The Life of Graham

Spam .. spam .. spam...lovely Graham. Coral's Personal Best. Monty Python's tall, thin, and not spotty, but still dead, Graham Chapman talks about The Life of Brian.

Recently Monty Python online gospel,The Daily Llama reported that Britain's Channel Four, (Chapman once did the Opinions program for them) recently hailed Monty Python's Life of Brian the greatest film comedy of all time. Seems the character of Brian Cohen was born in Paris...

Graham Chapman - Initially after the Holy Grail, I suppose we were all thinking, well, where next? Perhaps they find it, (the Grail) or whatever, what happens? We were thinking this kind of thought while actually doing some promotional work in Paris for Holy Grail in a Chinese restaurant I think, and Eric Idle suggested a ridiculous title which we all laughed at but were outraged by at the same time, for our next movie as being called Jesus Christ, Lust for Glory. We thought no, we can't possibly do that. Shut up, Eric. But then we thought, wait a minute! Something set in those times would be rather good so originally it was going to be about a character Brian who was the 13th apostle basically, so it was going to be the gospel according to Saint Brian. He was always late turning up for miracles and that sort of thing and we began to write that script. We were looking forward to it, because it was a fascinating era. We came to a point where we had to write a nativity scene and thought it ought to be Brian in it and if Brian was going to be the Apostle, he ought to see something he didn't know about. It fell to John and myself to write that particular scene and we couldn't quite see how to do it because you've obviously got to have Himself there with the big H. Then we hit on the idea of the three wise men going to the wrong manger, the one next door, and thereby going to see Brian and then we thought,well,we'll follow Brian, so that's how the whole idea came about. It wasn't to offend. Rather more, it was to enlighten I think. Cohen was a good Jewish name. I mean Jesus was a bit Semitic, after all.

We are interested obviously in Brian querying whether people are believing things in the right way, whether they've got hold of the right aspect or not. To us in all this Christianity business, love your neighbour is the important thing, not dressing up and belonging to a club, and not allowing other people to belong to it. It doesn't seem to particularly Christian, does it?