And welcome to Page Twentysix of this week's credibility-destroying issue. Next week we'll be coming over all serious again and attempting to rebuild ur image as a Legitimate Musical Journal - but for now...let's talk about bottoms. Better still relax, sit back, and enjoy a good story about MONTY PYTHON making a film in Scotland. It's very well-written by a jolly nice journalist we know, and the whole thing's quite a treat and exceptionally good value, if a bit runny...
[New Musical Express - May 25, 1974 issue]
The Dunblane Hydro bestrides a cemented hillock just five miles across freeway and dale.
In the spring months it's entirely encircled by thickets of National Buses from English mining towns, most of its residents being grey, wizened ladies with dry, furry hair and beige stockings who, because there's football on the telly, sit drawing breath in the hotel lounge.
It's an enormous place, with all the festering appeal of St. Pancras at sunset. Yet the Hydro serves as a kind of engine-room for the local community.
In the basement is the town's legendary masseuse, a brawny, pink-skinned woman with trucker's thighs and a smile of unparalleled radiance. This woman does things with the back muscles you wouldn't believe; rolling and kneading them between her fingers, smacking and tugging and inducing all manner of prurient notions the likes of which become clear the moment you're back on your feet.
It's just the thing for a couple of London boys who got way-laid after a Man concert in Glasgow and wound up searching for The Holy Grail (containing droplets of blood from Our Lord) with several dozen other looneys and imbeciles.
This last turns out to be the latest, most outlandish, and freeloading scheme of Monty Python's Flying Circus, supported with cash from the likes of Zeppelin, Floyd, Charisma and Island, and a West End mogul called Michael White. And it's as repellent as anything they've attempted before, featuring star and bit acts being constantly harangued with sheep shit, mattresses, mediaeval hangnail and a glove-puppet rabbit that bites the heads off knights and bloodies their jowls.
"A compellingly turgid melodrama," according to NME's film critic.
"A cheap mediaeval extravaganza...makes Ben Hur look like an epic," maintains Python.
So here we are in Blundane with a city-charged adrenalin power-pack tippling over the edge and pretty soon you discover there's no way of meshing with local opinion in this kind of condition. Where the shit are the Python crew? They were supposed to be mere miles away in Doune, filming in the local castle.
Bawn, of Pyton (Monty) Films Ltd., says they're dragging behind schedule slightly and plan one more day on a Killin mountainside, some 50 or 60 miles away.
There's a prop truck leaving from the Doune Woodside 6.30 the following morning and Tim Read of U.A. and I are aboard. We're driven by a jolly sod called Mick, whose friends are also called Mick. Or sometimes Keith.
Mick says he's ready for anything and although he's not sure about progress to date he's under the impression the crew, including the Python's two Terrys (Gilliam and Jones), have been in Scotland a couple of weeks lining up background shots and shooting random "fill" scenes.
"Bloody nerve of these people," says Mick. "I gets up this morning at six-a-bloody-clock and they tell me the Pythons have arrived and my room is wanted for one of them, so now I've got to look for another hotel. 'Ere I am six-a-bloody-clock in the morning, packing my gear and trying to get this lot out to the set gurgle arrgh."
In Mick's rentatruck we burrow through the lumpy Perthshire countryside and, a little after eight, arrive at a Killin farmhouse where Arthur's bloodstained knights are working through a breakfast fry-up; faces concealed by runny beards and scrambled eggs.
We join minstrel-knight Neil Innes for one more cup of coffee and a cigarette, and a man in a sagging roll-neck sweater runs over asking Tim and I, "How would you boys like to be pages today?"
It transpires that Python crewmembers have been calling on locals all week, dragging them away from their loved ones and getting them to perform perverse mediaeval acts in front of a specially-imported American camera that breaks apart whenever the wind drops and the sun peeps out from behind the clouds.
It's a tight budget. Somewhere in the region of £200,000. Which is something like half the figure required to do a relaxed job.
The crew are all toiling for record-low wages. Extras who utter less than 13 words are rewarded with £2 a day, and Python people - each of them playing a handful of roles - are reported to be working for zero...contenting themselves with promise of lucrative royalties and even more fame.
With Neil at the wheel we motor a couple of miles to the location, set steep on the side of a hill.
Deep inside a ravine is a muddy cave wherein is said to dwell the fugitive rabbit; paws of a panther and steely teeth that can divorce a man from his head with a single gulp.
This morning King Arthur (the lovely Graham Chapman) and his knights plan to exorcise the truculent beast who, alone, bars the way to The Holy Grail and a satisfactory conclusion to the film.
John Cleese has persuaded his frame into a cleft on a hillock where he reads a paperback in full ceremonial gear. Chapman, with what looks to be a genuine clump of facial hair, is an enthralling Arthur-cum-Francis-of-Asinine in majestical robes and rest-easy bootees.
Hello Arthur.
"Hello yourself!"
So what's going on, already?
Graham as Arthur and Arthur as Graham are almost melancholy this morning. Alert and full of bodyheat yet not the disgusting looney you'd half anticipated...not that we didn't always know those antics were just for the television cameras and that no-one's personal habits could be that all-round depraved.
Cleese put his tabard on it the next day at Doune when he said darkly: "It's the enthusiastic ones. The ones, when you're walking along the street just quietly going to buy a newspaper, who lean out of their vans and shout 'Ere Monty, give us one of yer funny walks. At the same time about 40 other people turn around and start nudging each other: 'Oh look it's that newsreader from ITV.'
"That can be very embarrassing. But 90 per cent of the people are very nice. If they want to say something they come up to you and say it quietly."
"An then the people that were of Antioch brought forward the grenade that it might be blessed. And St. Attila raised it on high..."
