Happy Birthday, Monty Python
Thursday October 7 1:29 AM ET
dailynews.yahoo.com
By Paul Majendie
LONDON (Reuters) - And now for something completely different -- ''Owl Stretching Time'' or maybe
''The Toad Elevating Moment.''
''The worst problem we had with the whole show was finding a good title for it,'' confessed English
comedian John Cleese, one of the creators of ''Monty Python's Flying Circus.''
The show changed the face of television comedy, spawned a string of hit films and became a cult classic for fans who
reveled in the absurd and surreal stream of consciousness.
Now the quirky masterpiece is celebrating its 30th birthday with a one-off British television special and a biography of the
comic geniuses who tell how they created the show and what they thought of each other.
''I am the only real nice one,'' declares Eric Idle, one of the sharpest contributors to David Morgan's ''Monty Python
Speaks'' which tells of the rise and rise of Cleese, Idle, Terry Gilliam, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones and Michael Palin.
Idle, asked to sum up his fellow Pythons, concludes with tongue firmly in cheek: ''Gilliam is one of the most manipulative
bastards in that group of utterly manipulative bastards.'' said Idle, now a Hollywood writer.
''Michael is a selfish bastard. Jonesy is now shagged out and forgets everything and Graham, as you know, is still dead.''
Like the Beatles, The Pythons always promised -- in the words of one of their sketches -- that nudge, nudge, wink, wink,
they would say no more.
DEAD PARROT
But, three decades after launching the lunacy of the Dead Parrot, The Ministry of Silly Walks and Instant Leprosy, the
Pythons have lifted their veil of silence to create some new material for a BBC anniversary show.
This time they will be adding some boiling nuns and dancing stockbrokers for the one-off television theme night on October
9.
The six Pythons were merciless judges of their own sketches. ''If it made us laugh, it was in; if it didn't, we sold it to other
shows,'' Idle recalled.
The comedy chemistry clearly worked. Cleese, who went on to further international stardom with the hit comedy ''A Fish
called Wanda,'' said: ''We really make each other laugh more than anyone else makes us laugh.''
But that chemistry had a delicate balance. ''One didn't want one person to dominate,'' said Palin, who has since hosted a
string of successful television travel shows.
From Canadian lumberjacks confessing they were transvestites to a quiz starring Karl Marx and Che Guevara, they turned
anarchy into a fine art and became a major influence on American stars such as Steve Martin and John Belushi.
Critics waxed lyrical about how the show loved to prick the pomposity of British society. But feminists attacked its
one-dimensional portraits of women as sexual stooges.
The Pythons, who loved to dress in women's clothing, were unrepentant about their political incorrectness.
''Everybody wanted to go out there and put the dress on,'' Palin said.
Idle agreed: ''We would happily grab most of the girls' parts for ourselves. Serve 'em right too. Get their own bloody
shows! How many men are in the Spice Girls?''
They all remembered with a mixture of fondness and exasperation their fellow writer and performer Graham Chapman, who
died of cancer in 1989.
GENUINE OUTSIDER
''Graham was a genuine outsider,'' Palin said. ''He was a very strait-laced man who was homosexual and an alcoholic all
at the same time and therefore found himself constantly in conflict with people and so he would fight back.''
They certainly paid the penalty for fame, particularly the rubber-limbed and angular Cleese.
Cleese, mocked by the other Pythons for being a headmasterly control freak, said: ''You know when you do something and
it catches on and everybody likes it, then for the next eight years you creep out of your house at 8.30 in the morning -- 'Oi,
do your funny walk here, John' -- Just painful.''
Biographer Morgan's most intriguing idea was asking the Pythons what they thought of each other.
Cleese was quick to pick Palin as the most likeable and effective performer. Gilliam, now a successful film director, loved
Idle the cheeky chappy and razor-sharp writer.
They all stood back from filmmaker Terry Jones' fizzling energy and stroppy determination to win an argument.
American Terry Gilliam, the zany cartoonist who gave Python a whole new dimension with such gems as Conrad Poohs and
his Dancing Teeth, was teasingly summed up as ''the monosyllabic Minnesota farm boy.''
But all, to a man, had the toughest time convincing Americans that the off-the-wall show was not written while they were all
out of their heads on mind-blowing drugs.
And, all treasure the memory so neatly encapsulated by Terry Gilliam: ''You've got six egos that are all pretty strong and
yet all working together, which astonishes me. It still gets me.''
But it was Idle who brought the nostalgic musing to an abrupt halt when asked what is the one thing he would save from his
career. ''My penis,'' he unhesitatingly replied.
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