know the way?
Yes, I believe you.
Hello.
George Harrison has always--
His theory is that we took over
the spirit of the beatles,
'cause we started
just as they finished.
Whatever that spirit was,
we were the ones that carried it on.
There's a lovely anecdote
told to us about a man
who'd been in the northeast.
In early Python days, we weren't
necessarily networked,
and he sat down,
and the Python show he was watching
started with this man
walking along one of the
Roman walls up in Cumbria
and going on about it.
He was a particularly silly man
with a particularly silly voice,
and this guy laughed
and laughed and laughed.
Then he began to think the sketch
was going on rather a long time.
Eventually he realized
it wasn't Python at all.
It was a local program.
It seems to me that it was a...
It was basically getting out hatreds
and dislikes of a certain
bourgeois structure of life
with which one had grown up--
The repressive English upbringing
where you weren't
really supposed to laugh
and make fun of things.
It wasn't satirizing individuals
in government or in politics.
Um, if there is any satire in Python,
it's in a more sort
of general sense,
you know, a sort of
generalized human level
rather than specifics.
Last week on party hints,
I showed you how to make
a small plate of goulash
go around 26 people,
how to get the best
out of your canapes,
and how to unblock your loo.
This week-- what to do if there's
an armed communist uprising
near your home when
you're having a party.
All the Pythons came from very
comfortable middle-class existences,
and so the rebellion, such as it was,
was not a curse against madly off-key
and probably into becoming
sort of, uh...
kitchen-sink dramatists
with a very short life.
Um, and sort of our, if you like,
our sort of reaction
was against a sort of
rather stifling world.
It wasn't necessarily oppressive.
It didn't hurt us.
It wasn't unpleasant or unkind.
It just was very, very conventional.
We know our place,
but what do we get out of it?
I get a feeling of
superiority over them.
I get a feeling of
inferiority from him,
but a feeling of
superiority over him.
I get a pain in the back of my neck.
We were all writers
for The Frost Report,
so we'd met over a long period of time
and had worked on the
same sort of shows.
The Frost Reports were very
good shows, very well written.
They had a theme.
Like the first show,
the theme was authority.
A comedy show about authority?
It had three more syllables
than most comedy notions.
So it wasn't a sort of
"Hello, darling. I'm home."
In a courtroom, of course,
authority is in its element.
My lord, in this case,
my learned friend
appears for the defense,
and I appear for the money.
The first television was
writing sketches with Graham.
We used to write one,
or sometimes two,
three-minute sketches each week.
I sometimes performed them,
but not always,
And Mike and Terry used to
write the filmed piece.
And Eric used to often write,
a rather sort of witty-type verbal--
His kind of style stuff,
which Ronnie Barker often did.
We were all meeting then.
We'd write what he called his cdm--
His continuous developing monologue,
which John and Graham
used to call ojaril--
Old jokes and ridiculously
irrelevant links.
So I learned there's a power
in being a writer.
I used to live in Notting Hill Gate,
and my jokes were sent
by the BBC by taxi,
and I had to go by tube.
This taxi would arrive,
and they'd be hot off the press.
It was an interesting stage.
The Frost Report went out live.
I would write in this pub,
The Sun And Splendour,
in Notting Hill Gate.
I'd spend my lunch there
writing some jokes
off the newspapers,
send them in the taxi.
The next day, I'd come in
and hear my jokes
being told at the bar.
Gilliam wasn't alive then.
He was still in America.
He hadn't made the great odyssey
across the atlantic.
Then Eric and Terry were
asked to do a show
called Do Not Adjust Your Set
by Humphrey Barkley,
And I think they asked,
"We'll do it if my
friend Mike can do it."
Mrs. Johnson, I wonder
if your husband's in.
What do you want him for?
Can he come out and play?
He's just had his dinner.
He's got to sit down an hour
while the food goes down.
But we've got to go in soon.
I can't help that. He was late.
Do Not Adjust Your Set
was a way of doing what you wanted
because nobody was
looking at kids' shows.
The executives weren't
watching this stuff.
You could get away with murder.
I was doing that sort
of thing in the states
and getting nowhere.
When I came to England,
this was like finding people
on the same wavelength.
They spoke the language
better than I did,
but as far as the way the mental
processes were working,
it was-- "We're home."
He came to us on
Do Not Adjust Your Set
with some sketches he brought.
Michael and Terry were
very sniffy to him.
Who is this awful American with
his long haircut coming in?
And I liked him.
He wore this sort of Afghan coat.
It was like a woolly old sheep.
It was love at first sight.
I fell in love with his coat.
I love you.
Ugh!
Indians!
Aah!
The Complete And Utter
History Of Britain,
Which nobody saw at all,
was a series Terry
Jones and I wrote.
The whole essence of the
complete and utter histories
was to look at history
As if television
had existed at the time,
so we were reporting
on historical events
as if it was modern television.
