Footlights!       A Hundred Years Of Cambridge Comedy       By Robert Hewison

Foreword by Eric Idle

Comedy is a very odd activity.  To stand on a stage in front of hundreds of other people and make them laugh is a very strange thing to do.  For some bizarre anthropological reason, since earliest time a few people have found it necessary to be amusing.  Why should this be so?  Clearly when someone goes to such lengths to attract the admiration of strangers we can observe that they must feel desperately unloved, but this does not explain why we, the audience, should tolerate and actively encourage them in their weird behavior.  Nor why comedy should prove to be so popular or so universal.

It seems no coincidence that England, a land rich in absurdities, should be so rich in comedians.  Writing about comedy is difficult, but it is not half so difficult as writing comedy.  For example, I am writing in this room to which I have come every morning for the past few weeks, but today is different.  Today I have only to write about comedy, I don’t actually have to write the bloody stuff itself.  If I’m wrong when I’m writing about comedy then some minor critic in Penge will abuse me over his saltimbocca, but if I’m wrong when I’m writing comedy then – horror of horrors – nobody laughs: there is nothing but the sound of one hand clapping.  It is this potential result that gives comedy its edge.  It is a bit like tightrope walking.  You really have to do it to know it, and indeed that is also the only way to learn how to do it.

If it were nothing more than gilded youths dressing up as women then you could hardly be blamed for thinking of the Cambridge Footlights as an effete collection of privileged wankers.  It has from time to time been just that, but collectively it is far more than that, for it has proved to be a durable training ground for people who have gone on to become excellent in their own right.  This is Footlights’ triumph and its justification.  It is also preeminently a self-inventing form.  No University Official stepped forward and said ‘Let there be Footlights.’  In fact they have flourished so healthily without direct encouragement that this might be seen as yet another triumph for Cambridge subversion.

Comedy is a shared experience.  Without an audience it is nothing.  Far more so than tragedy, comedy is intimately connected with the audience’s response.  We weep alone, but we all laugh together.  It is this shared communality that makes it so powerful and so popular.  It is constantly reminding us of our own absurdity in this vast universe.  It is frequently to do with scale, cutting us down to size, laughing at our human weaknesses.  For a few moments it removes us from the prison of our own personalities, the trap of our own self-created selves, and unites us in a warm shared response by making us laugh at the trivia in which we continually enmesh ourselves.  It is an uplifting experience.  We are taken out of ourselves, and made to laugh at ourselves.  This is both slightly painful (laughing does hurt) and healthy (because it is done communally).  It is instant group therapy.

It achieves this effect by demonstration rather than persuasion.  We do not decide to laugh, we find ourselves laughing.  In the dark amidst hundreds of strangers we suddenly find ourselves united in a tribal explosion of noise, which begins in a shout of recognition and ends in the sound of a gurgling drain or a goose being strangled.  For a few seconds we are all barking mad together.

To be on the other side of a laugh, causing it, triggering it and feeling the great wave of human noise come back at you, is one of the most powerful and addictive sensations that there is.  It is a great welcoming sound that wraps round the performer, enmeshing him in approval.  He can learn to play with it, to toy with the audience’s expectations, to tickle the laugh, to surf along it, hold it back and then finally release it, but he can learn this only by doing it.  To be sure, such ability is partly instinctive – some people are just funny – but it can also be learned, or at least honed and improved by experience.  This is why a structure like the Footlights is so useful.  It is both a training ground, and a safety net, which prevents hundreds of people who are drawn to it but are otherwise unsuitable, from pursuing it too far.

This is the history of a comedy club.  A loose association of extraordinary people with almost nothing in common except that they all belonged to it.  Nothing dates faster than comedy.  Today’s topical witticism is tomorrow’s puzzled yawn.  From the many extracts in this book it is easy to chuckle at the sketches near our own time, but at the distant end of the century the humour is elusive and we can only stare blankly at the lines and wonder ‘Did they really laugh at this?’ I think the reason for this is quite simple.  Comedy consists of two elements:  the content and the manner.  The content is the contemporary trivia of day-to-day shared experience from which the comedian draws his material.  The manner is the secret that belongs to the performer.  An odd mixture of ‘timing’ and a strange persuasive power which reassures the audience and lulls them into a state of confidence in which they can accept that that virtually anything he says is funny.  Looking at old scripts we are left only with what they said, not how they said it, and that is to miss perhaps sixty percent of the comedy.  A good comedian can make you laugh at almost anything.

