Life of Python Page #3

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Say no more.

Basically we were laughing

at the authoritarian figures

that we grew up under,

and observing.

I think if you're at a

boarding school for 12 years,

your vision of authority

is very much of this

looming nonsense,

and you're not allowed

to laugh at it

except privately

amongst your gang.

But you know it's nonsense,

this assumed authority

that's being given

to you by teachers,

by military figures--

We always had to do the ccf--

By police, by judges.

And it's all pretending

we know what's going

on on this planet

and this is the way it is,

and it's all bullshit.

Python was quite good for getting

rid of those inhibitions.

That's why it's still

appealing to the young.

Come in.

Is this the right room

for an argument?

I've told you once.

No, you haven't.

Yes, I have. Just now.

No, you didn't.

I did.

You did not.

Is this a five-minute

argument or half hour?

Oh, we'd always disagree.

I mean, you know, Python was...

Reading, writing,

and arguing, really.

The three rs.

A lot of arguing went on.

Typewriters were thrown.

People would stomp out of rooms.

There'd be shrill voices,

all sorts of aggravation,

which was important.

It was important

I only threw a chair once.

I think John, you know...

I think it bothered John more

'cause he's a man who has

to maintain his control more,

And being older--

we were like four years younger

than John, some of us,

And still are.

Let's face it.

And I don't think he liked

arguing with Terry,

and he'd tend to bait

Terry just a little bit,

see how far he could

get him to explode,

'cause once he made a man blow up,

he'd won the argument, you see.

Not an easy thing to do

with Terry, anyway.

I was still Welsh in my

feelings, my emotions,

But I was talking with

a "South of England" accent.

If you get excited in Welsh,

you go up at the end

of the sentence.

But if you do it

with an English accent,

you always go down at

the end of the sentence.

The more excited you get,

the more you go down.

It's a cultural clash.

I came all the way from Oslo

to do this program.

I'm a professor of archaeology.

I'm an expert in

ancient civilizations.

All right! I'm only 5'10".

All right! My posture is bad.

All right! I slump in my chair!

But I've had more women

than either of you two.

I used to have a lot of

fights with Terry Jones,

but they were basically

artistic fights.

We're very different character types.

I mean, Terry is welsh,

And is kind of, uh, passionate,

and I'm sort of

repressed and logical.

And the two of us used to

lock antlers a great deal,

but it actually worked extremely well

because somehow we kind of...

neutralized each other.

Then the other guys

could dance around,

throw their weight into the argument.

John was the head and Terry the heart--

Terry the heart of Python.

And the rest of us would be

grouped in-between there.

Eric and myself, I suppose,

Were... I mean, rarely disruptive.

We never got so steamed up

that we said,

"End of meeting! That's it!"

Um, we would muck in

and salvage whatever was around.

Graham would puff his pipe

and be rather detached

and statesmanlike

about the whole thing.

The best moments of Python

were those days

when we'd sit in my dining

room or John's flat

and read through the material

everybody had written over

the last week or two weeks,

and we'd read that stuff

for a whole day.

It was just wonderful.

I loved those things.

And the fact that it made us laugh

was the yardstick, really.

Maybe 25% of the material

that was read out

worked straightaway.

We'd put that on a pile

and say that's fine.

Then another 25% was almost there,

but needed a little work.

There and then, people would

come up with an idea--

A parrot rather than a motor car

for the pet shop sketch.

Look, matey...

This parrot wouldn't voom

if I put 4,000 volts through it.

It's bleeding demised.

It's not. It's... It's pining.

It's not pining. It's passed on.

This parrot is no more.

It has ceased to be.

It's expired

And gone to meet its maker.

This is a late parrot.

It's a stiff-- bereft of life.

It rests in peace.

If you hadn't nailed it to the perch,

it would be pushing up the daisies.

It's rung down the curtain

and joined the choir invisible.

This is an ex-parrot.

Gilliam wasn't always

at the writing meetings,

'cause in order to produce

the one to four minutes

of animation each week,

he was working up in a

little attic in hampstead,

getting all his little cutouts

and snipping bits out

of famous works of art

and sticking funny heads

onto them, going,

"Oh, sh*t! I gotta

have an assistant."

Time and time again,

it was a matter of

leaving one sketch

at a point where it

had run out of steam

and getting on to the next thing.

The scripts would literally say,

"Gilliam takes over

and get us to..." ba-boom.

I liked that a lot.

I'm off.

I'm off.

I'm off.

I'm off.

I'm off, dear.

Dead painters-- you don't

have to pay them.

You can take their ideas,

their art work.

I'd go through the National Gallery

whenever I'd run out of ideas.

Just walk through,

and the paintings would

start talking to me.

And came on this one.

The original painting is gigantic.

I was looking at it and thought,

"Isn't that wonderful?"

And out of the whole painting,

the only thing that

really stuck with me

was that little bit down here.

And there it is--

it's the big foot.

I think Bronzino would go crazy.

The guy spend years

painting this thing,

and some jerk comes along

and throws away everything

except that little bit on the bottom.

There's something very

satisfying about doing this.

You're dealing with really great art

that people pay

hundreds of thousands,

millions of dollars for,

and I'm reducing it to that...

It says something about life,

I think.

I used to sit there

with a blanket over my head

with all these kitchen utensils,

and I'd bang them and...

Make my own noises--

I'd sit there doing these noises.

Excuse me. I want to powder my nose.

Ahh, that's better.

The BBC used to send us far and wide

to any exotic location

for our filming.

This is Teddington Lock

about 5 miles from Television Center.

This was where we chose to do

one of my favorite

of the Python sketches,

although it's very, very short,

extremely inconsequential,

and has very little dialogue.

It's called the fish-slapping dance,

and those of you who don't know it,

I brought a couple of fish along,

like the cheeky chappies

we had in those days.

I would be dressed in a

pith helmet and long shorts

as worn by british explorers...

up to about the 1950s.

Um, I'll put that down there.

John was next to me,

uh, the taller one

in a pith helmet and long shorts.

I held these two rather slimy fish.

I think we all knew

we were doing something different.

We weren't enormously

self-conscious about it.

We just used to hoot with delight

when we thought of

some silly thing to do

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