There'd be an interview
with the victorious Normans
in the showers after
the Battle of Hastings.
"Boys, how did it go?"
When were you sure
you were going to win?
You can never be sure
of a thing like that,
when they were 2,000 down.
Great fun, these lads.
Well, now what about that incident?
You mean when Harold was knocked down.
Very nasty business, David,
and we're all sorry about it,
but I think it was fair.
Certainly gave our lads a laugh.
That was the good bit.
I remember John ringing me
in what must have been April of 1969,
and he said,
"Oh, I've seen The Complete
And Utter History."
He said, "Um,
"you won't be doing any
more of those, will you,
So why don't we do
something together?"
Meaning your lot and our lot.
Barry took, who was
then, you know,
and still is a highly
respected writer
who had worked with
Marty and all that,
was acting as a sort of
entrepreneur of comedy
at the time.
In 1969, I was the advisor
to the comedy department at the BBC,
And we'd just finished
a very successful
second series of Marty,
starring Marty Feldman.
The BBC asked me, "What comes next?"
I'd been looking around
at the various people
who were extremely good
writer-performers.
There were a lot of them,
and I, in my mind's eye,
put together a group of four
which subsequently became six.
They were John Cleese
and Graham Chapman,
Michael Palin and Terry Jones,
Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam.
When you look back,
it was an amazing act of courage.
I was the only one who'd been
much on as a performer,
except that the others--
Mike, Terry, and Eric,
and Terry Gilliam's
first animation--
first appeared on
Do Not Adjust Your Set,
but nobody knew that.
It was the funniest
thing on television,
but it went out at half past 4:00.
It was extraordinary they
went straight into a series
without asking for a pilot.
I thank them for that.
They used to meet and
argue first at my home,
then go to their homes,
then through the evening
they'd phone me and say,
"Am I ruining my career
"by being a part
of this new thing?"
Nobody knew what to call it.
The first title was "It's".
We thought the idea of
somebody saying "It's"
And then being immediately cut off
before they could
announce the program
was funny.
It's...
The BBC said, "Why don't
you just have something
really wacky or
off the wall like...
like somebody's flying circus?
how about that,
John Cleese's flying circus
or something like that?"
John, commendably, didn't
want to be associated
that closely with the show.
And it wasn't any one person's show.
That was something we didn't want--
The David Frost Show,
the John Cleese Show.
We merged our identities
as much as possible.
John suggested Python,
and I suggested Monty
'cause in my pub in Warwickshire,
there was this guy wore a bow tie.
Monty was the guy--
slightly overweight,
was always there in his corner
and had his own pint mug.
It was this wonderful,
warming sort of name.
shows, the early ones.
The first one was called
Whither Canada?
A silly send up of a
documentary subtitle.
Sex And Violence-- we liked that.
The BBC said, "We hope there
won't be any sex and violence."
Weren't we naughty?
Gosh, we were naughty boys.
Aah!
Monty Python's Flying Circus.
It was important to us
to have control
because even when we'd been
writing for other people
and had become well-
established writers,
artists would change a line.
Producers would change a line.
"We think this is better."
We'd say, "No, it isn't."
They might have been right,
but we wanted to say we do know.
The six of us know what is right.
We started off
having group meetings.
We'd meet and talk about
what we wanted to do,
what we should avoid,
The shape of the show--
Get based, then a Gilliam cartoon--
It would go through and link and flow,
and it wouldn't have stop-starts.
Terry Gilliam had done this
stream animation of consciousness.
It was definitely a conscious idea
that we create a whole show
that was a stream
of consciousness.
All the kids really wanted to hear
was that we were heavily into drugs.
Nothing else interested them.
We were all by then pushing 30.
We'd all been working
for a very long time
and were disciplined,
hard-working guys
doing a terrible, boring business
of trying to make people laugh.
They would be terribly,
bitterly disappointed
that we're not sort of--
"Hey, wow, let's do this.
Let's do that."
You can't get a knight in armor
and a chicken just like that.
You've got to plan it.
We cheated slightly in that
we stuck to our own usual
writing groupings--
Terry Jones and myself,
Eric Idle writing on his own,
Terry Gilliam doing
his animations on his own,
And John and Graham writing together.
Graham is a very, very clever writer
and the best judge
of whether something's funny
that I've ever come across.
If ever I was not sure,
I would always take
Graham's opinion.
He seemed to be a sort
of perfect litmus paper
with just extraordinary judgment.
And that was unbelievably
valuable, I think,
to the group and to me as a writer.
John always has to
write through someone.
He needs to focus his
ideas through someone.
The Graham-John partnership
worked extremely well
'cause Graham was always
able to throw in
this really bizarre...
Now and again he'd say "Mongoose,"
which would set the whole thing
careering off in another direction.
Funny that penguin being there.
What's it doing there?
