Roger Lewis

A clump of plinths

The joke surely with Monty Python is that these trainee doctors, accountants, solicitors and bank managers, who met at college when they were reading law or medicine, never really stopped being those respect- able middle-class things. There’s an air of put-on daftness about the Pythons; this is an end-of-term cabaret by the chumps from Management and Personnel. They remind me of those prats in the front row of the last night of the Proms who think it wildly funny to bob up and down in time to Henry Wood’s ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs’; or they are the committee of the Goon Show Preservation Society, eating damp sandwiches and ordering half a shandy and doing Eccles voices; or they are the weekend volunteers for a steam railway, turning up for duty in home-knitted woollen pullovers.

John Cleese (whose real name is Jack Cheese) was the son of a punctilious insurance clerk in Weston-super-Mare. Michael Palin’s mother was a debutante, presented at Court. Terry Jones was a rugby hero at Guildford Grammar School. Eric Idle boarded near Wolverhampton, swotted at Latin and got to Cambridge on the recommendation of his history master, an ex-RAF officer. Graham Chapman, whose father was a chief inspector in the Leicester County Constabulary, studied at Emmanuel and Bart’s, where he was president of the Students’ Union and had tea with the Queen Mother. Chapman smoked a pipe, drank with both hands and was a manic-depressive homosexual. His typical pick-up line would be ‘Are you camping here? Can I come and see your tent?’ He died of cancer in 1989. For completeness’ sake we are told, in this book’s epilogue, that Cleese will die in 2028, Jones in 2030, Palin in 2034 (whilst filming a documentary on the Kalahari desert), Gilliam in 2046 (August — it takes the whole month) and Idle in 3039 (‘He said he’d outlive the rest of those bastards!’).

Chapman’s tragic personal decline and fall aside (‘I began to see how disconnected he was emotionally’, said Cleese rather late in the day), never was a classic, dotty comedy show less anarchic, less revolutionary, than Monty Python.

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