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John Cleese: Graham Chapman
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John Cleese delivered a memorable memorial speech for Graham Chapman at a memorial service held two months later in the Great Hall at St Bartholomew's Hospital. Cleese delivered a humorous eulogy for his friend Chapman and took advantage of "this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf," which he then went on to do.
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Cleese returned to England where he began writing for television, including The Frost Report, where he teamed up with the others who would become his Monty Python partners. He resumed writing with Graham Chapman, whom he had begun collaborating with in the Footlights Revue, and they received their first screen credit, writing for The Magic Christian, in 1968. At about the same time Monty Python's Flying Circus took off. Aside from the BBC show, the group made several movies, including And Now For Something Completely Different (1971), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), The Life of Brian (1979), and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983). He and Chapman ... co-wrote the pilot episode for the BBC series Doctor in the House (1971).
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Though the programme lasted four series, by the start of series 3, Cleese was growing tired of coping with Chapman's alcoholism. According to Gilliam, Cleese was the "most Cambridge" of the Cambridge-educated members of the group (Cleese, Chapman, and Idle), by which Gilliam meant that Cleese was the tallest (6'4") and most aggressive of the whole group. He felt, too, that the show's scripts had declined in quality. For these reasons, he became restless and decided to move on. Though he stayed for the third series, he officially left the group before the fourth season. Despite this, he remained friendly with the group, and all six began writing Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Cleese received a credit on episodes of the fourth series which used material from these sessions, and even makes a brief appearance in one episode, though he was officially unconnected with the fourth series. Cleese returned to the troupe to co-write and co-star in the Monty Python films Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python's Life of Brian and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and would participate in various live performances over the years.
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By then, Cleese, having altered the world of sketch comedy for ever, had done the same for the sitcom. He was no stranger to sitcom, having written episodes of Doctor in Charge, together with Chapman. For Fawlty Towers he teamed up with his American wife Connie Booth to create a comedy of character and incident which is almost faultless in its construction. The "situation" is a small hotel in the genteel English resort of Torquay, run by Basil Fawlty (Cleese), his wife Sybil (Prunella Scales), the maid Polly (Booth) and the incompetent Spanish waiter Manuel (Andrew Sachs). Each episode is so packed with comic situations and complex plot developments, often bordering on farce, that it is no surprise that there were, in all, only twelve episodes ever made, in two series of six each from 1975 and 1979. Basil Fawlty is the ultimate Cleese creation--a manic, snobbish, repressed English stereotype with a talent for disaster, whether it be trying to dispose of the dead body of a guest or coping with a party of German visitors.
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John spent five years, from 1953 to 1958, at Clifton College, then taught there for two years while waiting to go to Downing College at Cambridge University to study law. Whilst at university he ended up joining the Cambridge Footlights and became friends with Graham Chapman when the pair appeared in the 1963 Footlights production of "A Clump of Plinths". The show was hugely successful and ended up being turned into the "Cambridge Circus" and ran in London's West End. It was then exported to New Zealand and finished up on Broadway in America. This left Cleese relatively well known as an actor and writer, leading to contributions for the BBC TV show "That Was the Week that Was" and "The Frost Report."
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Such was the popularity of the series that, in 1966, Cleese and Chapman were invited to work as writers and performers with Brooke-Taylor and Feldman on At Last the 1948 Show. He and Chapman ... wrote episodes of Doctor in the House. These series were successful and, in 1969, Cleese and Chapman were offered their very own series.
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