Standing.
I can see that.
Perhaps it comes from next door.
Penguins don't come
from next door.
They come from the Antarctic.
Burma!
Why did you say "Burma"?
I panicked.
The "Nudge-nudge" sketch,
I'd actually written
for Ronnie Barker
for a Frost On Sunday.
I thought it was
a funny character.
It was only afterwards I realized
why he never did it.
Because the script says,
"Know what I mean?
Know what I mean?
Nudge nudge. Say no more.
Know what I mean?"
There's no jokes in it or anything.
I read it out very tentatively
at one of the early Python meetings,
and they laughed like
crazy at the character.
Is your wife, uh, a goer?
Know what I mean?
Nudge nudge. Nudge nudge.
Know what I mean?
I beg your pardon?
Your wife, does she...
Does she go?
Know what I mean?
Nudge nudge. Say no more.
She sometimes goes, yes.
I'll bet she does.
Know what I mean? Nudge nudge.
I don't quite follow you.
Oh, follow me. That's good.
A nod's as good as a wink
to a blind bat, eh?
Are you selling something?
Selling? Selling? Very good.
Very good.
Oh, wicked! Wicked! You're wicked.
Know what I mean? Nudge nudge.
Know what I mean? Nudge nudge.
Nudge nudge.
Say no more.
Basically we were laughing
at the authoritarian figures
that we grew up under,
and observing.
I think if you're at a
boarding school for 12 years,
your vision of authority
is very much of this
looming nonsense,
and you're not allowed
to laugh at it
except privately
amongst your gang.
But you know it's nonsense,
this assumed authority
that's being given
to you by teachers,
by military figures--
We always had to do the ccf--
By police, by judges.
And it's all pretending
we know what's going
on on this planet
and this is the way it is,
and it's all bullshit.
Python was quite good for getting
rid of those inhibitions.
That's why it's still
appealing to the young.
Come in.
Is this the right room
for an argument?
I've told you once.
No, you haven't.
Yes, I have. Just now.
No, you didn't.
I did.
You did not.
Is this a five-minute
argument or half hour?
Oh, we'd always disagree.
I mean, you know, Python was...
Reading, writing,
and arguing, really.
The three rs.
A lot of arguing went on.
Typewriters were thrown.
People would stomp out of rooms.
There'd be shrill voices,
all sorts of aggravation,
which was important.
It was important
I only threw a chair once.
I think John, you know...
I think it bothered John more
'cause he's a man who has
to maintain his control more,
And being older--
we were like four years younger
than John, some of us,
And still are.
Let's face it.
And I don't think he liked
arguing with Terry,
and he'd tend to bait
Terry just a little bit,
see how far he could
get him to explode,
'cause once he made a man blow up,
he'd won the argument, you see.
Not an easy thing to do
with Terry, anyway.
I was still Welsh in my
feelings, my emotions,
But I was talking with
a "South of England" accent.
If you get excited in Welsh,
you go up at the end
of the sentence.
But if you do it
with an English accent,
you always go down at
the end of the sentence.
The more excited you get,
the more you go down.
It's a cultural clash.
I came all the way from Oslo
to do this program.
I'm a professor of archaeology.
I'm an expert in
ancient civilizations.
All right! I'm only 5'10".
All right! My posture is bad.
All right! I slump in my chair!
But I've had more women
than either of you two.
I used to have a lot of
fights with Terry Jones,
but they were basically
artistic fights.
We're very different character types.
I mean, Terry is welsh,
And is kind of, uh, passionate,
and I'm sort of
repressed and logical.
And the two of us used to
lock antlers a great deal,
but it actually worked extremely well
because somehow we kind of...
neutralized each other.
Then the other guys
could dance around,
throw their weight into the argument.
John was the head and Terry the heart--
Terry the heart of Python.
And the rest of us would be
grouped in-between there.
Eric and myself, I suppose,
Were... I mean, rarely disruptive.
We never got so steamed up
that we said,
"End of meeting! That's it!"
Um, we would muck in
and salvage whatever was around.
Graham would puff his pipe
and be rather detached
and statesmanlike
about the whole thing.
The best moments of Python
were those days
when we'd sit in my dining
room or John's flat
and read through the material
everybody had written over
the last week or two weeks,
and we'd read that stuff
for a whole day.
It was just wonderful.
I loved those things.
And the fact that it made us laugh
was the yardstick, really.
Maybe 25% of the material
that was read out
worked straightaway.
We'd put that on a pile
and say that's fine.
Then another 25% was almost there,
but needed a little work.
There and then, people would
come up with an idea--
A parrot rather than a motor car
for the pet shop sketch.
Look, matey...
This parrot wouldn't voom
if I put 4,000 volts through it.
It's bleeding demised.
It's not. It's... It's pining.
It's not pining. It's passed on.
This parrot is no more.
It has ceased to be.
