sorts of shows, tons and tons of stuff.
Apart from your collaboration with Terry,
were you also writing on your own?
PALIN: Not really, there wasn’t time. We had to make money in those days, too. We’d just got married and [were] having children and all that sort of thing. I probably had days when I thought, ‘Today I’m going to start The Novel,’ or whatever. And then we’d be offered by Marty Feldman a hundred pounds a minute for this new sketch (that’s between the two of us). ‘A hundred pounds a minute? I don’t believe that, that’s fantastic, so we better write something for Marty!’ So that day would be spent writing something for Marty Feldman. So yeah, we were real genuine writers during that time, we worked as a team. Although the mechanics of writing were not necessarily that we would sit in the same room with a giant piece of paper and say, ‘All right, now we’re going to make a sketch.’
JONES: Originally when we’d been writing for The Frost Report and for Marty Feldman, Mike and I would go and read them through, they’d all laugh, the sketch would get in, and then you see the sketch on the air and they fucking changed it all! We’d get furious. There was one sketch Marty did about a gnome going into a mortgage office to try to raise a mortgage. And he comes in and sits down and talks very sensibly about collateral and everything, and eventually the mortgage guy says, ‘Well, what’s the property?’ And he says, ‘Oh, it’s the magic oak tree in Dingly Dell.’ And the thing went back and forth like that. Everybody laughed when we did it, and when we saw it finally come out on TV, Marty comes in, sits cross-legged on the desk, and starts telling a string of one-line gnome jokes. This wasn’t what the joke was at all.
What happens is that people (especially someone like Marty) would start rehearsing it, and of course after you’ve been rehearsing it a few times people don’t laugh anymore. And so Marty being the kind of character he was, he’d throw in a few jokes, and everybody would laugh again. And so that’s how things would accumulate. It was things like that that made us want to perform our own stuff. We sort of felt if it worked, you wanted to leave it as it was.
Humphrey Barclay1 asked if Mike and I would like to get together and do a children’s show with Eric Idle. We’d seen Eric in Edinburgh in my final year in the Cambridge revue, a young blue-eyed boy; he looked very glamorous on the stage as I remember! So we knew of Eric, but we’d never worked with him. The three of us wrote Do Not Adjust Your Set. It was basically a children’s TV show but we thought, ‘Well, we’ll just do whatever we think is funny, we won’t write specifically for children.’ And we had the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band in it.2 And then at the same time we were doing the second series of Do Not Adjust Your Set, Mike and I were also doing The Complete and Utter History of Britain for London Weekend Television.
PALIN: The Complete and Utter History had a narrative [like] a television news programme. You had someone in the studio describing events that were going on, and then the camera would go out ‘live’ to, for instance, the shower room leading out to the Battle of Hastings where all the teams were washing, cleaning themselves off, and talking about the battle, as if it were a current affairs show in 1066 or 1285 or 1415. It was a very simple set-up. So we could parody television a little bit, but on the other hand we had to accept the convention of a television show, which made it a much more regular shape.
JONES: My big hero is Buster Keaton because he made comedy look beautiful; he took it seriously. He didn’t say, ‘Oh, it’s comedy, so we don’t need to bother about the way it looks.’ The way it looks is crucial, particularly because we were doing silly stuff. It had to have an integrity to it.
One time on The Complete and Utter History, we were shooting the Battle of Harfleur, the English against the French, and we wanted to shoot it like a Western. It was parodying Westerns where you see the Indians up on the skyline; when you come closer they’re actually Frenchmen with striped shirts and berets and baguettes and bicycles and onions, things like that. And then the Frenchmen breathe on the English: ‘They’re using garlic, chaps!’ And the English all come out with gas masks. All pretty stupid stuff. But it was very important that it should look right.
Anyway we turned up on the location to shoot it, looking around with the director, actually it was a nice gentle bit of rolling countryside amongst the woods. I said, ‘Where’s the skyline? There isn’t a skyline, doesn’t look like America, it looks like English countryside.’ We were there, we had to shoot it, but it wasn’t the thing we meant to be shooting. It wasn’t a Western parody – that element was missing from it – so it looked like just a lot of silly goings-on in front of the camera. And it was at that moment when I realized you can’t just write it, you can’t just perform it, you’ve actually got to be there, looking at the locations, checking on the costumes – everything was crucial for the jokes.
Curiously, we thought Complete and Utter History was wiped.3 The only things that existed of that were the 16-millimetre film inserts which I collected, but in fact a couple of years ago somebody turned up a whole programme that had been misfiled. All the stuff filed under ‘Comedy’ had been wiped, but this was filed under ‘History’ and so it was still there! But it was quite odd seeing it again, after all those years, and how Pythonic it was, way more so than Do Not Adjust Your Set.
Terry Jones in The Complete and Utter History of Britain.
NOW WHICH ONE OF YOU IS THE SURGEON?
John Cleese and Graham Chapman met in the Footlights club at Cambridge, where they were studying law and medicine, respectively. Cleese had originally gone to university for science, but upon realizing it wasn’t for him, he found his choices limited to archaeology and anthropology (‘which no serious-minded boy from Weston-super-Mare would waste a university education on’), economics (‘which I couldn’t think of anything much more dreadful to study’), and law.
JOHN CLEESE: Graham and I met at Cambridge when we were both auditioning for a Footlights show, which would have been 1961, and we both auditioned unsuccessfully. And we went and had a coffee afterwards and the funny thing is I remember that I quite disliked him, which is not a reaction I have to most people. But it was odd that that was my first reaction to him. It was purely intuitive.
What I liked about Footlights (which numbered about sixty) is there was a wider cross-section, so you got English people but you also got scientists, historians, and psychologists. Also, there was much more of a mix of class. A lot of the other clubs tended to have a predominant class or predominant attitude; the Footlights crowd were very mixed and very good company, very amusing, and a lot less intense and serious and dedicated than the drama societies, who (it seemed to us) took themselves a bit seriously.
At the beginning of the following university year, a number of us arrived back at Cambridge and we went to the Footlights club room and in bewilderment we saw a notice board informing us that we were now officers! We had been in the club for such a short period of time that we’d not realized that almost everyone in the club had left the previous year. So I found myself registrar, Tim Brooke-Taylor was junior treasurer, Graham was on the committee, we all had these jobs (without having the slightest idea what they entailed), but it meant that we got pushed together because we had to run the club.
Chapman and
