I got to know Graham. And he and I (and I don’t remember how) started to write together, and most of the things I wrote at Cambridge after I met Graham were written with Graham.
And then at the end of that year he went to London to continue his medical studies at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. He used to do some moonlighting, a late-night revue (which I never saw) with a guy called Tony Hendra, in a little room above the Royal Court Theatre. Graham used to come up to Cambridge occasionally and we continued to write a bit. And then when the Footlights Revue of 1963, A Clump of Plinths, started, Chapman used to come and watch and I used to make him laugh!
Then on the opening couple of weeks two very nice men in grey suits, Ted Taylor and Peter Titheradge, turned up at Cambridge. They’d noticed that I’d written a large portion of the material and they offered me a job. I was never very committed to being a lawyer, so when these guys offered me £30 a week when I was facing two and a half years in a solicitor’s office where I was going to get £12 a week (which was not much money even in 1963), I took the BBC job. I wasn’t at all sorry to say good-bye to the law; it was easy to convince my parents that it was okay because this was the BBC so there was a pension scheme – it was almost like going into the entertainment branch of the civil service.
Later when the Footlights Revue (which obviously didn’t have Graham in it) transferred to London, Anthony Buffery did not want to stay with the show very long, and his place was taken by Graham.
Cambridge Circus, directed by Humphrey Barclay, was a smash in the West End in August 1963. The show featured Chapman, Cleese, and Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor (who would later form two-thirds of the Goodies), David Hatch, Jo Kendall, and Chris Stuart-Clark. Cleese followed the stage show with a knockabout radio programme, I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, which Barclay produced for the BBC. It borrowed not only material from Cambridge Circus butalso several of its stars: Oddie, Brooke-Taylor, Hatch, and Kendall.
CLEESE: That’s what I did for a time until Michael White, the guy who put Cambridge Circus on in London, got in touch with us all about the middle of the following year and said, ‘Would you guys like to come to New Zealand and probably Broadway?’ So we all gave up our jobs and joined up.
Graham interrupted his medical studies. He always had a nice story that the Queen Mother came to St Bart’s around this time to take tea with some of them, and he actually put his quandary in front of her, and said, ‘Should I go on being a medical student or should I go off to do this show in New Zealand and Broadway?’ And she said, ‘Oh, you must travel.’ So he came! We had fun in New Zealand, which was a strange part of the Empire: very refined and very well mannered and sort of stuck around 1910. I remember [in] one town you could not find a restaurant that was open after eight o’clock!
DAVID SHERLOCK: Graham was training at St Bart’s Hospital at the same time that Cleese was still training as a solicitor. A Footlights-type revue was brought every Christmas to the patients in the wards, with all the people Graham worked with – Cleese, Bill Oddie, Jo Kendall, all the cast of Cambridge Circus – moving from ward to ward. Graham often directed; later on, he worked with other young doctors who were equally talented.
Cambridge Circus had so many elements of Python – the anarchic humour, sketches which had no punchline. The New York show was produced by Sol Hurok, who was better known at that period for bringing ballet over to New York (the Royal Ballet, etc.). It turned out these almost-schoolboys were brought over specifically as a tax loss, and on the first night they were given their notice – which is a hell of a way to open in New York, particularly as I think Clive Barnes absolutely raved.
CLEESE: We were always puzzled because it got such good reviews, with the exception of Howard Taubman of the New York Times, the former sportswriter (which I always add!), and it got this terrific review from Walter Kerr, who then – when he heard we were coming off – wrote another to try to boost the audience, which was marvellous. We could never figure out why Hurok had bothered to bring us to New York and put us on, when after we got such good reviews he didn’t bother to publicize the show. Somebody said he was looking for a tax loss and I don’t know whether there was any truth to it, or whether it was the exact truth or whether it was a rumour.
After Broadway, we went and performed at a small theater club off Washington Square called Square East. And after a time we put together a second show, but Graham said, ‘I must be off.’ So he went back to England to continue his studies.
I stayed on, got invited to do Half a Sixpence with Tommy Steele for six months, and tried to have a journalistic career at Newsweek, but my mentor disappeared to cover a crisis in the Dominican Republic so I sort of resigned before I was fired. I did one more show which took me to Chicago and Washington, and then came back to England in the beginning of 1966.
The threads start to come together at the end of 1965. David Frost had called from the airport and said, ‘Would you like to be in a television show? There are two other guys who are very funny but they’re unknowns – Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett – and there’s me, and it’s a sketch show and I’d like you to be in it, and it starts in March.’ And I said, ‘Yes, please!’ I mean, I was astonished, it was just absolutely out of the blue. David was the only person in England who knew my work at all and who was in any position of power to give me a job, so it was very lucky.
While I was in America doing these other things, that’s when they got I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again together on a regular, organized basis, and they did one or two series with Graeme Garden, and when I got back in 1966 they asked me to join the team, and I was very happy to do it. But the big thing was the television show, The Frost Report, for a number of reasons: one was I had never been particularly picked out or noticed as being especially good on stage. The moment I appeared on television something else happened, and I can only assume that some of the acting stuff I did worked better in close-up than it did from the tenth-row stalls. Because the moment I appeared on television there was a bit of a rustle of interest, and I’d got used to there not being a rustle of interest. Because when Cambridge Circus started most of the reviews were garnered by Bill Oddie (who was singing songs which he did very, very well, and he also had a couple of very amusing parts like a dwarf in a courtroom sketch), and the next most successful guy was Tim Brooke-Taylor (who had two or three big funny set pieces). I picked up a few reviews along with David Hatch, but I was not singled out.
Did Graham write outside of his partnership with John?
SHERLOCK: Graham wrote links for Petula Clark when she was doing her early Sixties television show over here. Petula Clark, while being a wonderful singer, could not ad-lib at all. She was very frightened about opening her mouth on stage and not knowing what to say. So everything had to be scripted, all the links between the songs. So he had a close rapport with Clark, which is very funny, particularly when you see some of the Python sketches later on which reference her.4
CLEESE: So I’d got The Frost Report, and sitting at the scriptwriter’s table were five future Pythons: Mike and Terry tended to write visual, fill-in items, which we used to shoot during the course of the week and then they would be edited into the show. And Eric typically used to write monologues which Ronnie Barker often did. So the show frequently consisted of a filmed item by Mike and Terry, one or two sketches by Graham and me, occasional Ronnie Barker pieces by Eric, and then a lot of other material from another dozen scriptwriters, of whom the leader was Marty Feldman. Graham didn’t perform; Mike and Terry would probably say that he turned up in one of the filmed items at some point, but I don’t remember him.
We did these half-hour shows every week for thirteen weeks, each on a theme. Tony Jay, who founded Video Arts
