Michael Palin was very touching when he spread the news that his friend and fellow Python Terry Jones is losing the power of speech. I was once on stage in a sketch with both of them, for a charity event, and during rehearsals was impressed with their meticulous dedication to the comic nuts and bolts, with Jones proving to be at least as sharp verbally as Palin.
It made me very scared about screwing up, which luckily didn’t happen, so when I emerged from the evening, my shoulders glittered with borrowed stardust. Now years have gone by and it turns out that Graham Chapman wasn’t the only Python who was mortal all along. On screen, they always looked as if they had a combined age of about 30, but it was an illusion born of exuberance.
Before the Pythons, there were Spike Milligan’s Q programmes. Some scholars hold that Spike was the true ancestor of Pythonism. The argument has a lot to it, because apart from Terry Gilliam’s dementedly extravagant artwork, it is quite hard to think of anything the Pythons invented that Spike hadn’t already at least hinted at. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones wasn’t out to prove any such thesis when he included an anthology of Spike’s best Q moments in his recent BBC4 anthology of wild TV stuff.
Richards, whose face has looked almost from the start as if he had rammed it into the wall where the road ends, was merely talking about his enthusiasms, but such is his reputation for taciturnity between numbers that he suddenly sounded as articulate as Oscar Wilde.
Clearly Keith worshipped Spike. It was the only thing to do. Among the precious footage was a complete version of the song in which John Bluthal sings the words and Spike does nothing but blow raspberries. His expression while doing so is one of shy maternal pride, and the total effect is beyond ecstatic. Spike was in drag at the time, as so much British humour often still was. This currently upcoming era of British humour will doubtless be more truly feminist and I’m sorry I’m going to miss seeing it. I have always preferred Eddie Izzard in trousers, even if he had to be playing a Nazi officer.
“Time,” sings the Field Marshal’s wife in Der Rosenkavalier, “it is the strangest thing.” But it isn’t really. If it didn’t end, it would never start. For any kind of artist, the most generous possible gift from the fates is to be granted a hand in writing the script for your own exit. Simon Schama’s wonderful show about Rembrandt’s last years has just been on again. The master was broke, but he was still in the game.