The value of Footlights for me was that, while learning about content, how to write, rewrite and cut sketch material, I still had to  go out and learn performing in front of quite difficult audiences.  In my short time there I experienced almost every kind of audience.  We performed cabaret professionally at least twice a week.  We played in theatres, we played at Edinburgh Festivals, before factory audiences, before dinner-jacketed hoorays and ball-gowned debs, in Butlin’s holiday camps, before drunks, before dinner, before Round Table businessmen, and ultimately in radio and television studios.  Had one sat down to plan a crash course in show business one could hardly have bettered this as a learning experience.  A University which permits such activity is clearly doing its job, by doing absolutely nothing.

Despite repeated complaints about the Footlights – that it is somehow too professional (but then who wants amateur comedy?); that it is elitist (though nobody laughs because they are impressed by the social rank of those on stage); that it is privileged (nobody laughs out of kindness either); and that it is undergraduate (they are after all, undergraduates) – it has nevertheless self-created its own tradition.  A tradition which seeks after excellence, and then seeks to hide that excellence.  (Ars est celare artem.)  The measure of the Footlights is that it is continually reinventing itself.  It is impressive that with no encouragement from the University, no financial support, no grants nor University premises, and with hardly any real continuity except for a few dedicated officers (take a bow Harry Porter), it should survive for a hundred years.

We should be grateful to Robert Hewison, a man who has suffered the advantages of an Oxford education, for so excellently researching and writing the history of Cambridge humour.

Eric Idle

Sydney 1982

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576767.Footlights_

Fifty years ago today I met John Cleese.  That’s odd isn’t it?   I suppose most of you can’t even imagine what fifty years looks like.  It’s hard for us to imagine time.  Only the mirror tells its relentless tale.  But yes, half a century ago, in February 1963,  John Cleese walked into my life and, although I didn’t know it at the time, my life changed.  Not immediately, but  irrevocably.

Even odder was that I was performing his material when he first saw me. I had no idea who he was, or that, at 23, he was a senior member of The Footlights, for I was just a 19 year old freshman at Cambridge University and I had been chosen at the start of my second term to be in the Pembroke “Smoker.”  A Smoking Concert is a College revue,  in this case held annually in the Old Hall, and the only reason that John wasn’t on stage was that though he wined and dined in Pembroke nightly and everyone assumed he was at Pembroke, he wasn’t actually a member of the College.  Pembroke had a great comedy tradition and it was not long since the great Peter Cook had reduced everyone to giggling heaps.

So, February 1963.  This is even pre- Beatles!  They are still getting hammered in Hamburg and we have never heard of them.  Indeed we are only into “cool” jazz, Miles Davis, John Coltrane that sort of groove.  Imagine, then, a not particularly large room, an ex-19^th Century Library, with gabled windows and leaded glass, packed with tables and candles, undergraduates and their dates dressed to the nines, a lot of wine and a great deal of smoke.   A small raised platform in one corner was the stage and on it performed the cast, led by Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie (later to become The Goodies).  There was one very funny girl (Carol), Jonathan Lynn, a pianist and one fresh faced young newcomer:  me.   One of the sketches was an Old Testament Newsreader played by Bill, called BBC BC.

 “Good even.  Here beginneth the first verse of the News.  It has come to pass that the seven elders of the seven tribes have now been abiding in Sodom for seven days and seven nights. There seems little hope of an early settlement.   A spokesman for the Tribes said only a miracle can save us now. The news in brief :Lamentations Four 18-22 and 2 Kings 14  2- 8

And now a look at the weather…

 I played the Biblical Weather Forecaster.

“Good even.  Well it’s been a pretty rough week in the Holy Land hasn’t it? Anyway let’s just take a quick look at the scroll. We’ve got a plague of locusts moving in here from the NW they’re going to be in the Tyre and Sidon area by about lunchtime tomorrow. Scattered outbreaks of fire and brimstone up here in Tarsus and down here in Hebron oh and possibly some mild thunderbolts force two to three in Gath.  Down in the south, well Egypt has had a pretty nasty spell of it recently 17 or 18 days ago it was frogs followed by lice, flies: a murrain on the beasts, and last Tuesday locusts and now moving in from the SSE –  boils. Further outlook for Egypt well two or three days of thick darkness lying over the face of the land – And then death of all the first born.            Sorry about that Egypt.”

