Graham Chapman

Graham_chapman2

Birth: 8th January, 1941
Place of Birth: Leicester, Leicestershire, UK
Nationality: British
Job Title: Writer, Comedian, Actor
Partners: David Sherlock
Died: 4th October 1989, Maidstone, Kent

The human intellect compels us to make sense of everything. We dislike films where we can’t follow the plot. We get upset when people around us act irrationally. Everything needs a rhyme and a reason or we start to panic.

This month’s Gay Great was one of the few exceptional people who managed to make complete and utter nonsense highly palatable to the human brain.

Graham Arthur Chapman was born in the middle of an air raid in war torn Leicester. His father, Walter Chapman, was a busy wartime policeman who was often called upon to attend to the grim aftermath of the bombing raids. One of Chapman’s earliest memories was of watching as his father along with his colleagues recovered body parts from the wreckage left after a bombing raid. Unlike many of the onlookers, the young Chapman was not afraid or disgusted by the collection of bodies and limbs. Instead, he was fascinated by what was exposed beneath the skin of the human body. His experience at the crash site may well have led to at least one of his future careers.

Chapman’s early years were rather unsettled as his father’s job took the family from town to town. The constant moving continued until he reached secondary education age when the family finally settled in the town of Melton Mowbray, famed for its pork pies. At the local grammar school, he began to take an active interest in the arts, especially acting, and his participation in dramatic productions was notable. Gradually, a passion for comedy emerged. Chapman loved to mix intelligence with humour and although he was a soft-spoken, often shy young man, he always had something witty in his armoury ready to pull out at every occasion.

For the last few years of his school life, Chapman watched his brother progress through a medical degree at Cambridge. This afforded him the opportunity to consider if he should follow this path too and, on balance, he decided that Cambridge had a lot to offer. After a short but very successful interview, he was accepted to Emmanuel College to study medicine. However, his attention was soon distracted from his studies. Since the 1880s, Cambridge theatrical types had flocked to the Footlights society. Having grown in prominence throughout the 20th century, the Footlights had become the training ground of many a great satirist, comedy writer and actor. Chapman was determined to have his name on the roll-call of past members and approached the Footlights stall at fresher’s week. The incumbent president, one David Frost, refused him a place in the troupe.

But Chapman had great passion and although most of his new friends laughed at his insistence on being accepted, he managed to find a fellow Footlights wannabe to team up with. Together, they produced a ‘smoker’, a piece of work written and publicly performed specifically as an audition piece for the Footlights. The revue worked and Chapman was duly invited along for an official audition.

At the audition, Chapman met another Footlights hopeful, a tall, lanky young man called John Cleese. It was obvious that the two shared a similar sense of humour and after the audition, they went for a cup of coffee to cement their newly found friendship. Both Chapman and Cleese were eventually accepted to join Footlights and it wasn’t long before they were writing and performing together.

The first production Chapman and Cleese worked on was the revue “Double Take” in 1961. They sat on the script committee along with other future stars Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie. As his studies at Cambridge progressed, so Chapman became acquainted with more Footlighters, many of whom would go on to attain fame for their comical work. Miriam Margolyes, Graeme Garden and many others all attended the now infamous 60s era of the Footlights. But one of the troupe hit a chord with both Chapman and Cleese. Eric Idle, a distinctive looking student of English, seemed to love the anarchic, pointless humour that Cleese and Chapman were producing. As Bill Oddie was busy bonding with friends who would eventually form the Goodies, so Chapman was unwittingly mixing with his own future comedy grouping.

The Footlights caused a storm at the 1963 Edinburgh Festival with their review A Clump of Plinths and the society decided to hit the big time and take the show to the West End, re-branded as the Cambridge Circus. Chapman had reached an important crossroads. Now working as a junior doctor at London’s St Bart’s Hospital during the day, he was also hot footing it to the West End in the evenings to take part in the revue. The question over where his future career should go agonised him.

Inspiration came from an unlikely source. At the opening of a new room in the hospital, Chapman found himself hosting a visit by the Queen Mother. He mentioned that the group were thinking of taking the Cambridge Circus to New Zealand and explained the agony of choosing between them and the hospital. Remaining as unbiased as possible, the Queen Mother mentioned that New Zealand was ‘an incredibly beautiful place’ and that Chapman must visit there at some point. Taking it as a Royal command, he put his medical career on hold and took part in the Cambridge Circus tour for a year.

When the tour was complete, Chapman did return to the medical profession but still continued writing comedy. As well as working at St Bart’s, he began to write for radio and television and he often performed in cabaret. Medical matters were gradually pushed aside. Soon, he was writing full time as a journeyman for radio shows such as ‘I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again’, ‘This is Petula Clarke’, ‘At Last the 1948 Show’ plus many more.

However, there were other changes afoot in Chapman’s life. For most of his twenties, he had felt an increasing attraction to men. While travelling in Ibiza, he met and fell in love with a British writer called David Sherlock. On their return to the UK, the couple became partners. The partnership would prove to be a very harmonious one and the couple ended up staying together until Chapman’s death many years later. The couple also adopted a son, John Tomiczek, a runaway from Manchester.

On the work front, a new and exciting commission was in the offing. A group of comic writers had slowly been forming. Chapman, Cleese and Idle had known each other since university. While on the Cambridge Circus tour, they had met Terry Gilliam, an enthusiastic American satirist. During the course of their collective careers, they would also meet fellow writers Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Together, the six men were commissioned to produce their own television sketch show.

The challenge was relished by all and every member of the new ‘dream team’ was set to create something utterly new. They named themselves Monty Python’s Flying Circus, an irrelevant name for what they hoped to be an equally irrelevant piece of genius. Via their experience of writing for other shows, they knew punch lines were not their strong point and so in a bold step, they decided to totally do away with them! Instead, sketches would blend gently into one another via the use of Gilliam’s superb animations.

But the nonsense didn’t end there. The writers also began to deviate from the norms of structure and would ‘trick’ the audience with false beginnings, premature ending titles and seemingly useless pieces of script. On one show, the ending credits were played directly after the opening titles! Chapman and Cleese would often work in isolation from the rest. Together they developed some of the greatest characters and sketches in modern comedy. On screen, Chapman became known as the army officer who stepped in, pipe at a jaunty angle in his mouth, to bring a halt to a sketch because it had got ‘far too silly’.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus was an instant hit, especially among the younger generation. Chapman and his colleagues were propelled to stardom and found themselves appearing on some notable chat shows. It was on one of these shows that Chapman chose to reveal his sexuality. Having already come out to the cast of Python, as well as his family, he became one of the few homosexuals in the public eye to admit their sexuality in the media. Soon after, a letter arrived at the Python office from a slightly confused Christian woman. She explained that she had heard one of the cast was gay and that she would pray for them. Eric Idle wrote back to say they had found out who the ‘gay one’ was, had taken him outside and stoned him to death. They didn’t receive a reply from the woman.

Chapman’s activism went far beyond his openness. Records of Gay Liberation Front meetings show he participated gladly, once buying a set of nun’s outfits for a protest at Westminster Hall. He was also a founder of Britain’s first ever mass produced gay publication The Gay News. But his openness came at a cost. Chapman often felt the stress of a life battling homophobia. In part, this led to a heavy drink problem which had been growing worse since his student days. As Monty Python grew in popularity, his drinking continued to get worse. At one point, he was downing around three pints of gin a day.

Graham_Chapman

Sadly, his drinking began to affect his work. He was often late, sometimes unable to remember his lines. When shooting the second Monty Python film in the Scottish Highlands, alcohol wasn’t readily available and he began to feel the full force of withdrawal. Shocked at his dependence, he decided to give up altogether. The battle was less arduous than he expected and by the time Monty Python gathered to complete their third film, The Life of Brian, he had recovered enough to put in a memorable performance in the lead role.

The reign of Monty Python came to an inevitable end before the glitter rubbed off. The cast went their own ways and Chapman began to work on a few films, the most memorable of which was Yellowbeard, a pirate spoof. He indulged in his long term passions such as mountaineering and his involvement with the Dangerous Sports Club. He was also invited to take a lecture tour of the USA which took him to many schools and universities across the nation.

Things started to go wrong when a lump was discovered on Chapman’s tonsils at a routine dental appointment. Tests proved it was a tumour, which was instantly removed. But Chapman’s body had been aged beyond its years by his heavy drinking and smoking and further tumours were found on his spine. As one tumour was removed, another grew, a cycle that carried on for several years until in October 1989, he developed pneumonia. His body was wracked by illness and he was unable to fight it off. He died on 4th October, his partner and several Monty Python cast members by his side.

The human brain may well be primarily obsessed with logic, but occasionally it likes to let loose and enjoy something that has no sense at all. It was this desire on which Monty Python fed. Although containing several political and social references, the majority of the material is abstract, alternative and sometimes just highly complex twaddle. The genius of Chapman wasn’t that he could explain complicated ideas or that he could discover new truths about the world, it was that he could make the whole world sit back and simply enjoy a load of complete nonsense!