Graham Chapman
Life of Brian star chats about the Monty Python formula.
T'is becoming somewhat of a ritual to watch The Life of Brian at Easter.
England crowned The Life of Brian Best Film Conedy Of All Time. One of the reasons - its hilarious script, in the best tradition of Monty Python. But where did the Monty Python formula come from?
Here is more from The Lost Graham Chapman Tapes.
"Most comedy was so predictable and you really could more or less be certain what was going to happen next and the shape of what was going to happen next, and that to us portrayed a lack of imagination, invention and sense of adventure, so we wanted to break that mould and let a bit of light in and shake things up a bit and not worry about other people. We weren’t aiming for an audience at all. We were lucky because of our past reputations I suppose, as writers. Indeed, all the Pythons apart from Terry Gilliam, who were writing on The Frost Report as writers had a whole backlog of material which although people found funny at read-thorough, said we can’t possibly do that because it will either offend, or they won’t understand it, or it won’t be right for my audience, or it won’t be right for my image.
"But we didn’t care about that image. It didn’t matter. We weren’t about to get any. It didn’t occur to us at all. We did have some pretty good material so all five of us joined by Terry Gilliam – six of us, thought we should team up and we thought was a reasonable idea to team up and do a show and that became Python."
"We were lucky the BBC thought we would be writing a Frost Report because that’s the sort of thing we had written before so they were quite happy to have us do that. They gave us 13 shows without a pilot first off which is unheard of today but they stuck us on late at night and gave us a very small budget for the BBC. We were put on about 10:30 which in those days was incredibly late [laughs] We were almost the last program in the evening on a Sunday – worst spot of the week but we picked up an audience – people thought ‘what is this?’ ‘this is interesting’ and began to watch. The BBC got a little bit embarrassed by this because they thought we would just be hidden away somewhere."
I really like the fact that you used to openly attack the BBC during the show.
"Yes, well we had our reasons and there again there’s a similarity I suppose between us and The Goon Show. One rather felt that the people performing the shows would join in the audience in a conspiracy against the medium which was pushing them out maybe in this case, the BBC. So it became a conspiratorial feeling between yourself and the audience."