It's expired
And gone to meet its maker.
This is a late parrot.
It's a stiff-- bereft of life.
It rests in peace.
If you hadn't nailed it to the perch,
it would be pushing up the daisies.
It's rung down the curtain
and joined the choir invisible.
This is an ex-parrot.
Gilliam wasn't always
at the writing meetings,
'cause in order to produce
the one to four minutes
of animation each week,
he was working up in a
little attic in hampstead,
getting all his little cutouts
and snipping bits out
of famous works of art
and sticking funny heads
onto them, going,
"Oh, shit! I gotta
have an assistant."
Time and time again,
it was a matter of
leaving one sketch
at a point where it
had run out of steam
and getting on to the next thing.
The scripts would literally say,
"Gilliam takes over
and get us to..." ba-boom.
I liked that a lot.
I'm off.
I'm off.
I'm off.
I'm off.
I'm off, dear.
Dead painters-- you don't
have to pay them.
You can take their ideas,
their art work.
I'd go through the National Gallery
whenever I'd run out of ideas.
Just walk through,
and the paintings would
start talking to me.
And came on this one.
The original painting is gigantic.
I was looking at it and thought,
"Isn't that wonderful?"
And out of the whole painting,
the only thing that
really stuck with me
was that little bit down here.
And there it is--
it's the big foot.
I think Bronzino would go crazy.
The guy spend years
painting this thing,
and some jerk comes along
and throws away everything
except that little bit on the bottom.
There's something very
satisfying about doing this.
You're dealing with really great art
that people pay
hundreds of thousands,
millions of dollars for,
and I'm reducing it to that...
It says something about life,
I think.
I used to sit there
with a blanket over my head
with all these kitchen utensils,
and I'd bang them and...
Make my own noises--
I'd sit there doing these noises.
Excuse me. I want to powder my nose.
Ahh, that's better.
The BBC used to send us far and wide
to any exotic location
for our filming.
This is Teddington Lock
about 5 miles from Television Center.
This was where we chose to do
one of my favorite
of the Python sketches,
although it's very, very short,
extremely inconsequential,
and has very little dialogue.
It's called the fish-slapping dance,
and those of you who don't know it,
I brought a couple of fish along,
like the cheeky chappies
we had in those days.
I would be dressed in a
pith helmet and long shorts
as worn by british explorers...
up to about the 1950s.
Um, I'll put that down there.
John was next to me,
uh, the taller one
in a pith helmet and long shorts.
I held these two rather slimy fish.
I think we all knew
we were doing something different.
We weren't enormously
self-conscious about it.
We just used to hoot with delight
when we thought of
some silly thing to do
like run the titles
halfway through the show--
Everybody would leave the room
and then think, wait a moment--
Then pretend to go on
as if BBC news, picking up something.
We actually were very conscious
of not trying to be, uh...
satirical and-- and topical
other than using names
of funny politicians
or the funny names
of other politicians.
They didn't mean anything
other than politician,
and the politician
is always with us,
and they'll always be the same.
I think a silly election
will always be a silly election.
It's interesting looking back on it.
The stuff holds up because of that.
The other shows were more topical
and suffered because of that.
But we were rather
canny in those days.
Alan Jones...
On the left, sensible party.
9,112.
Kevin Phillips Bong...
On the right, slightly silly.
Naught.
Tarquin Fin-Tim-Lim-Bin-Whin-
Bim-Lim-Bus-Stop-F'tang-F'tang-
Ol-Biscuitbarrel...
Silly.
12,441.
And so the silly party
has taken Luton.
What was wonderful in the group
is everybody influenced
everybody else.
My cartoons were changing.
They were doing more things
that were more obviously visual.
It's still--
I mean, their strength still
is words and performing.
I mean, John, luckily, is
very visual as a human being.
It would be hard to draw
something as funny as that.
He was blessed.
Mike had to put wigs and mustaches on
to be as silly-looking as John.
And, uh...
But it got more like that.
At times we were almost
making the characters
more and more cartoonlike
as it went along.
Things got stranger and stranger.
And quite early on, I'd get into wigs
because I had blond
hair down to here,
and it took them years
before they realized.
And I found out
I was much more comfortable
wearing more disguises.
I could act better
if I was in mustaches
and make-up and costume.
I think Mike's like that, too.
We were kind of into the make-up jar.
John always hated make-up.
The most he'd do was
plaster his hair down
and wear a packer mac, really.
Although he was always
wonderful in drag.
Just occasionally John in drag--
He's just a crack-up.
Dinsdale was a gentleman.
What's more, he knew how to
treat a female impersonator.
The problem on Python about the women
was I don't think we
knew much about women,
And you can only write
what you know about,
so we'd write about show girls.
You can imagine the stereotype.
We used to write
about these ridiculous pepperpots
who made us laugh a lot.
I don't know who they were--
A cross between parrots
and our mothers.
