for him to do, whereas Ian was very responsive to all our ideas, especially if we had him do something different. He would be at home with the anti-authoritarian aspect of it, which was something he liked and rather identified with, whereas I think John Howard Davies was much more identified with BBC structure as it was then. He wasn’t the kind to be taking risks; he was an organization man.
Ian would take some risks. Ian was always somebody outside the organization, probably because of his lifestyle: he was a Scottish actor, he didn’t see himself as a metropolitan London man at all, which helped, because Python was never metropolitan. As Barry Took once pointed out (which was very acute), all of the Pythons come from the provinces and none of us were Londoners. We all saw London in a sense as slightly the enemy, a citadel to be conquered, and of course Ian was definitely from Glasgow – he had this anti-metropolitan attitude, which helped us.
CLEESE: Well, I suspect my view on this is rather different from the others’, because I thought John Howard Davies was very good. But he wasn’t as skilful with his cameras as Ian was; Ian was a very visual director. John was a very, very good judge of comedy. He wasn’t a tremendously verbal person, but his instincts were extraordinarily good, and he was very good at casting. So I had a lot of respect for him to do comedy, but I know that the more visually oriented people felt that the show took a big step forward (from the point of view of form as opposed to content) when Ian took over. And I thought Ian was pretty good, but I never thought he was particularly expert in the direction of comedy. He was always more bothered by how he was going to shoot it than he was about whether the sketch was really working or not, whereas John Howard Davies’ focus on just those first four shows he directed was more towards the content, even if he didn’t actually shoot it so well.
GILLIAM: Ian had worked with Spike Milligan, that’s why we liked the idea of Ian coming in. He wasn’t forced upon us; we lucked out. Ian worked, because he put up with things. Everybody pushed him around. I like Ian a lot, I mean just his personality.
Ian held it together, but we would be constantly going, ‘Shit, why is the camera on that?’ But I think anybody would have been beaten up by us in the same way. He trotted on, he did it. If it had been left up to us, we couldn’t have done it, there’s just no way. We thought we could, but I’m sure we couldn’t have!
Ian MacNaughton directing Palin in ‘The Cycling Tour’.
LET’S GET THE BACON DELIVERED
As the group prepared for the first series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (which began recording in August 1969), the notion of applying a stream-of-consciousness style to the show’s content and execution was accepted.
PALIN: Certainly Terry Gilliam provided an example of how you could do stream-of-consciousness comedy in his animations, which he’d done on Do Not Adjust Your Set. We thought those were remarkable and a real breakthrough; there was nothing like that being done on British television. We loved the way the ideas flowed one into another.
Terry Jones was very interested in the form of the show, wanting it to be different from any other – not only should we write better material than anybody else, but we should write in a different shape from any other comedy show. And probably Terry Jones and myself saw (or were easily persuaded) that Gilliam’s way of doing animation maybe held a clue to how we could do it. It didn’t matter if sketches didn’t have a beginning or end, we could just have some bits here or there, we could do it more like a sort of collage effect. I remember that everyone was quite enthusiastic about this, but it would have almost certainly come from Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and myself.
GILLIAM: I think it was more like saying ‘no’ to certain things, and the first thing was ‘no’ to punchlines, which is a really critical thing. We’d seen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore doing so many really great sketches where they traditionally had to end with a zinger, and the zinger was never as good as the sketch. The sketch was about two characters, so in a sense it was more character-driven than plot-driven, [but] time and time again you’d see these really great sketches that would die at the end – they wouldn’t die, but they just wouldn’t end better [than] or as well as the middle bits. So very early on we made a decision to get rid of punchlines. And then Terry Jones was besotted with this cartoon I had done, ‘Beware of Elephants’, [in which] things flowed in a much more stream-of-consciousness way. Terry thought that was the shape that we should be playing with.
Spike Milligan had been doing some amazing things just before; his Q series in a sense really freed it up, playing with the medium of television, admitting to it being television, and commenting on that. We just continued to do even more of that than he had done, but once we agreed on the idea of not having to end sketches, and having things linked and flowing, it allowed us to get out of a sketch when it was at its peak, when it was really still good; we would laugh when it was funny and it would move on when it wasn’t funny. That also immediately made a place for me; it sat me in the middle, connecting things.
IDLE: We were young, and doing a show we would be in charge of for the first time. There were no executives. This freedom allowed us to experiment without having to say what we were trying to do – indeed, we didn’t have a clue what we were trying to do except please ourselves. This was the leitmotiv: if it made us laugh, it was in; if it didn’t, we sold it to other shows.
THIS YEAR OUR MEMBERS HAVE PUT MORE THINGS ON TOP OF OTHER THINGS THAN EVER BEFORE
JONES: The way we went and did the shows is, first of all we’d meet and talk about ideas. And then we’d all go off for like two weeks and each write individually or in our pairs. Mike and I tended to write separately and then get together, read out material to each other, and then swap over and mess around like that. So at the end of two weeks we’d all meet together, quite often downstairs in my front room or dining room, and we’d read out the stuff. That was the best time of Python, the most exciting time, when you knew you were going to hear new stuff and they were going to make you laugh.
GILLIAM: And so you get a sketch where John and Graham had written something and it got that far and it was really good, but then it just started dribbling; well, either you stop there, or maybe Mike and Terry would take it over with some ideas to patch it up. I always liked the fact that there was just a pile of material to start with all the time, because everybody would go their separate ways, come back, and there would be the stuff, [sorted into] piles: we all liked that pile of stuff, [we were] mixed on that one, we didn’t like that one.
You had to jockey for position about when and where a sketch was going to be read out, which time of the day; if it came in too early it was going to bomb. And you knew that if Mike and Terry or John and Graham had something they wanted to do, they wouldn’t laugh as much [at the others’ material]. And I was in a funny position, because I was kind of the apolitical laugh; I was the one guy who had nothing at stake because my stuff was outside of theirs.
IDLE: It seems to me since all comedians seek control we were a group of potential controllers. Obviously some are more manipulative than others, or cleverer at getting their own way. Cleese is the most canny, but everyone had their ways. Mike would charm himself
