Biography: Monty Python didn't just burst out from a trapdoor in the back of a cartoon Victorian gentleman wearing a policeman's hat and ladies' suspenders, you know. Kevin Courtney reviews The Pythons Autobiography by The Pythons
Python, like any real person, has a history, and it's all here in this weighty, lavishly-illustrated tome, a veritable encyclopaedia of idiocy, a phantasmagoria of Pythoniana, a compendium of comedic anecdotes, a repository of rip-roaring yarns, a smorgasbord of silly stories and serendipitous encounters, chronicling the life of television's funniest and most ground-breaking comedy of the 1970s, Monty Python's Flying Circus.
For an entire decade, Python held British comedy in a chokehold, squeezing laughs out of the Spanish Inquisition, Proust, Hitler, Women's Societies, cheese shops, travel agents, general elections and cross-dressing barristers. The shows were quickfire, surreal and disjointed, and took a while to get noticed outside the stoned student body; but by the mid-1970s, every British (and Irish) teenager worth his salt could recite entire sketches verbatim - complete with silly voices. Python went on to conquer America, playing to packed houses at the Hollywood Bowl, and hitting box office gold with the movie The Life Of Brian. It all fell apart a bit in the early 1980s, just like a typical episode of Python, really, but the influence of the slithery beast is apparent in such modern comedies as The Fast Show, The League Of Gentlemen and Big Train.
The story is told by the circus ringmasters - John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, who wrote, produced and performed such timeless material as the Ministry Of Silly Walks, the Dead Parrot sketch, the Lumberjack Song, the Upper Class Twits of The Year and the Four Yorkshiremen; and by cartoonist Terry Gilliam, the troupe's American member, who created Python's classic animated sequences and went on to direct such films as Brazil and The Fisher King. Not only is it a comprehensive history of Python, but it's also a cracking chronicle of the golden age of British postwar comedy, as told by the people who rose through the comedic ranks to become the top brass of onscreen hilarity. There's a "seventh Python" here: writer, broadcaster and film critic Bob McCabe, whose unenviable task it is to string a coherent narrative from six disparate viewpoints, without losing sight of the humour, smartness and surrealism which distinguished Python.
Anyone who ever owned a copy of Monty Python's Big Red Book or The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok during the 1970s - and no self-respecting Pythonmaniac would have left them off their Christmas list - will enjoy dipping into this bumper book and reliving the Python experience, but there's also something here for anyone interested in the evolution of British television comedy. Before Monty Python's Flying Circus, the cast variously starred in such shows as Do Not Adjust Your Set, At Last The 1948 Show, I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again and The Complete And Utter History of Britain, a kind of precursor to Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Before that there was Cambridge Footlights and the Oxford Theatre Group, where the Pythons cut their comedic teeth, and where the godfather of television satire, David Frost, went in search of young writers and performers for his new series, The Frost Report, eventually bringing Cleese, Chapman, Palin, Idle and Jones onto his team.
Each Python recounts his childhood and formative years in post-war Britain (and one in baby-boom USA); Eric Idle talks about being funny at school to avoid being bullied by the bigger guys. Michael Palin reveals how he nearly signed up to study forestry: "Oh, yes, I want to be a lumberjack". John Cleese wanted to play soccer for Bristol City, and saw show business as a diversion from studying law. Terry Jones was told by his headmaster that "all actors were homosexuals and you could tell because they wore green suede shoes". Graham Chapman actually was gay, which didn't bother the other Pythons very much, but he was also a heavy drinker, which did bother them just a tad. Chapman died of cancer in 1989, and his story is pieced together through various sources, including his own 1980 autobiography, and through his brother, Dr John Chapman (Graham was also studying medicine but jacked it in for comedy), his sister-in-law, Pam Chapman, and his long-time partner, David Sherlock.
The Pythons Autobiography is a life-affirming tale of how a bunch of highly-educated buffoons managed to subvert television comedy and write their own rules, albeit often without a plot, a coherent narrative, a punchline or even a proper ending.
"Comedy's done best when it's an anarchic conspiracy with people communicating and encouraging and egging each other on," says Eric Idle. This anarchic lot egged each other on into immortality, and turned modern comedy into something, well, completely different.
Kevin Courtney is a journalist and a critic
The Pythons Autobiography by The Pythons. By Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin with Bob McCabe Orion Books, 360pp. £30