I didn’t know it at the time but that part was written by John Cleese for himself and afterwards in the euphoria a very tall man in a thick tweed suit with dark hair and piercing dark eyes was introduced to me by Humphrey Barclay.  He was very kind and complimentary, and indeed encouraging, for both of them urged me to come along and audition for The Footlights at their next Smoker.  I had never heard of The Footlights, A University Revue Club founded in 1883, but it seemed like a fun thing to do and a month later Jonathan Lynn and I were voted in by the Committee, after having faced the ordeal of performing live to a packed crowd of comedy buffs on the slightly more glamorous Footlights stage, in the private Footlights Club, above fishy smelling MacFisheries.   I remember the sketch played surprisingly well, and one strange detail: in the front row, lounging on a sofa laughing rather drunkenly with some Senior Fellows was Kingsley Amis.

I soon adapted to Footlights Club life.  We had our own private bar which opened at ten at night and stayed open as long as we wanted.   (Pubs closed at 10.30)   Lunches were provided inexpensively on the premises and twice a term there were Smoking Concerts where one could try out new material.  I soon learned a very valuable lesson in performing, for one day I picked up a headmaster sketch by John and read it and didn’t find it very amusing.  That night he performed it and killed.  Brought the place to a standstill.  So much is confidence, and how you do it.  That was the most valuable thing about The Footlights: learning the art of writer/performing by watching and doing.  That year’s Annual Revue, which ran for two weeks during May Week at The Arts Theatre, was the funniest thing I had seen since Beyond The Fringe.  It was called A Clump of Plinths, a very Cleese kind of title, and John stood out head and shoulders amongst a great cast.  The thing was that, unlike the others, he never ever let on that he was being funny.  He was always deadly serious, the deadest of deadpans.  I watched in amazement and sheer joy.   The show toured the UK and then was picked up by Michael White and put into the West End under the title Cambridge Circus.   (How could I possibly imagine Spamalot would open at the same theater 44 years later?)  By then the gangly pipe-smoking Graham Chapman had joined the cast and they would take the same show to Broadway, and then run off Broadway for several months.

This gave me my big break, for they were supposed to go to the Edinburgh Festival in mid-August and urgently needed a replacement cast. Humphrey Barclay sent me a telegram which, amazingly, found me hitch-hiking around Germany.  I was requested to report immediately to Cambridge for rehearsals.  We took that same material to Edinburgh under the title Footlights ’63 and were a smash hit, attracting rave reviews from the top London critics.  “They attract admiration as effortlessly as the sun attracts the flowers” (Harold Hobson, Sunday Times.)  Amazing how you never forget those first reviews!  By then we were living in a cold-water walk-up flat six stories up and girls were beginning to play songs by something called The Beatles…..

At that same Festival we checked out the Oxford Revue (our rivals) and there I first met the lovely, funny, Terry Jones.   A year later at the same venue I met the unforgettable Michael Palin.  Albeit unknowingly by September 1964 all the future Pythons (save for the wild card American animator) had met and admired each other.

A couple of years later we were all writing professionally for The Frost Report, a very funny live TV show in which John starred.   And the rest is history.  Well social history.   Well comedy history.  Which may very well not actually be history at all but which changed the face of my life.

And now we’re still here, and it’s amazing to look back and think about it all.   So thank you John, for all the laughs, all the funny material, all the support and great lessons in comedy which you generously gave to all of us who had the pleasure of performing with you.

You were always the funniest, and always the most serious.  I am eternally grateful for the trip.

Happy Anniversary.

Love

Eric

L.A.

February 2013

There was a young man in his prime

Rich and fair

Rich and fair with golden hair

The fairest Prince in all the land

And all the ladies sought his hand

For they all saw

That no one wore his clothes so well

And all could tell

That he danced well

And rode his horse

And he was very rich of course

And handsome as the day is long

And Ta ra la he sang his song

And played his lyre

While girls conspire to be his bride

Everywhere

For he was very rich and fair

With golden hair

And one fine day

In the month of May

This rich young man in all his pride

With his best friend by his side

Fell off his horse

And died.

There’s been a lot of silly talk about Python re-unions, and whether a few Pythons doing a few Voice Overs constitute a genuine Monty Python film (duh, of course not) so I thought I’d share what happened the last time there was a real attempt to make a Python Movie.  It was in 1997 and I had come up with an idea called The Final Crusade.  I liked the idea of a film about a group of grumpy old men being pressured to get back together again for a last quest, as it would allow us to mock ourselves.  So I sent them all a draft outline of what such a thing might look like. (See Previous Blog.) Surprisingly there was a very positive response, even from John, so I went down to visit him in Santa Barbara and we had a splendid lunch and then a walk on the beach, and he expressed genuine interest in the idea, enough to encourage everyone to meet up in England.  Unfortunately by the time we all got together at a hotel in Buckinghamshire he had changed his mind.

