<\/p>\n
Life has a very simple plot<\/p>\n
First you\u2019re here<\/p>\n
And then you\u2019re not.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I was working on a lyric when the mail thing dinged and distracted me. Fortunately the Person from Porlock now has his own website, and can interrupt almost anyone anywhere in the world who is writing.\u00a0 Oh sure my poem is not exactly Khubla Khan<\/em> but it\u2019s a start.\u00a0 And by the way, for those of you following the obscure Coleridge references, don\u2019t you think that the Person from Porlock must have been his Dealer?\u00a0\u00a0 Why else would he stop and answer the door?<\/p>\n \u201cOh hello Mr. C. I got some really nice opium this week\u2026Some reds, and a hemp enema\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThank God you came man, I was waffling on about caverns measureless to man, desperate for something\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Anyway, my<\/em> interrupter was a P.R. Person from Porlock.\u00a0 Well Porlock Place, just by the BBC.\u00a0\u00a0 I promised what?<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019d write a piece for The Telegraph.\u00a0\u00a0 By when?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Shit.\u00a0 On what? A History of the Pythons<\/em> from my personal view?<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 Oh God, no. \u00a0\u00a0Say it ain\u2019t so.\u00a0\u00a0 Can\u2019t I write about Coleridge?\u00a0 What can I say about Python that hasn\u2019t been said, read or written about ad infinitum?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sure we weren\u2019t as funny as Coleridge but we didn\u2019t have half the laudanum he took\u2026.<\/p>\n Writing about Python is self serving and vain, I said, and there are bad things about it as well; but these PR people are agents of the devil and she would not be shaken off. I have to cough up some tendentious memories of the Old Cleese Snake Gang or they won\u2019t print what we really want, which is to seduce you into coming to see Not The Messiah, (He\u2019s a Very Naughty Boy)<\/em> at the Royal Albert Hall on October 23rd where I am appearing with my Spamalot<\/em> co-creator John Du Prez, who will be conducting 260 musicians: The BBC Symphony Orchestra, The BBC Chorus, and Pipers from the Royal Scots Guards, as well as Michael Palin in full drag, Terry Jones as a Welsh Miner, Terry Gilliam as a Mexican and Carol Cleveland and Neil Innes, in a full Choral re-telling of The Life of Brian<\/em> in Oratorio form: a kind of cross between The Nine Carol Service, The Messiah and The Last Night of The Proms.\u00a0\u00a0 And yes there are sheep, and candles and angels and snow and even Bob Dylan and what<\/em>?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I really have to say something about Monty Python now.<\/p>\n Alright. Let me say simply that if you are going to roll around in pig shit in drag on top of the Yorkshire moors, or gallop around Scotland on imaginary horses in soggy woolen armour, or intend to be crucified for three days in Tunisia, then these are the finest bunch of chaps you could ever wish to roll, ride or be crucified with.\u00a0\u00a0 The irrepressible Palin, the ebullient Jones, the mercurial Gilliam, the aloof Cleese, the implacable Doctor Chapman puffing placidly on his pipe:\u00a0\u00a0 this was a gang to be in all right.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And it was<\/em> a gang, not just a Gang Show, and in angry mood storming around the Television Centre looking for a confrontation with Management, fully grown BBC executives would hide.<\/p>\n There were only supposed to be thirteen shows. The group fell together almost accidentally in early 1969 when the Children\u2019s show Do Not Adjust Your Set <\/em>rammed into the remnants of a Marty Feldman-free At Last It\u2019s The 1948 Show,<\/em> scooping up the pieces into a bizarre and unlikely team, which found it could communicate easily and criticize freely, and largely without rancour,\u00a0 and while we had no idea what we wanted to do with this new show the BBC had so casually granted us, we did<\/em> know what we didn\u2019t want:\u00a0 a typical Light Entertainment Show, with singers and punch lines and an ebullient host greeting us with the words \u201cAnd Now For Something Completely Different.\u201d\u00a0 So yes, we did want to shock, to challenge, to epater les bourgeois<\/em>, to make the viewer sit up and wonder if this was even the right channel.