Montry Python Speaks! The Complete Oral History
David Morgan, the author of this book, has studied the history of the six men who, apart from the one American member, Terry Gilliam, were students at Cambridge and Oxford and were active in the drama societies of their respective universities. After graudating they began, as individuals or in twos and threes, to create skits and sketches for various television programmes. To produce this book the author has viewed all the programmes and films made by the members of the group, either together or individually, and has interviewed its five surviving members – John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palon, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, the last being the illustrator and the only American in the group. One of the original members, Graham Chapman, died in 1989, following a struggle with alcoholism.
The book does its best to follow the rather erratic development of the comedy group, under the auspices of the BBC’s Light Entertainment programme, starting by acknowledging their debt to a zany radio show, The Goon Show, aired by the BBC in the 1950s and early 1960s, featuring Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and myriad sound effects. The whacky comedy of the Monty Python group developed from the comedic writing and acting talents of all six original members of the group. Each of the interviewees explains in turn how they came up with the name of the group and how they were encouraged by the BBC to put together a series of comic skits and create a programme, and then a series for television.
The comedy created by the group consisted of a quirky assemblage of stream of consciousness nonsense, satire, sex and violence, and the mark they made on popular culture is still felt today. Their shows, which began to be broadcast in 1969 and continued until 1974, were characterized by a complete lack of predictability and a total departure from the sit-com formula of most other television comedy programmes. In the series, which lasted for forty-five episodes, all six members of the troupe were both writers and comedians.
As a writing and performing group, they went on to create films, most prominent among them being And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Life of Brian (1979). At a later stage individual members created their own works. Thus, John Cleese wrote and acted in his television comedy series Fawlty Towers and the film A Fish Called Wanda, as well as numerous commercials; Eric Idle wrote and directed the musical show and film Monty Python’s Spamalot and wrote a novel The Road to Mars. Graham Chapman wrote A Liar’s Autobiography; Terry Jones (‘most likely of the Pythons to appear in drag’) has written about Chaucer and hosted the documentaries Ancient Inventions, The Crusades and Barbarians. Michael Palin has travelled just about everywhere and made entertaining and informative TV documentary programmes of his travels, and has also written two novels, Hemingway’s Chair and The Truth.
Despite the fact that each member of the group has developed his own individual career, they have managed to get together occasionally for TV performances and interviews and, most notably in 2014, for a series of five ‘farewell’ performances at London’s massive O2 arena, which seats an audience of 16,000. Although their acting talent was still in evidence, the effect of time and ageing could not be disguised. Nonetheless, this performance was achieved at a time when they were all well into their seventies and Terry Jones was battling the initial symptoms of dementia. The book ends by noting that their takings from those shows were sufficient to offset the losses they had incurred along the way due to mismanagement and legal penalties and fees.
