Monty Python's Flying Circuses!
How did I get involved with Python?
I had left America in 1967 and come over to England.
I was working in magazines as an illustrator
and an art director.
One of the few people I knew in this country, was John Cleese.
I'd met him when I was working on a magazine in New York.
By then John was quite successful in television,
and I was determined to get out of magazine work,
and introduced me to
some producers in television.
He gave me a couple of names. It took me months to track these guys down.
They were very evasive,
like all good producers.
But eventually, I caught one of them, Humphrey Barclay.
He answered the phone himself and that was it. I had him.
And it turned out he was an amateur cartoonist,
and he liked my cartoons, my drawings.
I hadn't done animation yet.
And he also bought some of the written sketches I'd done
and foisted them upon Mike Palin and Terry Jones and Eric Idle,
who were doing Do Not Adjust Your Set,
much to their chagrin.
They were territorial, at least Mike and Terry were.
Eric was more open-armed.
Anyway, they did those sketches.
After that series, he did another series called
We Have Ways of Making You Laugh.
Eric was on that series, as well.
And I was on as the guest...
The cartoonist. I used to do caricatures of the guests as they came on.
And there was... One day they had
some material they didn't know how to present.
And I said, "Well, why don't I make an animated movie out of it?"
And they let me do it. And I think it was £400 I had
and two weeks to do it in.
Or maybe it was £200 and four weeks to do it in.
Whatever it was, there was neither enough money or time,
and so the only way I could do it was start cutting things out and moving them around.
And it went out on television.
People in Britain had never seen cutout animation.
They'd never seen anything like this.
And so I became fairly well-known, fairly quickly.
And that lead to more work on the next series,
which was Do Not Adjust Your Set.
And then... Do Not Adjust Your Set,
and Cleese and Chapman decided to become a unit.
And that was Monty Python and there I was.
From the very beginning, I mean, animation was part of Python.
In fact, Terry Jones had seen one particular animation I'd done
that was a very stream-of-consciousness piece,
and he felt that's what Python should be like.
Let's just get rid of punch lines.
Don't shape things that way. Go on a flow.
And so, that's what we did.
So that really formed the kind of rhythm of the show.
And I would basically fill in the gaps between sketches
that didn't have an ending or that didn't have a beginning.
I would connect "A" to "Q".
It's all right. I'm a doctor.
Actually, I'm a gynaecologist, but this is my lunch hour.
I have a nasty feeling lam somebody's lunch hour.
It was a bit like what we say now, "We can fix it in post."
There was that moment when,
"Okay, we don't know how to get from there."
"Okay, we'll get Gilliam, and he'll do some stuff."
And I did.
And it sort of became... It stitched the shows together.
It also created another level, another visual level,
another sense of things.
And it was always interesting to watch, as the series developed,
how I started becoming a bit more like them,
and they became a bit more like my cartoons.
That was the great thing about Python.
There was always the interplay of the six of us,
and that was the chemistry that created what we did.
I hope you're
enjoying
this!
Hey, you!
And now, a sketch
about a chemist
called, "The Chemist Sketch."
Doing this kind of work required seven days a week.
Always a few all-nighters in the course of it.
And sometimes, late at night,
the pieces of paper would actually start speaking to me.
It seemed to form on the desk. They were telling me things.
"Put me on top of this thing."
Because I had heads, I had skies, I had all these bits.
And there was a great advantage of working these long hours, because it freed me up
from the kind of responsibility
that was sort of thrust upon my shoulders, and I would just fly.
But there was no real form.
It was just whatever sparked my imagination and got me moving.
And sometimes I just dried up, had nothing to do, but I got something in there.
And now for something completely different.
Most of the stuff I worked on my own. In the latter series,
I had one... Possibly one assistant would help.
And I was working in a room, it was actually much smaller than this space.
It was in the back of my flat.
And I would just do all this...
I would cut things out. I would colour things in.
I'd sort of plan what I was doing.
I'd make little charts of the pace of things.
And then, I would take all this stuff and go down to the BBC
on to the Rostrum Camera room which is, you know, the camera points down.
There's basically a big table with a glass that comes down
and holds all these pieces of paper together.
I used to have to take tape and fold it over so it was double-sided
and stick it on the back to keep things roughly in place.
And then it would be... I'd shoot two frames,
lift the piece of glass up, move things a little bit,
down with the glass. That was the process.