Pepperpots were inventions
of John and Graham's,
but they were people--
They were ladies of sort
of late middle-age, I would say,
with a shopping basket,
Um, and usually a
rather heavy coat on
and a scarf
who would stand in small
groups in supermarkets
and talk very loudly
about things they didn't like.
It was always,
"I don't like him,
"I don't like him.
"Ooh, hate that. No, don't like it.
Ooh, not very nice, no.
Ooh, smells a bit."
They were all negative people,
but they were shaped
like pepper pots--
Probably what John and
Graham had in the house.
Oh, hello, mrs. Premise.
Hello, mrs. Conclusion.
Busy day?
Busy? I just spent four
hours burying the cat.
Four hours to bury a cat?
Yes, it wouldn't keep still.
Wriggling around.
Howled its head off.
Oh, it wasn't dead, then?
Well, no, but it's
not at all a well cat,
So as we were going away
for a fortnight,
I thought I'd better bury it.
What makes me squirm
about that first series,
I think, are some of the, uh,
Some of the camp
stereotypes, you know.
There's some very, you know,
limp-wristed, uh...
Camp stereotypes around,
which certainly we wouldn't do now.
Um...
And, uh, I-- certainly you can say
there's not an awful lot of depth
to Python's character of
female characterizations.
The fellas were always
apologizing to me
for not having more for me to do.
Michael was always coming up
and saying "I'm sorry, darling.
We don't have a lot for you."
But as he said,
"We're just not very good
at writing parts for women."
Um, and I suppose in that way
they were a bit chauvinistic
as far as their view of young women.
They did write very well
for the older women,
which they played
themselves so well,
far better than I could.
When it came to young women,
they couldn't write funny parts.
Oh, my god! What a mess!
Here, did you do this?
Uh, no. No. I didn't do all this.
Uh, it-- it did it all.
Oh.
Well...
Here. Hold this. I'll get started.
Huh. It's jolly nice. What is it?
Hmm?
Oh, it's a Brazilian dagger.
Whoop! Ooh!
Oh...
Oh! Oh!
I certainly think, uh,
One of the things
that Python introduced
or accentuated in comedy
was aggression, the
comedy of aggression.
I think that's so much
John's input there.
But I think the kind
of deaths we're having
are what I call cartoon deaths,
and I think the nearer
deaths get to cartoon,
the more people see it
the same way that they see
with Tom and Jerry,
when Jerry runs over tom
with a steam roller.
There's always two people who think,
"Oh, poor cat. That must have hurt.
I hope the cat's all right."
But they're in a minority.
Now stand aside, worthy adversary.
't Is but a scratch.
A scratch? Your arm's off.
No, it isn't.
Well, what's that, then?
I've had worse.
A lot of comedy seems
to be like poetry.
It's getting its kick
out of conflict,
out of contrast of ideas.
Um, in poetry, it's
what Browning said,
when you get two metaphors--
When you bring two ideas together--
They produce not
a third idea but a star.
That's kind of magic.
The same thing with comedy--
You bring two conflicting
ideas together,
And you produce a laugh
instead of a star.
Look!
It's just a flesh wound.
Look, stop that!
Chicken!
Chicken!
Look, I'll have your leg.
You'll what?
Come here!
What will you do, bleed on me?
I think with the
Black Knight sequence
in Holy Grail,
you're getting this horrible thing--
Somebody's having
his limbs chopped off,
but his total unconcern of this
and his total indominability
in the face of such odds
and such disaster.
All right. We'll call it a draw.
Come, Patsy.
Oh, well, I see.
Running away, eh?
You yellow bastards!
Come back and take
what's coming to you!
I'll bite your legs off!
I wouldn't say there was
any subject at all
that I would immediately think
of not making jokes about.
A lot of comedy
is about seeing deeply--
I mean, seeing actually
under the surface,
into sometimes the darker areas,
but being able to make a joke of it.
It's the only way you can cope
with something that's
very unpleasant,
all the nastiness in the world.
Sometimes joking is
the only way to cope.
Well, I remember the first time
that John read out the, uh...
The sketch about the undertaker,
about arriving with
his mother in a sack,
the undertaker proposing to eat her.
And he read this, and we all laughed.
And...
And then I thought, we can't do that.
I mean... Just... We can't do that.
I think my mother was
very ill at the time.
Uh, I don't know.
She might have just died, actually.
And then I remember
going into the kitchen
and buying some--
uh, making some coffee,
And as I was making the coffee,
I thought, why can't we do it?
I mean, it's, uh,
It's not encouraging people
to eat-- eat their mothers.
Excuse me. Um, are you, uh,
are you suggesting...
Eating my mother?
Um...
Yeah. Not raw. Cooked.
What?
Roasted, a few french fries,
broccoli, horseradish sauce.
Well, I do feel a bit peckish.