\u00a0\u00a0 No producers, no voice of reason suggesting something might be tasteless.\u00a0\u00a0 Tasteless was the point.\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed one of Python\u2019s greatest strengths over the years has been to provoke revealing outbursts from sacred cowboys.\u00a0 (The Bishop of Southwalk, Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary Whitehouse, wives of US Senators\u2026)\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to remember there was a\u00a0 time when we were almost universally hated by large sections of society.\u00a0\u00a0 Now that we are the cuddly old farts of comedy I rather miss this hatred.<\/p>\n Laughter is what I remember most. I don\u2019t think I ever laughed so much in my life.\u00a0 It was a writers commune.\u00a0 For the first and last time in Showbiz history the Writers were in charge. All material had to be auditioned out loud.\u00a0 If we didn\u2019t laugh we sold it to other comedians.\u00a0 The Pythons wrote in pairs and Cleese would always read out Chapman\/Cleese sketches and Palin would always read out Jones\/Palin material.\u00a0 I was on my own.\u00a0 But it left me free to edit and assess.\u00a0 I have always thought of myself as the Python wicket keeper.\u00a0\u00a0 I could tell when the ball was turning and when we could get a quick leg-side stumping and when to change the bowler.\u00a0 It was portmanteaux comedy \u2013 a trunk full of different styles of comedy material glued together by Gilliam, whose cut-out art provided a reassuringly cheap-looking kind of spurious continuity, forming a Victorian Theater frame of images around these disparate sketches giving the illusion of some kind of theme which we would then pretentiously overstate: \u201cMan\u2019s Inhumanity to Man in the Twentieth Century\u201d or \u00a0\u201cWhither Canada?\u201d<\/p>\n Cleese, who always gave the impression of being somehow above the proceedings, would unleash devastating readings of his sketches destroying us, killing us, and occasionally we too would make him laugh, and his huge frame would lie full length on the floor roaring out loud and rolling around in merriment.\u00a0 The Doctor would chuckle.\u00a0\u00a0 Gilliam would greet new material with a broad grin, Jonesy could go off into unexpected hysterics and Michael laughed freely and sometimes uncontrollably: once\u00a0 when Cleese nailed him with the Cheese Shop we thought some kind of medical intervention might be needed, and indeed a fresh bottle of Sancerre, prescribed by our own doctor, had to be applied before he calmed down.\u00a0\u00a0 Graham of course, from St. Bart\u2019s hospital, was studying to be a fully qualified alcoholic.\u00a0\u00a0 Typically, none of us noticed.<\/p>\n It is an odd thing to do comedy and we were an odd bunch. And it was not<\/em> undergraduate humour, we are all graduates<\/em> thank you very much.\u00a0 Perhaps our best achievement was managing to stay together long enough to segue from TV comedy into movies.\u00a0\u00a0 All in all we managed fourteen years and that while we turned from young men into husbands and fathers.\u00a0 And do we still get on?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 We do.\u00a0\u00a0 So there.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course we bicker and bitch and gossip and moan about each other, but you just try attacking one of the others and see what you get.<\/p>\n People ask what it was like, but so absurd and improbable is the story of Python\u2019s success and so implausible its ability to survive and spread round the world, that it is beyond the reach of any metaphor.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps only Coleridge could have found the right words to explain the unlikely survival of this most unlikely show. And then he\u2019d probably say something Shlegel had said anyway.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Eric Idle.<\/p>\n California September 2009<\/p>\n \u00a0I just recently found this<\/em>.<\/p>\n There are still a few seats left for Not The Messiah, at Carnegie Hall, New York on the 15th and 16th December<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Or I Wanna Hold Your Handel. Life has a very simple plot First you\u2019re here And then you\u2019re not. I was working on a lyric when the mail thing dinged and distracted me. 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