cartoon. It was the first time I’d ever seen cutout animation, and it was Richard Nixon photographed with a foot in his mouth, trying to get it out. I thought it was outrageously funny. So on the show I said, ‘Why don’t I make an animated film?’ And they let me. And overnight I was an animator.
I had two weeks to do it in, and four hundred pounds. The only way I could do it in that time was using cutouts. I just did these silly things with these cutouts and nobody had ever seen that before on British television. And the result was instantaneous; within a week I had all these offers to do all this other stuff. That’s the power of that going out there and millions of people seeing your stuff.
Chapman in the delivery room, from The Meaning of Life.
LEAVE IT ALL TO US, YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT HIT YOU
How did the grouping of Python come about?
BARRY TOOK, BBC AND INDEPENDENT TELEVISION PRODUCER: Marty Feldman and I were sitting in an Indian restaurant. He had been working on The Frost Report with John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and I’d been working at Thames Television with Michael Palin and Terry Jones, and I said, ‘I’ll put my two Oxford chaps against your two Cambridge chaps.’ It started as a joke – hah hah hah – so I got home and I thought, ‘Hey, that’s not a bad idea.’
So I put it to Michael Palin, and he said yeah, he thought it’d be fine by him, but if it came off could he bring Gilliam and Eric Idle because they’d been working together at Thames on this children’s show, Do Not Adjust Your Set. And I took it to Cleese and Graham Chapman, and we got together and talked about it, and I went to the BBC.
CLEESE: So what happened – and I am fairly clear that my account is fundamentally right – after Graham and I had been laughing at Do Not Adjust Your Set every Thursday, we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do something with those guys, because they are the funniest people around.’ Connie had now been in England for a year and a half and had found her feet, so I didn’t feel guilty about going off to the studio for rehearsal. We rang them up – I rang them up, because when I say ‘Graham and I’ rang them up it always meant I did; Graham didn’t do that kind of thing, he’d sit there sucking on his pipe – and I suggested it to them, and they were a bit cautious. They didn’t say, ‘What a wonderful idea!’
I was told later that they’d had an offer from Thames Television, so they were making up their minds how to proceed. And then about two weeks later they rang back and said, ‘Okay, we’ve thought about it and we like the idea.’
Marty Feldman’s writing partner was Barry Took, and they’d written hundreds of very good radio shows together of which Round the Horne was the best known. Graham and I wrote a certain amount of stuff for Marty during that period when we weren’t performing, so I knew Barry a little and I’d always liked him, and I knew he was some kind of comedy advisor to the BBC. I spoke to Barry and said, ‘Look, I’ve talked to the Do Not Adjust Your Set people and we’d like to do something.’ And my partly constructed memory is that Barry said, ‘I’ll speak to someone.’
PALIN: I can remember John ringing me up and saying that he’d seen The Complete and Utter History of Britain that Terry and I did, and saying, ‘Well, you won’t be doing any more of those!’ – John’s estimation of The Complete and Utter History, which had been a partial success (or partial failure, according to which way you looked at it)!
Terry, Eric, and myself had all been contributors to The Frost Report, [but] I had worked as an actor with John and Graham on a thing called How to Irritate People which was made in 1968. I think this was the first time that I’d actually acted with John in sort of long sketches. John was pretty much a star in the television comedy world by 1968 because of The Frost Report and then At Last the 1948 Show, and I was very flattered that I was asked to go and do this show, because John was the best around – by far he was the most interesting, the most effective television comedy writer/performer around, as far as I was concerned. I think it was doing that that we realized that we enjoyed working together, we had a similar sense of humour, but also a similar attitude to comedy performing: playing it straight for laughs rather than to handle it too obviously. So that really brought John and myself together. I don’t think John had worked with Terry Jones, but he knew Terry Gilliam of course because he worked with him on that magazine in America.
So anyway this phone call came and I think it must have been early in ’69, John saying why don’t we do something together. I think not just because Complete and Utter History was over but [also] I don’t think John wanted to do any more of At Last the 1948 Show. I think he had had enough of those for whatever reason. Marty Feldman had gone on to be a big star, and I think John saw his future with a style of writing that Terry Jones and myself were doing being compatible with his and Graham’s writing.
TOOK: By then I had become the advisor to the comedy department at the BBC on what they called cheerfully a ‘peppercorn rent’, meaning they paid me nothing but I was allowed to steal; I didn’t steal because I’m not that sort of person, but I desperately wanted to get some shows together. Things were pretty flat [at that time] because David Frost had gone elsewhere, the Marty Feldman series was finished, and they had a show called Broaden Your Mind with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden which was a bit flabby.
I had seen Barry Humphries, the Australian, in a one-man show and thought he would make good material for television, and I had this idea of putting this Cleese/Chapman/Palin/Jones together. So I arrived at the BBC and they said, ‘Well, Barry Humphries was a female impersonator.’ I said, ‘He’s not, he’s a very broad, interesting comedian, he does all kinds of things, and Edna Everage was just one of his jokes’ – it came to overwhelm him in the end, but I mean in those days he had several characters. And they said, ‘Oh, this Palin and Jones, all that is much too expensive.’ I said, ‘You must do it, you’ve got to. Why the hell have you employed me? You said come in, bring us new ideas, I bring you new ideas, you say: We can’t do it. Too expensive.’
I thought, you can’t fiddle about with these guys, you’ve got to go for the throat, you’ve got to say, ‘You’ve got to do this!’ So my boss at the time, an eccentric man by the name of Michael Mills, said, ‘You’re like bloody Barry Von Richthofen and his Flying Circus. You’re so bloody arrogant – Took asks you a question, halfway through you realize he’s giving you an order.’
So it was known internally as Baron Von Took’s Flying Circus. It was then reduced to The Flying Circus and subsequently The Circus. All the internal memos said ‘The Circus’: i.e., ‘Would you please engage the following people at these prices dah dah dah.’ I have a copy of the memo somewhere which predates anybody else’s claim to have invented the name, it’s something I’m fairly jealous about – I mean, I don’t give a damn, but I did invent it.
When they wrote their first script, it was called Owl Stretching Time or Whither Canada? and Michael Mills said, ‘I don’t give a damn what it’s called, it’s called The Circus in all the memos – make them call it “something Flying Circus.”’