In fact, when-- when the show went out,
there were... Deep questions asked,
and I think Ian was
hauled over the coals
by the heads of department.
There was quite an uproar
at BBC about it.
It became the kind of excuse
for sort of the hierarchy
keeping a slightly tighter,
closer look at Python.
When we came to do the next series,
people wanted to start
reading scripts beforehand.
There was a joke
about the policeman.
He comes in, and he arrests
Nigel Somebody, the pop star,
and produces this brown bag,
and they-- "Well, what's in it?"
And he says, "Ah.",
he says, "Dope."
And he opens it up,
and he says, "Oh. Sandwiches.
Blimey. Whatever did I
give the wife for lunch?"
And they accepted that,
but then they catch the wife
saying, "It was better than lunch."
The BBC wouldn't have that.
They cut that.
Well, there was a sketch.
All the other Pythons thought
it was pretty funny.
I didn't think it was funny enough
to justify what I thought
was the slight tackiness involved.
I remember that I found myself
on the side of the establishment.
Bill colton, I think,
wanted to cut it.
But the Pythons always
quite correctly
referred to me as being fuddy-duddy,
a bit establishment
and all that stuff.
And I am, and proud of it.
There was one silly sketch
which John always hated
and collaborated with the BBC
to cut, I think.
It was a thing Michael and I wrote.
It was about wine tasting,
and it-- mmm.
Mm. It's very smooth,
It's flavorful, it's, um...
It's-- it's probably some k--
Savi-- oh, is it a...
A Sauternes, perhaps?
No, sir. It's wee-wee.
Ah. Yes.
Well, try this.
Ah. This is obviously much fuller,
Fuller, rounder flavour.
Probably south side of the hill.
Would it be a Medoc?
No, sir. That's wee-wee, too.
It just went on relentlessly,
and they cut that. I don't know why.
It was-- John found that
totally distasteful.
Which it is,
but that's half the point of it.
It's a silly, childish sketch.
That's the fun of it.
sit on my face
and tell me that you love me
I'll sit on your face
and tell you I love you, too
I love to hear you oralize
when I'm between your thighs
you blow me away
sit on my face
and let my lips embrace you
I'll sit on your face
and say I love you truly
life can be fine if we both 69
if we sit on the face
and it's ah, such
a pleasure to play
till we're blown away
I saw them at Hollywood Bowl,
and the audience...
It was sort of what I used to do.
That of that rock 'n' roll
idolization.
I saw that at the Hollywood Bowl.
There was only one thing
we ever all agreed on--
That the show would
never work in America.
We were all solid on this.
And it was a total surprise.
It was amazing
how we were treated in America.
We were treated like pop stars.
It was quite incredible.
At the Hollywood Bowl
and even in New York.
At the end of the show,
they would be screaming and yelling,
and girls would throw
things on the stage--
Home-baked cookies,
flowers, presents,
their knickers.
Uh, nobody ever threw
any jock straps for me,
unfortunately,
but all these knickers
were thrown on the stage.
When we left the theater,
the first night,
we opened the stage door,
there were the hordes
of screaming females.
And the fellas didn't
know what to do.
I remember one female
came up to Michael
saying, "Ah, Michael, Michael!"
Threw herself at him
and promptly fainted in his arms.
There was Michael with this female
going, "Uh... W-w-w-what do I do?"
Michael Palin is the only one
I could still die for.
Michael, if you're wondering
who sent you that
Duke Ellington tape,
it was me-- yours truly.
I love you.
I think Python is funny!
Eric Idle's really cute.
I'm available, Eric.
Um... I don't know.
I like them all, really.
I can't. I'm sorry.
I can't. I won't.
I won't choose. I want them all.
I love Hazel Pethig.
I think she does great costumes.
Hazel! Hazel!
Hazel! Hazel!
Hazel! Hazel!
Hazel! Hazel!
Hazel!
Oh, I think, uh,
The real fans are so--
can be slightly strange.
I think people adopted
this sort of thing
and learned the words,
it's maybe just slightly mad.
oh, I'm a lumberjack,
and I'm o.K.
I sleep all night,
and I work all day
he's a lumberjack,
and he's o.K.
he sleeps all night,
and he works all day
I cut down trees,
I eat my lunch
I go to the lavatory
on wednesdays I go shoppin'
and have buttered scones for tea
he cuts down tree,
he eats his lunch
he goes to the lavatory
on wednesdays he goes shopping
and has buttered scones for tea
he's a lumberjack,
and he's o.K.
he sleeps all night
and he works all day
I cut down trees,
I wear high heels
suspenders, and a bra
I wished I'd been a girlie
just like my dear mama
he cuts down trees,
he wears high heels
suspenders, and a bra
I wish I'd been a girlie
just like my dear mama
Oh! How perverse!
I thought you were so rugged!
