B
oarding schools, corporal punishment, inedible dinners and endless respect for your elders. If you were a child growing up in provincial 1950’s Britain, even being a member of the relatively prosperous middles classes didn’t mean much in the way of luxury or privilege. In drab towns and villages from Western Super Mare to South Shields, life after the war, if you happened to be a bright child with artistic tendencies, centred on getting out of these remote places and to Oxbridge, where, if you’d read the right Evelyn Waugh novels, you could still believe that a fantasy life of port, punting and promiscuity awaited. John Cleese (from Western Super Mare), Eric Idle (from South Shields, along with Michael Palin (Sheffield), Terry Jones (Colwyn Bay) and Graham Chapman (Leicester) were all the sort of bright children who had exactly these kind of aspirations. Though how this morphed into a comedy phenomenon now entering its half century is a tale as unlikely as any silly walks ministry or self defence against soft fruit class. For these were the kind of comedic legends that emerged from the minds of these men who were expected, in the cases of Cleese and Chapman, to grow up to become quantity surveyors and doctors. These teenagers, mostly ensconced in old-fashioned boarding schools, were, however, able to receive voices from beyond the grimness of their Victorian educational barracks.
Thanks to primitive radios, the likes of Stanley Unwin’s Showtime and the Goon Show, heard on crackly Bakelite radios, provided an anarchic and still deeply strange comedic universe that would prove to be immense influences on the team that would become Python. All five future Pythons went to either Oxford or Cambridge; part of the first generation of men from outside the Etonian realm who were able to get into these hallowed halls. It was here that they would watch, and be mesmerised, by Beyond the Fringe, the group consisting of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennet who were fast becoming the pioneers of modern satirical comedy. “I didn’t even know that you were allowed to be that funny,” recalled Eric Idle who admitted to literally falling out of his seat with laughter when he first watched his older Oxbridge compatriots on stage. University revue shows and the Edinburgh Fringe all beckoned for the boys themselves, with Jones and Palin, and Chapman and Cleese, already establishing themselves as formidable writing duo’s.
It was in the Scottish capital, in the summer of 1963, that the four men, plus Eric Idle who was also performing in a sketch show, would first meet and, almost immediately, discover that, among their audiences, were TV execs and theatre producers on the lookout for fresh talent. And so, aged just 22, Cleese and Chapman went Stateside, to star in a Broadway adaption of their show Cambridge Circus. It was while in New York that the duo met Terry Gilliam. A graduate of political science in California, it would be through his animations and cartoons that this young man from Minneapolis would find his creative voice. Working for a humour magazine called Help, Gilliam met Cleese and Chapman in a bar in Greenwich Village. He would be the last to join the Pythons, staying in America while the five others came together as writers for the very first time on The Frost Report, a sketch show headed by David Frost. Another Oxbridge man, Frost took the early 1960’s satire boom onto television with That Was The Week That Was, a smash hit show that was only