When I got back I wrote about it for PythOnline, and here is what I published then.

Fear and Loathing in Buckinghamshire

5/24/1997

What a delight it all was, a twenty-four hour Python re-union at Cliveden, a spectacular Mansion rising above the River Thames in Buckinghamshire, built by George Villiers in the reign of Charles the Second.   I don’t think I have laughed so much since… well since the last time Python met, and no one can quite remember when that was, seven, ten years ago?

I hurried in from London by cab.  Gilliam was already there having flown overnight from LA where he begins shooting Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Johnny Depp in less than seven weeks.   Mike arrives by Mercedes, Terry Jones in some kind of battered Audi, and finally John arrives in his Bentley.  Everyone hugs and handshakes as they come in.   John ignores us and goes off to his room.  Ah, the same effusive Python as ever.   We all have splendid staterooms.  Mine was the former billiard room and is called the Mountbatten Room, named I assume after the legendary “Leggy” Mountbatten, which is highly appropriate as I am still limping following an operation in March.   You can just about see the oak-paneled walls from the bed.   The ceiling is like a Renaissance palace.

About a mile away, along long and windy corridors hung with portraits of the Astors, we have a Business Conference Room booked for twenty four hours, which comes complete with a black-tied, morning-coated gentleman, who rapidly fills our orders for cappucini and snacks.   Gilliam fiddles with the high tech controls and makes the curtains open and close several times, plunging the room into darkness.  He then discovers the projecting sketch pad and proceeds to doodle, throwing great outlines on a screen which fills one side of the room.   Is there any other major film director so endearingly silly?

The first two hours seem exactly like old times, as Graham is still absent.

“He’s off writing a series for Ronnie Corbett” someone quips.

His lateness was legendary.  In fact it seems altogether appropriate that he now really is the late Graham Chapman.

The meeting opens with a shock:  John announces that he does not want to do a film.  Gilliam, who has flown overnight all the way from LA, raises a weary eyebrow.   “Don’t you think you might have mentioned this sooner?”

Cleese remains unflappable.  “I’ve only just realized” he says.  “I simply hate filming.  I am going to retire to a beach and read books.”

Gilliam giggles.  The line does seem very familiar from old Python meetings.  Later when John informs us he can’t meet in the spring as he will be “filming in New York” several heads snap up.  Filming?  Aha, so it’s just filming with us he doesn’t want to do.   By then though we had wrested several concessions out of him.   At Mike’s gentle prodding he conceded that he would be prepared to do three weeks filming.   Terry J. thought that might be sufficient.   We decided to discuss the idea anyway since two of us had flown across the Atlantic for this meeting.   Besides, a simple creative discussion would legitimize this whole thing as a tax write-off.

Ideas began to flow just like the old days.   After a short while John began to nod off.   His eyes closed.   His attitude was clear, this was a day off, nothing was going to come between him and relaxation.  We continued to throw ideas around.   John slept on regardless.    After a short nap he suddenly woke up and looked around bleary eyed.

“The thing is I’m very tired” he said.

We encouraged him to go off and lie down.  He accepted the offer gratefully and went to his room.  Now the ideas began to flow quite fast.

“We should just make the Do Not Adjust Your Set film” said Jonesy.

It was true, the four of us had been in rooms writing together since the mid-Sixties.   It felt comfortable and familiar.

“Let’s get it down” I suggested, grabbing a marker and writing Act One on the fresh paper on the Executive Board.   I outlined the first beat in a different color.  Now it really was tax deductible.   Of course this being Python the first idea immediately went off in the wrong direction and I was forced to start writing before Act One.

“Typical Python” I said.

“That’s right” said Michael “start at the beginning and work backwards!”

All concerns that we might no longer be funny fell away as we carved and chalked and marked and a rough shape grew on the Executive Board.  In fact only the return of John from his nap stopped the flow and by then we were well into Act Two.    John seemed rather dazed and suddenly wanted to discuss Las Vegas, and so we abandoned the creative and turned to the planning stage again.   John was proposing that we spend a month together “leisurely writing some new material for a new show.”   Several of us pointed out the unlikelihood of this ever happening, and indeed the simple fact that an audience needs to see familiar Python material.   Everyone hates that moment in a concert when the old British group say “and now here’s some new stuff from our latest album…”

“The very point of concerts,” I argue “is their predictability.  It’s like Church, it’s important the audience know what is going on.   It’s a ritual.  They don’t want new material.”

