explain in words what he was doing.
The writing was the most glorious fun. We would go away and write anything at all that came to mind for about two weeks, then get together for a day and read it all out. Then, what got laughs was in, and people would suggest different ways of improving things. This was very good, this critical moment. Then we would compile about six or seven shows at a go, obviously moving things too similar into different shows, and then noticing themes and enlarging on strands of ideas and then finally linking them all together in various mad ways that came out of group thought. This, as far as I know, was an original way of working which hasn’t been tried before (or since) and was unique to Python. Gilliam was there, too, as an individual non-writer, and whenever we were stuck we would leave it to him to make the links, which he would do.
PALIN: By [the time Python started] Terry and I were working separately; there’d be a couple of days just writing ideas down and then we’d get together, talk about things, so some of the sketches that were Jones and Palin would be entirely Jones or entirely Palin, but the other would add lines here and there. So it was good in that way; we were writing separately perhaps more than we had before.
I think we were all (certainly to start with) anxious to be generous to each other, and give each other time and due consideration. You know, it was important that everybody write something that was funny, otherwise it would have been very difficult, and generally I think everybody did. Spirits were pretty high. It was not difficult for some of those sessions to be happy at the way things were going because the material was fresh; we could chop stuff around and not be confined to the shapes of previous comedy shows; we were really getting some very nice, new, surreal stuff together.
The best sessions I remember were when we were just putting the whole lot into a shape, into a form. Certainly there would be some sketches that were still very conventional, and others would just be fragments. We’d have read the stuff out and then we’d try and put them together, follow this by that, and then, ‘Why don’t we introduce that Gambolputty character and then try to say the name “Gambolputty” later in the programme,’ something like that. ‘Yes, that’s right, he can come in and we do this, and then the Viking can come in and sort of club him or something.’ The idea of having characters in quite elaborate costume just coming in to say one word – ‘So’ or ‘It’s’ – in the middle of a bit of narration, all that seemed very fresh. We enjoyed that feeling of being able to clown around the way we wanted to. And the material coming in was (we felt) pretty strong and really unusual. Things like the man with three buttocks seemed just wonderful, especially because it was done in this very serious mode – bringing the camera around to see this extra buttock, and he’d say, ‘Go away, go on!’ – this man who’d agreed to go on television because he’s got three buttocks then getting rather sort of prudish about any talk about buttocks! Really nice ideas.
How did your own work habits change as you started working as part of a larger group?
PALIN: I wasn’t used to working like that, but basically I have such respect for the other writers. I mean, Graham and John were just writing the best sketches around at that time, so to be able to give them [something] they would then take away, one had absolute confidence. And the same usually with Eric; we’d worked together on Do Not Adjust Your Set. There was really, as far as I can remember at that early stage, very little wastage. I mean, sketches didn’t just disappear if someone screwed them up; it would happen: someone would take something away and it just didn’t work out, and we would similarly take other people’s ideas. It didn’t happen that much. And in the early shows John and Graham were still writing ‘sketchey’ sketches; ‘The Mouse Problem’ or ‘The Dead Parrot’. They came fully formed, four or five minutes of stuff which didn’t need to be changed, so very often it was just the links that would be our group. There wasn’t an awful lot of cross-writing.
If anything strengthened Terry and myself as a team, I think we felt this was highly competitive in a way it hadn’t been before. We’d send sketches to Marty Feldman or The Two Ronnies and someone somewhere would take a decision and you get the word back – ‘We love this, we don’t like this’ – we wouldn’t be in the room at the time, we wouldn’t be part of that process. Here, because we were writing the whole thing and performing it ourselves, the atmosphere was quite competitive. We felt we really had to get our ideas really right before they were read.
That was an interesting thing. We’d have a discussion the day before: ‘Shall we read this, shall we read that?’ Terry and I always wrote more than anybody else – a lot of it was of a fairly inferior quality – but we didn’t want to read the group too much because there was a certain point where you could see people getting restless: ‘And what have you got?’
‘Oh, we’ve got another six sketches!’
‘[Huffing] All right, we’ll have some coffee and then read these next six sketches for Mike and Terry!’
You had to be a bit careful about how you sold your stuff!
Were you at a disadvantage because you didn’t have a writing partner helping to ‘sell’ your material?
IDLE: No, no. The other teams had two people to laugh. But I had the advantage of working with myself, a far more interesting partner!
Comedy writing is done often in pairs, but I always found it boring. I occasionally worked with John (‘The Bruces’, Australian philosophy professors with a passion for beer and a distaste for ‘pooftahs’; ‘Sir George Head’, the mountaineering expedition leader with double vision) and a bit with Mike. But I like writing by myself.
Last time I looked, writing was always largely a solitary occupation. I like to write first thing in the morning and then stop when I feel like it. I don’t like to talk. I don’t much care for meetings. My favourite form of collaboration is with a partner on email who bounces back my day’s work. I think you need partners for shape, notes, and criticism.
CLEESE: I was the one who was having to write with Graham. Now I thought early on, before Graham’s drinking was any sort of a problem, it would be much more fun if we occasionally broke up into different writing groups; we could keep the material more varied. To some extent there was a Chapman/Cleese type of sketch (which was usually somebody going into an office of some kind and probably getting into an argument in which there would be quite a lot of thesaurus-type words), whereas Mike and Terry would nearly always start things where some camera would pan over Scottish or Icelandic or Dartmoor countryside and afterwards would get into some sort of tale. And Eric’s was largely one man sitting at a desk talking to the camera and getting completely caught up, as they say, disappearing up his own arse.
The result of this switching was that Eric and I wrote ‘Sir George Head’, and Michael and I wrote about Adolf Hilter standing for Parliament in Minehead. I thought those were rather successful. But there was a general resistance to that switching around, and maybe it was partly that nobody else wanted to write with Graham. I think he was regarded as my problem, which naturally I thought was a little unfair. But I think that Terry was always very keen to write with Michael, that it was quite difficult for him to let go of that. And Eric liked to write on his own because it gave him such autonomy – for instance, he could write when he wanted to. There are many good things to be said for that, because if you write with someone else it becomes an office job.
So I guess Terry wanted to reclaim Michael, and Eric maybe liked being on his own, and Graham was my problem; I guess that was the dynamic.
Did you and Terry ‘perform’ your sketches for the group
