Spike Milligan, author of such pithy memoirs as Adolf Hitler – My Part in His Downfall, created the revolutionary BBC Radio series The Goon Show, which was to radio comedy what Picasso was to postcards. Aired between 1951 and 1960, and featuring Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and (briefly) Michael Bentine, The Goon Show was a marvellously anarchic mixture of nonsensical characters, banterish wordplay, and weird sound effects all pitched at high speed. The surreal plots (such as they were) might concern climbing to the summit of Mt Everest from the inside, drinking the contents of Loch Lomond to recover a sunken treasure, or flying the Albert Memorial to the moon.
Milligan’s deft use of language and sound effects to create surreal mindscapes showed how the medium of radio could be used to tell stories that did not rely on straightforward plots or punchlines; it was the illogic of the character’s actions bordering on the fantastic (e.g., the hero being turned into a liquid and drunk) which moved the show along. It was a modern, dramatized version of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear – fast-paced and hip, its language a bit blue around the edges.
The artistic and popular success of The Goon Show inspired many humourists who followed. Although its surreal nature could not really be matched, its fast-paced celebration of illogic and its penchant for satire opened the doors for some of the edgier comedy that came to light in Britain in the Sixties, such as Beyond the Fringe (an internationally successful cabaret featuring Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, and Dudley Moore), and the television series That Was the Week That Was and The Frost Report.
But while The Goon Show demonstrated how broadcast comedy could bend convention, it was the passionate satire of the rising talents from university revues that forced satire – typically a literary exercise – into the vernacular of the day. If a map were to be drawn of the comedy universe in the late Fifties and early Sixties, its centre would assuredly comprise the halls of Cambridge and Oxford; between them, they produced a flood of talented writers and performers who were to raise the comedy standard, extending from stage to recordings, magazines, television, and film.
Among the many illustrious figures who began their careers in the Cambridge Footlights comedy troupe or in revues at Oxford were Humphrey Barclay, David Frost, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, Jo Kendall, David Hatch, Jonathan Lynn, Tony Hendra, and Trevor Nunn. Also from this rich training ground came five writer/performers of deft talent: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin – five-sixths of what would become the most successful comedy group in film and television, Monty Python.
Leading up to their first collaboration as Python in the spring of 1969, these five Cambridge/Oxford university graduates were working separately or in teams for several radio and TV shows at the BBC and at independent television (ITV) companies. They soon recognized similar tastes or aesthetics about how comedy should be written and performed. It was partly magnetism and partly luck which brought the group together, and the result was a programme that reinvented television comedy, launched a successful string of films, books, and recordings, and turned dead parrots and Spam into cherished comic icons.
I MEAN, THEY THINK WELL, DON’T THEY
TERRY JONES: Mike and I had done a little bit of work together when we’d been at Oxford. I first saw Mike doing cabaret with Robert Hewison, who later became a theatre critic. Mike and I and Robert all worked together on a thing called Hang Down Your Head and Die. It was in the style of Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War, and it was a show against capital punishment, which we still had in this country at that time. That was the first time Mike and I worked together. And then we did an Oxford revue called Loitering Within Tent – it was a revue done in a tent – and he and I worked out a sequence called the ‘Slapstick Sequence’ [in which a professor introduces demonstrations of various laugh-inducing pratfalls]. As far as I remember that was the first real writing collaboration we did, and in fact that sketch was later done in the Python stage show.
I did a bit of writing with Miles Kington (who was a columnist for The Independent), and then when Mike came down (I was a year ahead of Mike) he worked on a TV pop show for a while. By that time I’d got a job at the BBC, so I kind of knew what was happening, and Mike and I started writing stuff for The Frost Report. We were contributing little one-liners for Frost’s monologue and sketches, and then we got to doing these little visual films which we actually got to perform in. Little things like, ‘What judges do at the high court during recess’. We just filmed a lot of judges with their wigs and gowns in a children’s playground, going down slides.
We weren’t being paid very much for the writing; our fee in those days was seven guineas a minute – of course, that’s a minute of airtime, not how long it takes to write! We were kind of lucky [if] we got two or three minutes of material on the show, so by letting us appear in our little visual films, it meant that they could pay us a bit more.
MICHAEL PALIN: Terry and I worked together since I left Oxford, which would be 1965. Terry by that time had a job in the BBC in a script department, and we worked together very closely. We saw each other on an almost daily basis, and that was true from that period right up to the Python times; we wrote for all sorts of shows, tons and tons of stuff.
Apart from your collaboration with Terry,
were you also writing on your own?
PALIN: Not really, there wasn’t time. We had to make money in those days, too. We’d just got married and [were] having children and all that sort of thing. I probably had days when I thought, ‘Today I’m going to start The Novel,’ or whatever. And then we’d be offered by Marty Feldman a hundred pounds a minute for this new sketch (that’s between the two of us). ‘A hundred pounds a minute? I don’t believe that, that’s fantastic, so we better write something for Marty!’ So that day would be spent writing something for Marty Feldman. So yeah, we were real genuine writers during that time, we worked as a team. Although the mechanics of writing were not necessarily that we would sit in the same room with a giant piece of paper and say, ‘All right, now we’re going to make a sketch.’
JONES: Originally when we’d been writing for The Frost Report and for Marty Feldman, Mike and I would go and read them through, they’d all laugh, the sketch would get in, and then you see the sketch on the air and they fucking changed it all! We’d get furious. There was one sketch Marty did about a gnome going into a mortgage office to try to raise a mortgage. And he comes in and sits down and talks very sensibly about collateral and everything, and eventually the mortgage guy says, ‘Well, what’s the property?’ And he says, ‘Oh, it’s the magic oak tree in Dingly Dell.’ And the thing went back and forth like that. Everybody laughed when we did it, and when we saw it finally come out on TV, Marty comes in, sits cross-legged on the desk, and starts telling a string of one-line gnome jokes. This wasn’t what the joke was at all.
What happens is that people (especially someone like Marty) would start rehearsing it, and of course after you’ve been rehearsing it a few times people don’t laugh anymore. And so Marty being the kind of character he was, he’d throw in a few jokes, and everybody would laugh again. And so that’s how things would accumulate. It was things like that that made us want to perform our own stuff. We sort of felt if it worked, you wanted to leave it as it was.
Humphrey Barclay1 asked if Mike and I would like to get together and do a children’s show with Eric Idle. We’d seen Eric in Edinburgh in my final year in the Cambridge revue, a young blue-eyed boy; he looked very glamorous on the stage as I remember! So we knew of Eric, but we’d never worked with him. The three of us wrote Do Not Adjust Your Set. It was basically a children’s TV show but we thought, ‘Well, we’ll just do whatever we think is funny, we won’t write