It's very slow and tedious.
What I would do is shoot over length. So I'd move a little character,
and then I'd hold him for quite a few frames, then move him on.
Because I could adjust that later and get the pace better.
Because after I'd shot it,
in most cases, I would then go and get the voices.
So either I was doing voices or I'd get the guys,
either during rehearsal or when we were doing the previous week's show,
and I would record in the corridors, them saying different lines.
And then I'd go back in the editing room
and adjust what I had done to make a rough, kind of, lip-synch.
It was always very crude.
Very amusing, Lord Kimble.
But would you excuse me a moment? I want to powder my nose.
I would go to the kitchen and get knives, forks, grinders,
anything to make noises.
And then, I would record it with a little tape recorder sitting in my front room
with a blanket over me and I'd go...
Make all these noises, and then I'd... Do my own noises
and build up a sound effects library is what I was doing.
That's better.
In the early series, I always liked
the man with a pram,
the pram that ate old coo-cooing women.
And that was just a very simple idea.
In the later ones, I got more elaborate.
There was one that I loved, it was "House-Hunters,"
because it was kind of like I was making a movie.
A full movie except, you know, it was pieces of paper running around the place.
- Do you hear that, Tim? - Yup.
Could just be the house we're looking for.
I loved some that were about timing.
It's like David with a fig leaf and the hand
slowly coming in to pull the fig leaf off.
It's a joke all about timing, it's nothing else.
'Cause what happens is so... nothing.
That's it! We're not about to allow this sort of smut to be shown onscreen!
There's another one that I'm just perversely happy with,
and it's with an ambulance
in the distance going across frame. There's a guy standing with his back to us,
sort of a fat guy with a bowler hat, watching it.
And it goes on forever.
And of course the ambulance runs the guy over.
And it was playing with things like that... "Killer Cars" is one I do actually like a lot.
The idea that there are too many people in the city and the cars take revenge.
Keep close. That's right. Watch out for the killer cars.
And then of course, the cat.
Thanks to the miracle of atomic mutation,
we've got a giant cat stalking in...
And the cat was my cat.
In fact, I photographed it. My dad was holding it up by its front legs.
So it's up in the air like a Frankenstein creature.
I shot different angles on it and used it.
Oh, thank you. You've saved our city.
But at what cost?
Everything was just around my home. I mean, when I see "House-Hunters,"
and I see the car... I mean, the house that's eating people,
it's just a shot from my back window.
And everything was very close to where I lived, 'cause I didn't have time
to go out and get great shots.
So I'd just go around the corner and photograph something,
and then up the stairs and off we went.
Postman!
When we were doing the shows, there was a man named Paul Fox
who was the BBC Controller.
And we started putting him in the shows.
He was turning up in different ways.
I just thought he had an interesting face.
And so, at one point, I have him appear
as sort of this fairy godfather, except he's more fairy than godfather.
And he starts kissing this cartoon character,
and eventually the kiss works and the cartoon character turns into a frog,
which is the reverse of the whole thing, and he flies off.
It was very funny 'cause Paul Fox didn't really...
I think he, in a strange way, probably enjoyed it.
Because we were the bright young things on television,
and suddenly to be incorporated in the show,
maybe it was a kind of cool thing.
We never found out. He never stopped us.
He never said, "No, you can't do this."
Hello, I'm the good fairy from Programme Control,
where we're all grateful for your work on this link.
So much so that I'm here to release you from the evil spell you've been under.
Well, it doesn't always work the first time.
Thank you. Thank you.
No, no need to. You see, it's all in a day's work for Programme Control.
I think the cutout animation is just crude,
and there's something that takes you in a different...
You know, you're in a different plane of existence. It's like puppetry.
You know, in puppetry you can do jokes with puppets
that work better than if it was a stand-up comedian doing it.
It's just that step abstracted.
The crudeness, the jerkiness, you can stick things together
in ways that would be difficult to do in any other way.
And you're not trying to pretend that they don't belong together.
I just think there's an anarchy in cutout animation
that just appeals to the senses.
The strange thing is, you know, I started doing it
because it was the simplest way. I'd cut the jaw, wiggle it up and down,
and you spoke.
And what's weird, as I get older I've noticed
my mouth is beginning to take on lines here.
And I'm not sure if one just becomes what one perpetrated on the world,
and soon it'll be definite, and then it'll split apart.
It'll be like that in the end.