finish a film they were doing with Carlo Ponti or somebody like that and then take a holiday in Ibiza, leaving Terry and myself and Terry Gilliam to think more about a shape for the show. That would have happened during May or June of ’69; when they came back we actually started writing.
IDLE: I remember sitting on the grass in some London park idly discussing what we should do. Mike, me, Terry G., and Terry J. already had an offer to do an adult version of Do Not Adjust Your Set on ITV, but not for another year. John and Graham came with an offer to go straight ahead in the autumn. John was keen to get Mike, and we had him. John was not keen to do a show on his own that the BBC had offered him, therefore he came to us. Our decision was to blend the two shows: At Last the 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Set.
Mike said Cleese was interested. We met up with him and Graham in this park somewhere, [and] said, ‘Let’s do it.’ [We] went to the Beeb, who said, ‘Right you are, thirteen on air in September,’ and that was it.
It wasn’t like US TV at all! We didn’t have to do anything as stupid as selling a concept. There was no executive structure. They just gave us thirteen shows and said, ‘Get on with it.’ Executives only spoil things and hold back originality – that is their job.
CLEESE: The worst problem we had with the whole show was finding a good title for it. We had the first show written and we didn’t know what to call it, and we had a whole lot of fanciful titles: A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin, which I really liked; Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble and Boot; Owl Stretching Time; The Toad Elevating Moment. In fact, the BBC had started to call it The Flying Circus. They’d started writing it into their schedules, in ink, and so they said, ‘Well, could you call it The Flying Circus? Because otherwise we’d have to write out new schedules.’
Then we couldn’t decide who. We thought it might be Gwen Dibley’s Flying Circus, because she was a name Michael had pulled out of a newspaper, and then somehow we went off Gwen Dibley, I don’t know why – she could be famous now, you know? But somebody came up with Monty Python and we all fell about, and I can’t explain why; we just thought it was funny that night!
TOOK: I fended off the BBC, who were constantly whinging about how much it was going to cost. They just thought there was too many of them, they knew the animation would be very expensive, and they knew these guys had a lot of imagination and they’d rush off into the fields and film, they would have elaborate sets and all that, and they knew the whole bag of tricks would be very costly, as indeed it was. I said, ‘How much is in the budget for scripts?’ And they said such and such, and I said, ‘Well, split it in six and give them a sixth each. And how much for performing? Do the same thing. It won’t cost you any more.’
‘Well, we can’t because John Cleese gets more than Michael Palin.’
‘That’s irrelevant; if they’re going to do it they’re going to do it.’
I was about ten years older than the Pythons were and was regarded by them as a man who had a track record which was quite respectable, and I looked a fairly cheerful person. I could be objective. We used to have these meetings at my home in the study, and they used to come in, have tea and cakes and chat and discuss ideas, and they would argue and discuss and they would all agree, and then they would go home. An hour later, the phone would start: ‘Is this a bad move for me, is it worth doing?’ And I said to all of them, anybody who would ask me that, ‘Well, if it’s a success, it can’t possibly hurt your career, and if it’s a failure it’ll be off so fast that nobody within six months will remember it, so it won’t hurt your career at all.’
Were they confident in being able to carry the show by themselves?
TOOK: Well, yes, they’d been given free rein. They were told by the BBC, ‘Yes, you can do whatever you like, within reason, as long as it’s within the bounds of common law.’ I made the BBC make that statement to them so they wouldn’t feel threatened. And that was my role, then I got out of the way!
To see people with real talent using that talent to the full, it’s terrific and if I’ve been involved in somehow helping to shove that along I’m even more pleased. I suppose I remember my own struggles and how you need patrons and people who help you along in the beginning.
The only criticism that I actually had to face head-on was [from] the head of Light Entertainment, a man called Tom Sloane, [who] came into my office one day and said, ‘Excuse me, Barry, I’ve just been looking at a playback of Python. Does John Cleese have to say “bastard” twice?’ I said, ‘Yeah, if he wants to.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m just asking! I’m not trying to –’ He shut the door and went away. And that was that!
They were sort of a bit scared of me, and a bit scared of them because they’re a pretty high-powered bunch, as time has revealed.
Did the BBC know what they were getting with the Pythons?
PALIN: I think probably something like Dad’s Army1 was more up their street than Python, because we couldn’t tell them what we wanted to do – we didn’t know ourselves. Barry Took was very much involved in introducing us to the BBC as a group. Barry at the time was very interested in exporting British comedy to America, because Laugh-In had just come to England and made a big impression on BBC2, I think. And Barry knew George Schlatter, who was Laugh-In’s executive producer. They wanted to produce comedy shows in this country that would have that sort of effect in America. Which was ironic, because they said, ‘Well, we can’t show this at all’ (for the first few years anyway). And the BBC were not particularly committed to Python in the sense that ‘we need this sort of show’. They had lots of shows going on at Light Entertainment at the time.
So Barry just had to present us as decent, responsible young men who could produce this sort of wacky new show that we couldn’t quite describe but was going to be something very fresh.
The BBC did have a certain amount to go on: John was a big name for them, one of their new great discoveries of the Sixties, so whatever John wanted they considered that to be significant. The rest of us, I don’t think they particularly cared; we were journeymen scriptwriters. We’d done most of our shows for independent companies: Do Not Adjust Your Set, The Complete and Utter History, and for that matter, At Last the 1948 Show were all made for ITV companies, so we hadn’t really worked for the BBC except for The Frost Report. So their attitude was [to] take a gamble, saying, ‘Well, you know, you could do more good than harm letting these people produce a series.’
But the early steps were very faltering. For a start they gave us thirteen shows, which was quite a commitment, and then they immediately started trying to strangle us financially by offering pitiable money. And they regarded Gilliam as something quite unnecessary: ‘An animator? Who wants an animator? There’s no animators in programmes, what’s an animator going to do, for God’s sake? That’s Walt Disney, we can’t afford that!’ So they showed their confidence in Terry by giving him about a hundred quid a week extra to make these animations, and Terry couldn’t afford an assistant – he had to do them all himself.
ALL BRONTOSAURUSES ARE THIN AT ONE END, MUCH MUCH THICKER IN THE MIDDLE, AND THEN THIN AGAIN AT THE FAR END.
– (MISS) ANNE ELK
CLEESE: When I was working on The Frost Report I felt quite frustrated – not in a desperate, emotional sense, but held in – by