The Holy Handgrenade, a glittering orb not unlike the one used by Queen Majesty for the Coronation, is the one way out of their troubles.
To invoke its awesome power Arthur has to read from the Book of Armaments, housed in a broken-down cart guarded by Brother Maynard and his rabid monks and containing the fingernails and osified kneebones of dead saints.
"...three shall be the number thou shalt count and the number of the counting shall be three. Four thou shalt not count. Neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out."
Michael Palin, crazed cyclist and laundromat confidante to French Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, reads the lines in a squealing falsetto, surrounded by his brouther knights, one of whom, played by Eric Idle, is soiling his armour.
"That's Sir Robin," says Chapman. "He's not in the original story, mind you, but we decided to introduce him. He hangs to the back a good deal and runs away very quickly.
"Then there's Bedevere. He's quite strange. Another dimension. That's Terry Jones. Neil Innes is playing Gawaine and Terry Gilliam is playing the parts that need a lot of make-up and are very uncomfortable because he's the only one who'll do that sort of thing. And John is Lancelot."
Python animator Terry Gilliam and housewife-impersonator Terry Jones have been elected to direct the epic. Jones The Serious and Gilliam the Good-Natured goof with Quinn The Eskimo features and a boundless capacity to accommodate Eric Idle's rancid put-downs.
Gilliam laughs madly and pretends the whole thing's as easy as popping a blackhead, but the gleeful profile drops at the day's end and he begins to resemble a worried man. Just like Terry Jones in fact, who has no intention of masking his anguish.
"The first shot of the film," says Chapman, "we did in Glencoe, quite high up on the side of a mountain. We were going through a rather involved dialogue scene about three or four minutes long, when the camera broke down after 15 seconds - the first shot of the entire film! They had to cut it, and we had to wait around while they tried to get another camera, and for three days we had to use cameras not equipped for sound. It means dubbing on dialogue for the first three days' work which is a bit awkward."
It's not as winky as it sounds, mind you.
There's an almost lurid attention to detail and period etiquette. Costumes are by Royal Shakespeare Co Ltd., Stratford, and by Nathans of Drury Lane. And most scenes are shot (and re-shot) with a smoky Canterbury Tales aroma accomplished by use of a pungent incense expelled from hand-operated bellows.
"How do you like the smoke?" a props man asks assistant-director Gerry Harrison.
"The smoke was lovely that time," says Harrison.
"Alright, was it?"
"Yes. It was very good."
"There's a battle scene," says Graham, "where we didn't have as many extras as we'd liked but it looks like a lot on the screen. We're having about 200 involved at one point and we're also having numerous numbers of extremely pretty ladies in one particular scene which I'm not in, actually. But then that doesn't matter because I'm a poof."
Aside from this one carnal feast it's the usual appalling Python violence, with excessive amounts of tearing and shredding of flesh. Knights are continually bombarded with dead cattle and lunch a lot on mixtures of burnt sheep-bones and animal-droppings.
Worse than the Peckinpah tennis-match sketch, says Chapman.
"Yesterday Neil had his head bitten off by the rabbit. That was fairly horrifying. And in the final sequence there's a bit where Arthur gets lots of human droppings thrown all over him."
Why would anybody want to do a thing like that?
"It's the French, you see. They're taunting him. Excuse me I have to go and do a bit now."
And so have Tim and I; togged up four inches thick in knobbly tights, tops, and belts that allow our uniforms to swill around our persons. We're supposed to look cool and uninterested while Chapman, Cleese, Palin, Jones and Idle dither with the Holy Handgrenade.
"Would it help to confuse it if we ran away more?" Sir Robin enquires.
"Shut-up and change your armour," replies the unhelpful Arthur.
"Have you heard about the masseuese at the Dunblane Hydro?" I ask Eric Idle during a break in shooting, knowing full well Lone Eric can't stand being interviewed, but hoping he's hot for Scottish women with thick thighs.
"That's my beard you're wearing," says Idle, astonished that a music writer should have the gall to cower alongside him in the costume he'd been wearing just one day before.
"That's a very good imitation of me," he finally decides.
Thanks very much...I know you don't like doing interviews, but how about...
"Careful with the beard, won't you? I have to wear it tomorrow."
Sure thing, Eric...I know you don't like doing interviews, but how about if I kind of creep up on you when you're least expecting it - and see what your reaction is then?
A few minutes later I approach Idle again with my tape recorder just when he's most expecting it.
"Interviews are so boring," he confirms. "People you expect to be interesting just go winding on and on and the whole procedure's such a waste of time."
Aw cummon, Eric. We could make music, you and me.
"The Ellsberg interview in Rolling Stone was a worthwhile read because it divulged all sorts of facts that wouldn't otherwise be available. But that's an exception.
"Why don't you write down some questions on a piece of paper and Mike Palin and I will answer them over lunch?"
Mid-morning snack is served from bins and pails.
Cold, congealed scrambled eggs, sweating sausages, soiled rolls. Lunch comes off the back of a lorry, down the hill and quarter of a mile along the road. Rodent stew, sticky pie, and squash.
But first, knights and pages gather on a hill-ledge for a disappearing-into-the-skyline shot; knights whinnying on imaginary horses, pages following in profile making horse noises with coconut shells.
A man from the local press has arrived with camera pack. A rust-haired clown in flappy check jacket and cord trousers.
"A member of the fascist press to ask inane questions," says Idle. "I want to tell him a lie. What can I tell him?"
"Tell him his hair looks nice," says Chapman.
The camera goes gung-ho again and someone remarks how this filming business is such a disaster.
"It's a disaster that frankly parallels the Boer War, although the machinery these days isn't quite so advanced," says Cleese.
"It's not as bad as a famine," Palin observes.
It's very avante-garde, I remark (but I don't think anyone heard).