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It Certainly Wouldn’t Be Worth Your While Risking It Because I’m a Very Good Shot; I Practice Every Day … Well, Not Absolutely Every Day

PALIN: Well, John’s quality, apart from just being very, very focused and disciplined as a writer, was a great economy in his writing – very funny and very tight – and that I think comes from his legal background.

Apart from the superb sense of comic timing – the ability to deliver a line – John was able better than any of us (apart from perhaps Graham) to show this wonderful process of an Establishment character undermining the Establishment. The rest of us could be dismissed as being your sort of irritants, the smaller person getting in the way; or the way our characters were played could sort of be dismissed. [But] the great thing about John’s characters was he epitomized the ruling establishment of Britain; he looked like the bishop or bank manager, a man of authority. He looks just right, and to be able to undermine it as successfully as he did from that perspective was really wonderful and I think the greatest strength of John. It meant that people were really genuinely taken aback when John would be in full blow of invective. His is not just a purely comedic character; this is an archetypal English, respectable, responsible person physically attacking from within. It seemed to me that was an ability that John had, because we all felt he wasn’t acting the part, he was it. That’s the best analogy – he was a headmaster who had gone mad.

John is a very strong, forceful character and within the group he was probably the one who would have the most obsessive desire for structure, both within the sketches and in the way we wrote, the way we worked. John would want to know when we were going to finish, what time we were going to do this, how we were going to do that. We needed that structure, so that was good, as it gave the others who were perhaps more languid something to react against.

As well as having a great time, you had to be businesslike. Not that we were unfocused, but for instance the rest of us were far more likely to say, ‘Let’s stop now and go out and have a nice lunch.’ And John would have to meet somebody, he’d go out and do that and be back at exactly 2:15. So in a sense John forced us to organize ourselves pretty thoroughly, which I think was a good thing, but it didn’t impinge on the comedy. There was never a sort of feeling of, ‘God, here he is, Mr Bossy Boots.’ I mean, he was bossy, but he delivered.

GILLIAM: John’s a hard one. John loves manipulating and controlling; he’s only comfortable when he’s doing that. When he lets go of control and just starts hanging out, he can only do it for a short while and then the panic sets in, it really sets in. I mean, after we did Holy Grail we were in Amsterdam all together promoting it, and we went on a pub crawl one night, and we were having a great time, all of us. And we were getting drunk and speaking openly, all the things that a group can never [otherwise do], and it really was getting funny, and we were saying a lot of things that needed to be said in a really jolly, drunken way. And at a certain point John just had to pull back from it; he was relaxing, he was letting down his guard too much, and he went back off wherever he went. It was really weird. And it was a pity because we were having a good time, and John was having a good time, and he couldn’t allow himself to not try to be in control.

After the first series, John had taken a house down in Majorca, and said, ‘Come on down.’ There was one night we went into Palma and we were sitting there having this silly time, like two guys – ‘Yours isn’t so good looking,’ you know, like two kids laughing, trying to pick up girls and failing miserably and all that – and we were driving back and the sun was setting, and there was this castle on the hill. I said, ‘Oh, shit, let’s drive up there!’ VVrrmm!! Knocked on the door of the castle, it was locked, it was after hours. I said, ‘Let’s break in, let’s climb in.’ So we went around, climbed over the wall and eventually got in. There were sheep grazing in the middle of this castle and we chased them around, it was like really, really good fun – and then John closed down again. It was like one of the few times I’ve seen him just totally relaxed. But he can only do it for a limited period, and then he’s got to get back in control.

I think his attempt to try and control things gave a sense there was always something one could go against – his need to control [versus] our need to not be controlled, and that’s such an interesting dynamic. I don’t know if that’s exactly the best use of everybody in the group!

But John, as I said, was the one we could all struggle against all the time, one thing we always agreed on: ‘He’s going to try this.’ ‘Oh, fuck him!’

Did he serve as a substitute for the BBC,

or a potential audience, that you had to win over?

GILLIAM: No, it wasn’t about that he represented anything larger than himself, or that he was right or wrong. It was about him trying to get his own way. And that’s why he and Terry were at opposite ends, they both wanted their own way. They were these two poles, sort of psychic emotional poles that were at opposite ends – Terry’s passion and John’s intellectual need to control – and that set up this really weird and interesting dynamic.

JONES: When we first started I remember John saying, ‘We don’t want to have personalities in this group, it’s going to be the group.’ Which is why we didn’t sort of have our names and faces up at the end of the show. It was a group undertaking, and that very much came from John’s feeling, I don’t know quite why. He had just come out of At Last the 1948 Show, where somehow Marty Feldman had been perceived to be the star, and Marty had gone on to do his own series, and it was somehow some sort of reaction, against the cult of the individual kind of thing. But nonetheless I think the original offer was from the BBC to John to do a show, and then he came to us and it sort of grew up around him like that.

John was useful to have as your front man; he could deal with the bureaucracy, though there wasn’t that much bureaucracy in those days. John’s contribution was always being kind of a rallying point, a spokesperson. He always had the authority; when it came to dealing with the BBC, we always felt they took John seriously. Partly because he was best known; it’s partly his personality as well. Everybody always feels that John’s really the prime minister in disguise.

Colin ‘Bomber’ Harris wrestling Colin ‘Bomber’ Harris, from Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl.