<Archive Obituaries> Graham Chapman (October 4th 1989)
Bill Schenley
Photo:
http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/castpics/graham_chapman_1988.jpg
FROM: The Guardian (October 6th 1989) ~
By Michael Palin
I first heard of Graham Chapman as one of that pool of ex-Oxbridge
revue talent that sloshed around the BBC in the mid 1960s.
I use the word sloshed advisedly, for many of our best times were had
propping up the various bars of the Corporation. Graham was like a
figure out of a Biggles story. Strong, finely-chiselled features, pipe
at a jaunty angle in his mouth, pint in one hand and progger in the
other. A progger was Graham's name for the flat-ended instrument which
he used to bed down the tobacco in his pipe. I never knew whether it
was a real name or not. Graham liked words and used them well, but if
he felt the right one didn't exist he'd invent another.
In the post-Cambridge days he was a journeyman writer, like us aK=ne
day he would be working with John Cleese to produce a dazzling
succession of successful sketches for the Frost Report, the next he
would be writing filler jokes for the Petula Clark show.
He kept a low profile as a performer until At Last The 1948 Show in
which he revealed a talent for playing intense, rather serious
characters hilariously. He was a charismatic performer, drawing the
eye to himself, as much for the originality and un-showbizziness of
his approach, as for the lightly detectable hint of unpredictability.
An audience was never quite sure what he would do next. Nor I think,
as performer, was Graham. During a singing court scene in one of the
early Python shows he quite inadvertently substituted 'window dresser'
for 'window cleaner' in his song. A Freudian slip at which we all fell
about, especially Graham.
In 1969, when the mutual appreciation society which became known as
Monty Python assembled, Graham met David Sherlock and embarked on one
of the many radical changes in his life, when they decided to live
together. It was a courageous decision, which shocked some of his
friends at the time but was borne out triumphantly by the fact that
they shared the rest of their lives. David, together with their
adopted son John Tomizcek, nursed and cared for him with stoic
patience and quiet strength throughout his final illness.
Graham's need to relax himself with a dram or two took a
disproportionate hold on his life as the pressures of a heavy Python
schedule grew. Drink was not always the friend he thought it,
affecting his performances and occasionally doing a great disservice
to a much underrated natural acting talent.
His writing contributions to Python were of quality rather than
quantity. Whilst all around were scratching their heads for
inspiration, Graham would puff his pipe and glance sideways at the
Times crossword and be quite silent for 30 minutes or so before coming
out with a single shaft of inspiration that would transform a mundane
sketch into something very mad and wonderful.
Such surreal flashes were the very essence of Python as were his
memorable performances as the Colonel, as the Hostess in the
Eurovision song contest, Raymond Luxury-Yacht and others.
His off-stage performances included collecting an award from the Sun
newspaper by leaping high in the air, emitting a loud squawk and
crawling all the way back to his table with the award in his mouth,
leaving Lord Mountbatten, who had given him the award, looking very
confused. Once for no apparent reason he bit Eric Morecambe's wife
lightly on the leg at a BBC Light Entertainment party.
But Graham's most memorable performances were sustained and
demanding-as King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Brian
in The Life of Brian. The measure of his success is that it's
impossible now to imagine another Arthur or another Brian. They are
Graham.
AnSnd the time of the filming of Life of Brian, Graham made a
conscious effort to free himself from his dependence on the large G
and Ts-after that 'ice but no lemon please'. His restless
ever-inquisitive need to be freed from the boring and the conventional
had led him to the brink, but his cautious disciplined rational side
saved him at the last minute from toppling over. He gave up drinking
and later, with immense difficulty also laid aside his pipe and
progger.
Perhaps Graham too easily overestimated the talents of others while
underestimating his own and, as a result, his ventures outside
Python-Out Of The Trees for the BBC and his two films, Odd Job and
Yellowbeard-were full of good ideas badly resolved. The commercial
failure of Yellowbeard depressed him, but Graham never had much time
for self-pity and, at the time of his death, had embarked on fresh
film projects as well as a second volume of his A Liar's Autobiography
Volume V1 (an essential and sensational companion to the life of G.
Chapman and M Python).
His recent illness was another in a series of mountains which Graham
had to climb. He always regarded death as highly overrated and could
never understand why anyone made such a fuss about it. Despite great
physical discomfort he remained alert, informed, articulate and
humorous. Those who visited him in hospital over the last month found
him in benign philosophical mood. Graham never had much difficulty
making friends. Though often quiet, reserved and thoughtful, he
generated affection easily and was someone you loved as well as liked.
He hated to be bored which is why he joined the Dangerous Sports Club
and once hurled himself into thin air attached to a length of rubber
..'I was high for two weeks after that'. So there's no knowing what
sort of trouble he might have got into had he lived.
I suspect he would have enjoyed an old age of increasing eccentricity,
dispensing his considerable wisdom and hospitality, occasionally
leaping in the air and shouting 'Eeke!'
Graham Chapman, born January 8, 1941; died October 4, 1989.
---
Photo:
http://www.dailyllama.com/news/2004/images/graham_chapman.jpg
---
FROM: The Independent (October 6th 1989) ~
By Alan Rafferty
Graham Chapman, writer and actor, born Leicester 8 January 1941, died
Maidstone 4 October 1989.
If, in the Forties and Fifties, a traditional training course for
British comedians would start with the period of apprenticeship in
ENSA and be followed by a stint filling in the gaps between trippers
at the Windmill Theatre, these days a university degree (from
Cambridge, ideally) has increasingly become a requisite for any
successful career in stage, films or television humour. Graham
Chapman, who died on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of his first
appearance in the show which made his reputation, travelled along (and
to a certain extent pioneered) that now orthodox route to celebrity.
Chapman studied medicine at Cambridge and, on graduating, even briefly
practised it; of more significance, however, in the light of his
subsequent career, was a meeting with John Cleese, with whom he was to
write and perform numerous sketches, most notably for David Frost.
Eventually they joined forces with other graduates sharing the same
skewed sense of humour, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and an
American-born cartoonist and graphic artist, Terry Gilliam; and on
Sunday 5 October 1969 (incongruously enough, in a scheduling slot
which had always been rigorously reserved for programmes of a
religious cast) the very first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus
was broadcast.
With its demented self-referentiality, its abrupt and dreamlike
transpositions of settings and the head-spinning ease with which each
sketch would dovetail into its successor, Monty Python soon became a
cult show, albeit achieving viewing figures to rival those of the
cosiest and most conventional sitcom; and its peculiar brand of
humour, which contrived to be both anarchically delirious and
quintessentially British, transferred without strain to the cinema, as
witness And Now for Something Completely Different (a portmanteau film
of the best-known TV sketches), Monty Python and the Holy Grail,
Jabberwocky, The Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life and, released only
last week, Erik the Viking.
These, along with other, related ventures, made the members of the
Python team all variously rich - with the sole exception of Chapman.
His alcoholism apparently alienated his former writing partner; his
admirable disinclination to offer any public denial of his
homosexuality may have compromised his potential as a solo performer;
and he battled for several years with the throat cancer which finally
killed him. Nor can one omit, as an important contributing factor in
his decline, the humiliating failure of his own attempts to write and
direct a feature film, Yellowbeard, even after some drastic and, by
Chapman's own account, disastrous re-editing by the studio.
It is equally possible, however, that Chapman's problem as a
performer, within a collective context in which the success of each
individual seemed virtually guaranteed, related to an inherent
incompatibility between the innovation of the Monty Python group and
his own comedic style.
The Pythons' inspiration (of the films in particular) can be traced
back, via the immediate influence of the Goon Show, along a line
leading directly to Lewis Carroll and the whole English tradition of
nonsense, parody and the mock-epic. But the distinguishing feature of
those films (even if they cannot quite be credited with inventing the
conceit) was what might be called their sense of the inverted
anachronism. The humour of anachronism has always existed, of course.
But, in a film like The Life of Brian, the characters were not played,
as one might expect, as superficially representative figures of the
period turned into figures of fun by the odd verbal or gestural
modernism. Instead, they constituted a set of twentieth-century
British comedy stereotypes (the harassed working-class housewife and
mother, the truculent, bloody-minded shop steward, the jovial pillar
of the labour exchange) somehow transplanted into a biblical setting -
as, respectively, Virgin Mary, militant Early Christian and willing
good-humoured martyr.
Yet what such a comic ploy demands is, precisely, performers capable
of representing stereotypes; and, whatever the evidence to the
contrary, that is where the true talent of the Pythonites lay.
Throughout the show's history, for instance, Cleese was the very image
of pompous, impatient rectitude. Whatever the different roles
assigned, Palin invariably personified a sweatily ingratiating
Milquetoast; and so forth. Only Chapman lacked any easily identifiable
and stereotypical presence (his cantankerous military type, who would
interrupt the more outrageous sketches with a testy 'this is silly!',
might just as well, or even better, have been played by Cleese). It
was he who tended most to be swallowed up by the show's overall style
and it was therefore he who became in a sense ultimately dispensable
---
Photo:
http://www.alien-menace.allthingsfun.net/images/toe-tag-large.jpg
deb...@comcast.net
an urn was brought on stage & placed in a chair. They said it was
Graham Chapman!
homes...@netburner.net
When I heard of his death on the radio while driving I blurted out the
"s" word with my folks in the back seat.
Tommie Hicks
theresa
Didn't they shoot off his cremains in fireworks (around 1999)?
J. Eric Durbin
I believe it was an exploding penguin.
robertc...@yahoo.com
Bill Schenley wrote:
> The Life Of Graham
>
> Photo:
> http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/castpics/graham_chapman_1988.jpg
>
Here's a photo of Chapman as most of us remember him.