It’s agreed that Jonesy will draw up a list of new old material for consideration.  Someone suggests we do the Hollywood Bowl again.  Someone else suggests we play a tiny venue like Littlehampton.  Gilliam is keen on planning elaborate Vegas type effects.   John suggests we come on in wheelchairs with a coffin.  Everyone agrees there should be showgirls.   It’s getting late by now and John proposes a walk.   We’ll meet up later for cocktails and dinner.   We haven’t done badly.  In four hours we have outlined a movie and proposed a way of going forward towards a Vegas Re-Union Concert.  Of course no one is exactly committed to anything at all, but still, it is now genuinely tax deductible, and the laughs have been great.

Dinner is even more hilarious.  Fortified by some Crystal Louis Roederer (’89) a tax-deductible gift from our Management Company, a white Macon enjoyed by Jonesy, (itself the recipient of much caustic abuse from John) we leave the Blue Gainsborough Withdrawing room and withdraw into the large ornate gilded Dining Room.   John calmly orders two bottles of red, the more expensive of which is roundly condemned by Jonesy, and which indeed is rather uninteresting at over a hundred quid the bottle.  The second is a much more spectacular Chateau Eric Cantona, at least I think that’s what it was, several bottles came and went, though I clung gamely to the champagne.  (I am a champagne teetotaler I discover.)    After much laughter, very tolerable risottos, oysters, salmon, Chateaubriand  (Chateau Brian?) and  some fine cheeses, John announces he is ready for bed.   I think he quite enjoyed himself.

It’s still early once John retires so we decide to have one more bottle of Chateau Cantona in the Snooker room.

“Terry’s v. the rest” yells Michael, and so on Lady Astor’s table where Christine Keeler had once lain naked and brought down a Conservative government we banged our little red balls around.

It soon became evident that while we were all fairly hopeless at snooker, the two Terrys were more hopeless than anyone.   Balls shot off the table, leaped spectacularly over other balls, banged into the balks accompanied by shouts and curses, anywhere and everywhere except in the holes provided.   After an hour or so things began to sink for me and Mike and I sailed into an unassailable lead of 40 – 3.

“Right” said Jonesy in a masterly Zen way “time to stop thinking” and he instantly slammed in a red.   Within a few minutes, and aided by a generous helping of foul shots from me, he rolled up the blue, pink and black in consecutive shots and the Terry’s had won!    Unbelievable.  Never trust film directors.   Mike and I as befits our lowly status as mere actors, were nauseatingly decent about it.   This contrasted starkly with the two Terrys’ habit of jumping up and down and screaming abuse at Michael as he attempted to pot.   I expect that’s allowed in the rules though.   I’m sure the Duke of Buckingham behaved that way, and God knows the lucky fellows who ploughed the lovely Christine Keeler on that table must have made quite a noise…

So to the very big question: will we or won’t we?   To be honest I haven’t a fucking clue.  I think Mike, Terry J. and I agreed to come up with a first draft screenplay by sometime next year.   John proposed another re-union in mid-September when TG finishes his shoot. He is alternately happy to see us and very keen to leave, but he is very endearing in his old age. One thing for sure, we are all still happily bonkers.  Lack of money has not spoiled us.   Also we are all still funny.   Hilarious in fact, though you may have to take my word for it.   The banter was incessant, affectionate and deeply personal.    It was a great re-union.  I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.   I do hope we can all make another one.

Postscript

This was published on PythOnline in 1997.  Nothing came of the film. The distances were just too great and by this time we hadn’t worked together in 15 years.  It certainly wasn’t John’s fault, but with the death of Graham in 1989 John had lost both a friend and a peer.  Graham was in many ways the glue that bonded the older 1948 Show pair with the younger and more unruly Do Not Adjust Your Set quartet.  Without Graham John had no one of his age or generation to turn to for sympathy or advice.  I understand his isolation and lack of enthusiasm now.  I would continue to work on PythOnline at Seventh Level where I became Producer of a CD-ROM game based on The Holy Grail which would open my eyes to the potential of adapting this Python material into other forms, a quest that ultimately led to Spamalot.

We would all have a glorious re-union at the Aspen Comedy Festival in 1998 and another very fine and funny re-union in New York in 2009.  Despite newspaper reports to the contrary we all still get on very well.