The Meaning of Monty Python

Good morning, good morning, 2:30 in the morning.

It's tea time.

This is worse than fucking filming.

Old comedian's home. Hello, comedian. How are you?

Yes.

- Hello, hello... - Hello.

Uncle Weiner.

This is lapsang souchong.

So it's a bit like a tea and a cigarette.

I'm going to evacuate and have a shower.

Hope I feel a little better, I'll come out back again.

Still doing a gig in California.

There's Eric.

Hey!

- Good morning. - Good morning.

What time is it?

It should be dark there, shouldn't it?

It's three in the morning.

It's three in the morning, yes.

So that's why you look like that.

This is how I look at three in the morning.

So which chair am I sitting in?

The only other one that's not occupied, John.

Work it out, work it out.

What you on, Eric? Are you having something to drink or not?

I had a lapsang souchong and now we're on Brendan's breakfast.

Trying to see the books on Eric's shelf.

Can you see that clearly? I... you're very fuzzy.

- Can you read books entirely? - No, I can't at all.

I'm just wondering if any of them are mine.

Really?

There's a Michael Palin section.

Oh, where is it?

I have some very rare, unsigned Michael Palin books.

Where? Where did you find them?

Eric, where... I've been trying to find one.

You have to send up for them from the publisher

because they come signed from the factory.

Don't worry, Eric, I'll come over and soil them, personally.

There is a shop in Henley, apparently, where you can get unsigned copies...

It's called something like Jonkers or something like that.

I'm gonna vouch for that.

I, Me, Mine by George Harrison.

That's even greater than the unsigned ones.

On the bottom shelf.

That's actually my...

No, it's not by George Harrison, it's by somebody very similar.

Uh... John Locke.

- John Locke? Oh. - John Locke, yeah...

- It's Francis Bacon. - Francis Bacon?

Francis Bacon, yes.

He actually... No, it was actually Shakespeare who pretended to be him.

I have a theory that all Francis Bacon's works were written by Shakespeare.

They were. Oh, clearly, yes.

Do you know he died in my house? Francis Bacon.

- Francis Bacon? - It's true.

- What? - Francis Bacon died in my house.

Not at your mother's...

Thousands of people died in your house.

By the way, lucky bastard.

Exactly.

He set the tone for it.

He was trying to invent the TV dinner it appears.

And found a dead chicken, stuffed it with snow, got a chill.

They put him to bed in the house, the bed hadn't been heated properly,

he caught pneumonia and he died.

- In your house? - Which room?

- I don't know. I don't know. - In the kitchen?

- Francis Bacon the artist? - No.

Criminal political leader.

The one who's so encouraging, he said, "We must put nature on the rack...

Oh, you're right.

...and force her to reveal her secrets."

It's a nice Elizabethan turn of phrase.

That's very good, that's rigorous.

Wasn't the sort who died on the bed or on the pillow,

one sort of teethes the secrets out of nature.

Any famous die in your house, Terry?

No, no...

I thought Aristotle had died in our house,

but it was all bloody rumor.

- He'd never even been there. - Who?

Aristotle.

Never been anywhere near Kensington.

You know, the estate agents will tell you anything, won't they?

"Oh, it's very, you'll like this, Aristotle was here for three years.

Why is it called "Aristotle Lane" then?

Exactly, exactly.

Absolute cheeks.

I bought it on the basis of Aristotle Lane, thought it'd be good for me.

It was to toughen me up a bit intellectually.

He was a bugger for the bottle.

- Bugger for the bottle, yeah. - He was a bugger for the bottle.

Hobbes was fond of a drum and René Descartes...

- Wittgenstein? - Wittgenstein.

It's come up again. The second time this morning Wittgenstein's come up.

We were talking about Wittgenstein earlier

and I was asking whether it was "Wittgenstein" or "Vittgenstein."

What do most people say?

I should imagine it's depends whether it was in Austria or Cambridge.

Oh, very good answer.

He was the Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University in 1940.

Oh, right.

And, also, interesting enough, he went to school with Hitler in Graz, in Austria,

when a little boy.

There's pictures of him next to Hitler.