By the time we got to New York
to open Holy Grail,
it was hugely hip.
There were lines around the block
when we opened.
The theater started with a 10:30 show,
and there were lines around the block
of Americans waiting to get in.
We had to sign coconuts.
Somebody had a good idea
of giving them--
The first thousand people--
a free coconut.
And then we had to-- somebody said,
you should autograph them.
They never tried to
autograph a coconut.
It's impossible.
Ah, Lord Pinkney,
here's the young boy
Miles you sent for.
Ah... Young Miles, is it?
What a fine lad you are.
Sit down, boy.
Sit down.
Oh, we shall get on
handsomely you and I.
You shall be clothed and fed
and-- and... Oh, dear. It's happening.
I hope miss Paine told you about this.
Oh... Oh, dear.
I'm terribly sorry.
I just--
Whenever the Pythons came in
and gave us, like, license
to kind of really, uh, take off
and, uh...
And expand even the limits
of what we were doing,
and we were perceived
to have been out there at that time.
A lot of people have
that sort of schoolboyish
or schoolgirlish attitude
towards things,
and they take it to the point
where it's not petulant anymore.
It's just very funny,
and it gives--
I mean, you sort of
experience it vicariously
from watching them.
They influenced me a great deal.
They influenced
Saturday Night Live,
I think, a great deal.
The difference was--
And this is something
we rarely said about--
Was they could edit, we couldn't.
So, uh, we had to write
endings to our pieces.
And, uh...
They just went from one
concept to the next.
And for main course, sir?
Uh, I'll have a whiskey
for main course,
and I'll follow that
with a whiskey for pudding.
Yes, sir.
And what would you like
with it, whiskey?
No. A bottle of wine.
This is the silliest sketch
I've ever been in.
Shall we stop it?
Yeah. All right.
I got fairly bored with television
somewhere around about
the middle of Python,
partly because I'd done
an enormous number of shows
in that short period of time.
You know, I'd done, uh...
40 that were either Frost Reports
or 1948 Shows,
before I'd ever got to Python.
And after we'd done
about 20 of Pythons,
I, and I alone,
felt that we were beginning
to repeat ourselves
and sort of being
derivative of ourselves,
and I never enjoyed that,
so I remember getting a bit bored,
even by about '71.
By then, there was a
lot more fights going on.
I don't know why, really,
but it just...
It's like a marriage.
John's not very good
at marriages, either.
And, uh...
If you actually probably
looked at his timetables,
they'd probably
worked out the same.
He was married to Python
as long as he was
to however many wives he's had.
Morning.
Are you the registrar?
I have that function.
I was here on Saturday
getting married to a blonde,
and I'd like to have
this one instead, please.
The other one wasn't any good,
so I'd like to swap.
I have paid. I paid on Saturday.
Here's the ticket.
Ah. No. That was when
you were married.
Yes, to the wrong one.
I didn't like the colour.
This is the one I want,
so just change the forms.
I think that there was a
certain amount of antagonism
in the third series,
About 1973.
Um, and I know that I was unpopular,
although they were nice
to me, basically,
uh, face to face,
and then they'd
sort of go off pissed off
and say rude things
about me behind my back
when I said I wanted
to drop out of the group
for television purposes.
Uh, but I think that
most of that rancor
was really isolated.
Um, it was late '73, really,
which is a pretty short period.
We didn't feel angry with John.
We'd known for years
that he didn't want to do it,
so you couldn't suddenly feel...
feel anger at it.
Um...
I think the decision of the five of us
to go on and do the fourth series
without John, um...
was kind of interesting...
Um...
Ah...
And surprising in a way
because we always said
Python was the six of us.
Take away anyone,
it wouldn't be the same.
We did six, and BBC
wanted another seven,
and at that stage I said no,
and Michael tried
to talk me into it,
and I said,
"It's not working,"
Because there was
this lovely tension
between John and Terry.
There was a series
of tensions and balances
that allowed it to work.
And without the full group,
it never works-- it never
worked quite as well.
Apart from the sheer performing,
the writing didn't
work quite as well.
Naturally, British journalists,
being the rather unhappy
creatures that they are--
And I'm being quite serious--
Are fascinated by negative emotion
and not interested in much else.
So those few months,
sort of 6 months in
a period of 20 years,
tend to feature quite strongly
in all the things that
they write about us.
But other than that, um...
I think we got on
astonishingly well.
My recollection of The Holy Grail
was that even a few
months after that--
Holy Grail was '74--
We were getting on well.
And the sketch Terry
and I had written
about people going along with, uh...
They're knights, not
being on horseback,
but holding, uh, coconuts,
which they banged
together as horses,
became the beginning of, uh...
uh, of The Holy Grail.
Suddenly the idea of The
Holy Grail seemed terrific.
You've got these six
main characters,
six main knights going along.
Nobody really knows the stories.
No one's going to say,
"They went wrong there."
