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it being television, and commenting on that. We just continued to do even more of that than he had done, but once we agreed on the idea of not having to end sketches, and having things linked and flowing, it allowed us to get out of a sketch when it was at its peak, when it was really still good; we would laugh when it was funny and it would move on when it wasn’t funny. That also immediately made a place for me; it sat me in the middle, connecting things.

      IDLE: We were young, and doing a show we would be in charge of for the first time. There were no executives. This freedom allowed us to experiment without having to say what we were trying to do – indeed, we didn’t have a clue what we were trying to do except please ourselves. This was the leitmotiv: if it made us laugh, it was in; if it didn’t, we sold it to other shows.

      THIS YEAR OUR MEMBERS HAVE PUT MORE THINGS ON TOP OF OTHER THINGS THAN EVER BEFORE

      JONES: The way we went and did the shows is, first of all we’d meet and talk about ideas. And then we’d all go off for like two weeks and each write individually or in our pairs. Mike and I tended to write separately and then get together, read out material to each other, and then swap over and mess around like that. So at the end of two weeks we’d all meet together, quite often downstairs in my front room or dining room, and we’d read out the stuff. That was the best time of Python, the most exciting time, when you knew you were going to hear new stuff and they were going to make you laugh.

      GILLIAM: And so you get a sketch where John and Graham had written something and it got that far and it was really good, but then it just started dribbling; well, either you stop there, or maybe Mike and Terry would take it over with some ideas to patch it up. I always liked the fact that there was just a pile of material to start with all the time, because everybody would go their separate ways, come back, and there would be the stuff, [sorted into] piles: we all liked that pile of stuff, [we were] mixed on that one, we didn’t like that one.

      You had to jockey for position about when and where a sketch was going to be read out, which time of the day; if it came in too early it was going to bomb. And you knew that if Mike and Terry or John and Graham had something they wanted to do, they wouldn’t laugh as much [at the others’ material]. And I was in a funny position, because I was kind of the apolitical laugh; I was the one guy who had nothing at stake because my stuff was outside of theirs.

      IDLE: It seems to me since all comedians seek control we were a group of potential controllers. Obviously some are more manipulative than others, or cleverer at getting their own way. Cleese is the most canny, but everyone had their ways. Mike would charm himself into things. Terry J. would simply not listen to anyone else, and Gilliam stayed home and did his own thing since we soon got tired of listening to him trying to explain in words what he was doing.

      The writing was the most glorious fun. We would go away and write anything at all that came to mind for about two weeks, then get together for a day and read it all out. Then, what got laughs was in, and people would suggest different ways of improving things. This was very good, this critical moment. Then we would compile about six or seven shows at a go, obviously moving things too similar into different shows, and then noticing themes and enlarging on strands of ideas and then finally linking them all together in various mad ways that came out of group thought. This, as far as I know, was an original way of working which hasn’t been tried before (or since) and was unique to Python. Gilliam was there, too, as an individual non-writer, and whenever we were stuck we would leave it to him to make the links, which he would do.

      PALIN: By [the time Python started] Terry and I were working separately; there’d be a couple of days just writing ideas down and then we’d get together, talk about things, so some of the sketches that were Jones and Palin would be entirely Jones or entirely Palin, but the other would add lines here and there. So it was good in that way; we were writing separately perhaps more than we had before.

      I think we were all (certainly to start with) anxious to be generous to each other, and give each other time and due consideration. You know, it was important that everybody write something that was funny, otherwise it would have been very difficult, and generally I think everybody did. Spirits were pretty high. It was not difficult for some of those sessions to be happy at the way things were going because the material was fresh; we could chop stuff around and not be confined to the shapes of previous comedy shows; we were really getting some very nice, new, surreal stuff together.

      The best sessions I remember were when we were just putting the whole lot into a shape, into a form. Certainly there would be some sketches that were still very conventional, and others would just be fragments. We’d have read the stuff out and then we’d try and put them together, follow this by that, and then, ‘Why don’t we introduce that Gambolputty character and then try to say the name “Gambolputty” later in the programme,’ something like that. ‘Yes, that’s right, he can come in and we do this, and then the Viking can come in and sort of club him or something.’ The idea of having characters in quite elaborate costume just coming in to say one word – ‘So’ or ‘It’s’ – in the middle of a bit of narration, all that seemed very fresh. We enjoyed that feeling of being able to clown around the way we wanted to. And the material coming in was (we felt) pretty strong and really unusual. Things like the man with three buttocks seemed just wonderful, especially because it was done in this very serious mode – bringing the camera around to see this extra buttock, and he’d say, ‘Go away, go on!’ – this man who’d agreed to go on television because he’s got three buttocks then getting rather sort of prudish about any talk about buttocks! Really nice ideas.

       How did your own work habits change as you started working as part of a larger group?

      PALIN: I wasn’t used to working like that, but basically I have such respect for the other writers. I mean, Graham and John were just writing the best sketches around at that time, so to be able to give them [something] they would then take away, one had absolute confidence. And the same usually with Eric; we’d worked together on Do Not Adjust Your Set. There was really, as far as I can remember at that early stage, very little wastage. I mean, sketches didn’t just disappear if someone screwed them up; it would happen: someone would take something away and it just didn’t work out, and we would similarly take other people’s ideas. It didn’t happen that much. And in the early shows John and Graham were still writing ‘sketchey’ sketches; ‘The Mouse Problem’ or ‘The Dead Parrot’. They came fully formed, four or five minutes of stuff which didn’t need to be changed, so very often it was just the links that would be our group. There wasn’t an awful lot of cross-writing.

      If anything strengthened Terry and myself as a team, I think we felt this was highly competitive in a way it hadn’t been before. We’d send sketches to Marty Feldman or The Two Ronnies and someone somewhere would take a decision and you get the word back – ‘We love this, we don’t like this’ – we wouldn’t be in the room at the time, we wouldn’t be part of that process. Here, because we were writing the whole thing and performing it ourselves, the atmosphere was quite competitive. We felt we really had to get our ideas really right before they were read.

      That was an interesting thing. We’d have a discussion the day before: ‘Shall we read this, shall we read that?’ Terry and I always wrote more than anybody else – a lot of it was of a fairly inferior quality – but we didn’t want to read the group too much because there was a certain point where you could see people getting restless: ‘And what have you got?’

      ‘Oh, we’ve got another six sketches!’

       ‘[Huffing] All right, we’ll have some coffee and then read these next six sketches for Mike and Terry!’

      You had to be a bit careful about how you sold your stuff!

       Were you at a disadvantage because you didn’t have a writing partner helping to ‘sell’ your material?

      IDLE: No, no.

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