That's a bummer for your CV isn't it?

There's some theory that Hitler developed his anti-Semitism

because he hated Wittgenstein so much.

Just 'cause he liked the boy next to him, he didn't like.

That's... that's probably what it's about.

Isn't it sad? Yeah, and Wittgenstein had a one-handed brother pianist.

He lost his arm in the first World War and became a concert pianist.

- Oh, great. - A one-handed concert pianist.

And people like Ravel wrote special pieces for him.

I love that.

It's like being a one-handed cricketer, you know, gotta admire their spirit.

I was watching Somerset playing Glamorgan once

in the pub, Terrace Pub, Weston-super-Mare,

and the guy next to me was moaning on about Somerset.

And he was talking about a fellow who played for his local village team,

he said to me he'd give his right arm to play for Somerset.

Not that he would've stood out because they were wooden spoon winners,

you know, bottom of the championship table, for seven consecutive years.

Why a wooden spoon?

I don't know where that came from. That's the right expression, isn't it?

- Yes, wooden spoon. - Yeah, wooden spoon.

From the bottom of a...

Eric, our wooden spoon correspondent.

- It's rhyming slang, Michael. - What for?

It's cockney rhyming slang for being fucking bottom.

- Oh. Oh, yes. - It's not particularly good

cockney rhyming slang.

Fucking bottom wooden spoon.

That's got a certain non-ring to it.

Like Vaticans, remember?

Vatican cities.

- Oh, yes. - Oh, yes.

They were known as Bristol cities in the old days.

Yeah, Bristol's.

No, don't worry about the cause of this, just do it.

And will it. Sorry.

- Who? - You mean this is not "doing it"?

I think we all have a completely different feeling about Meaning of Life.

I think some of it's the funniest stuff we ever did

and other bits I didn't like at all.

- Yeah. - And I always felt that the problem was

that we rushed into it.

We really shoulda just stepped back from Life of Brian for a couple of years,

and then I think something would've come together that would be more integrated.

We were trying to find a form, a narrative, weren't we, like,

the holy search for the grail was a narrative,

Life of Brian was a narrative.

The trouble was it was almost on the last day in Jamaica

that we came up with the title.

And then it was, "That's it, that's it, this goes here,"

- because everything then fitted. - Three days in, actually.

It was three days in and I came down to breakfast

and everybody was looking glum and thinking,

and Mike suggested we should turn it into a TV series.

I thought, "What if I only got, I've got the script timings, which..."

One of the script girls did.

And I thought, "What are we worrying about?

We've got 70 minutes of really great material,

and we only need to write 20 minutes more."

And then that turned around. And Eric came up with The Meaning of Life.

And we could say, "the life of man,"

and that was the third, Wednesday, three days in.

And I know when Terry said that, Eric looked very surprised,

but I have to say that's how I remember it,

because I believe that after a couple of days,

we read this material out, we didn't see any way of integrating it,

and I'm almost sure that I said,

"Look, guys, why don't we just forget this,

- Yeah. - and have a lovely two week holiday,

and then go back to London and say 'We worked our brains to death

and it just didn't work. It's a failure and we're not gonna make it.'"

And the next morning you came down

because I think you'd been working on it that night or in the morning...

Well, I just thought, "What have I got that nobody else has got?"

And I thought, I got the timings the script girl had done in the thing.

So, I didn't, just came...

I remember sitting out at the table, do you remember?

Outside the place in Jamaica and all these guys walking out of the beach

offering to sell us weed.

"No, no, we're writing comedy. Writing comedy, please."

We should've just taken it.

And the film would've probably made much better.

But I do remember them.

-I still love the idea, -Couldn't believe the court case though.

- What? - Remember the idea of a court case?

The whole thing was being, taking place within a court.

And, because it was a con that we had made this film

and we needed to do Hamlet on an island out somewhere in Jamaica,

the whole thing was a lie and, ultimately, we all then,

we're going to be killed at the end.

We were going to be found guilty. Don't you remember this?

No! I don't remember this.

- Do you remember it, Eric? - Nope, not at all.

I remember it being more of a tax deductible, a tax dodge.