They're looking for the grail.
On the way, there's
all sorts of jokes,
and it's an area where you can make
sort of modern references
in a historical period,
which is a nice area for comedy.
How did you become king, then?
The Lady of the Lake,
her arm clad is the purest
shimmering samite,
held aloft Excalibur
from the bosom of the water,
signifying by divine providence
that I, Arthur,
was to carry Excalibur.
That is why I'm your king.
Listen, strange women lying
in ponds distributing swords
is no basis for a
system of government.
Supreme executive power derives
from a mandate from the masses,
not from some farcical
aquatic ceremony.
Be quiet!
You can't expect to wield
supreme executive power
because some watery tart
threw a sword at you.
Shut up!
And somebody said "What's
going to be your next film?",
and I said, "Oh, Jesus
Christ, Lust For Glory."
And uh... I liked to get
into trouble in those days.
And then after that,
this became a joke we
were going to do this,
and then we thought,
this is an interesting area.
Nobody's ever done comedy
about this entire area
and what-- and then what's
funny about this area?
And so we researched it first.
We all read-- we
read all the bible,
And we read the
histories of the area
and the dead sea scrolls.
We spent some serious time
seriously researching it,
and then got together
and discussed things
for quite a long time
and realized that in fact--
You can't really make fun of J.C.
Because he's actually saying
quite good things.
Although it wasn't meant to be
a parody of Christ's life,
it was a story,
but it could take its shape
from that, I suppose.
There wasn't a story in that.
The story actually
emerged from the writing.
We still did it as sketches really,
and magically, a story emerged.
A miracle! A miracle!
He hath made the bush
fruitful by his words.
They brought forth juniper berries.
Of course they brought
forth juniper berries.
They're juniper bushes!
What do you expect?
Show us another miracle.
Do not tempt him, shallow ones.
Is not the miracle of the
juniper bushes enough?
I say, those are my juniper bushes.
They're a gift from god!
They're all I've bloody got to eat.
Clear off those bushes, go on!
Clear off, the lot of you!
Lord, I am affected
by a bald patch.
I am healed! The master healed me!
I didn't touch him.
I was blind, and now I can see.
A miracle! A miracle!
A miracle!
What we wanted to attack
was the sort of people who
listen to church leaders
and have to be told what to do.
If you look at Brian,
it's actually the most
moralistic film.
It actually suggests
positive behavior--
"I must be an individual."
It embraces a philosophy
which is actually
not present in the other films.
I remember Life Of Brian as being
an enormously happy experience
because, by coincidence, we all had
the same kind of views and
feelings about the subject,
and I think that's our
masterpiece, you know.
That's what I would
like to be judged by.
I'm warning you!
If you say Jehovah once more--
Right! Who threw that?
Come on, who threw that?
Him! Him! Him!
Was it you?
Yes. Well, you did say Jehovah.
Stop!
Stop! Will you... Stop that?
Stop it!
Now, look, no-one is to stone anyone
until I blow this whistle.
Do you understand?
Even-- and I want to make
this absolutely clear--
even if they do say Jehovah.
Good shot!
If you've done a film about
The Meaning Of Life, the bible,
It's really quite hard
to know where to go next.
I think probably people are happy now
to just sort of be friends
without the pressure of feeling
you have to get something done,
"We've got to re-form,"
or anything like that.
Really we never had sort of
greedy managers or people saying,
"Come on, lads, you've
got to get out there
And do another show. Money,
money, money," all that.
The greed has come
from within the group.
I think it would be very difficult
to all get back together again.
For a start, we're all older
and fatter, more lined.
It would look a bit pathetic.
And there's still a lot of
competitiveness in the group.
It's sibling rivalry
because we are siblings.
We're very much contemporaries,
very much product
of a particular time,
and we all want the
others to do well,
but we don't want them to
produce total masterpieces,
'cause that would be
rather annoying,
But at the same time,
we don't wish the others bad.
We want them reasonable-size
success, you know,
but nothing too annoying.
I like what I'm doing now,
and-- and the idea
of doing more Python
gives me the feeling it's
going to be more of that
in a strange way.
It's not what I want to do.
I've done all that.
It's done, past.
Several of us felt the door
is finally closed now.
This is a perfect way to end it.
Walk away from it.
It probably means we'll do
a film next week together.
The great thing about Python
is we could never believe our luck.
We were like a group
who met at school,
still allowed to do
these old schoolboy jokes,
misbehave, do silly voices,
before we got self-conscious,
before people started making
critical interpretations
of Python's work--
How we thrust aside
the barriers of comedy.
We're just a sniggering little group
who had a terribly good time
giggling at humanity.
Suddenly we've broken
comedic barriers.
We went a bit quiet then.
Thank you very much, young man.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the World Of History is proud
to present the premiere
the Batley Townswomen's Guild reen-
actment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor.