An early reading list . . . no Dostoevsky as yet, but plenty of horse and dog books. I can’t date this exactly, but fellow Pythons would probably say. ‘Maybe in your early twenties?’
We always had dogs in the house – usually setters, along with the odd spaniel – so these books did not require great intellectual leaps of understanding on my part. But the great thing about reading as a spur to the imagination (as opposed to say Grand Theft Auto – not that I don’t enjoy that too) is that you’re doing all the visualisation yourself. However good the author might be at painting a picture with words, the final stage of translating that mental picture from two dimensions into three is up to you.
It’s the same with the radio, which was all-powerful in America at that time. There was a children’s radio show called Let’s Pretend, which was one of my very first gateways to the fantastical. It might seem a strange thing for a cartoonist to say – that radio was the medium that first taught him how to conjure up visuals – but it’s certainly true in my case. Even later on, when I started to get actively interested in animation, the name of a voiceover artist like Mel Blanc still probably meant more to me than Chuck Jones’ did. And once I started making films of my own, I loved doing the voices and sound effects every bit as much as the images.
We didn’t have a TV during the time we lived at Medicine Lake, but I do remember going round to a neighbour’s house to watch Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Caesar was the one commanding your attention, but I realised when I went back to that show years afterwards that it was the less prominent Carl Reiner who was truly breathtaking.
Another comedian I discovered on that same neighbour’s TV, who made a huge impression on me right from the off, was Ernie Kovacs. Even though I saw him ridiculously early in life – I was just ten or eleven years old and pondering the economic benefits of my first paper round – I think Kovacs was the one who did more than anyone else to bring alive my interest in what I would later learn to think of as surreal comedy. No one else was doing that kind of thing on TV at the time, and he died far too young in a car crash, but not before he had introduced my receptive mind to the entrancing notion of a thing not having to be what it was.
Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar (handsomely pictured here) were so anar chic that it was hard to imagine how they got on the telly. But TV was a fairly new medium then and clearly couldn’t support the legions of executives that are now available to get in the way of talent. In a way these shows were my first connection with what became Python.
In terms of constructing a home for my youthful imagination, the two sure foundations which Ernie Kovacs and Walt Disney had to build upon were Grimms’ fairy tales and stories from the Bible. Decades later, when I eventually came to try to film Grimms (an experience that was a mittel-European horror story all of its own, but we’ll come to that later), I’d find out that they had been every bit as bowdlerised as the Old and New Testaments have been. But just because a sacred text has been tampered with by a few old men with beards over the years, that doesn’t make it any less powerful.
The version of the Bible I read at least twice all the way through was the King James, which is a pretty good run at the material, all things considered. Once you’ve got a book like that in your hands, you want to get to the end just to find out what happens – was it the butler who did it, or the Messiah?
As well as a tree-house, my father also made me a special table for backyard performances of the secret knowledge imported by this magic set. It wasn’t so much about becoming a master of illusion, as learning how to keep the audience on your side when things almost invariably went wrong . . . useful preparation for my later career as a film-maker.
Either way, I was raised to know the whole thing – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, the lot – and I do think the generations who’ve grown up without learning the Bible (and to my own secular regret I include my own children in that) have really missed out. Stories like David and Bathsheba are the building blocks of our culture, but who knows Bathsheba now? Who even knows David?
It’s not necessarily a question of having a reverential attitude. What’s interesting is sharing a culture that has grown out of those tales, because it’s easier to have fun with things when everyone understands what the references are.
Ours was a relaxed religious household. Christianity was a normal part of life, like fresh water and mosquitoes; everyone we knew went to church on Sunday, listened to the sermon and sang vigorous non-conformist hymns like ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ (which are much better than the standard Anglican hymn book – that is fucking horrible).
Lawnmowing for candy is one of the essential human transactions. Contrary to the propaganda of certain studio executives, tight budgeting has always been really important to me . . . whether I was saving $1.30 out of every $2.10 earned as a kid, or trying to get by on $50 a week and still save up for a film camera in New York in the mid-sixties. Obviously the numbers are bigger now, but it’s still the same fucking thing. To me it’s always been about buying the freedom to do what I want and nothing else . . . I don’t have to clean those cars or make that advert, because I’ve got a dollar thirty for a sketch book and some pencils. I owe my forensic record-keeping to my mother, who even kept the hospital bill (totalling $76.60) for the week of my birth – room, drugs, laboratory anaesthetic, Thanksgiving dinner for Gill, circumcision for Terry ($2). That first brutal edit was standard practice in America – every kid (well, all the boys at least) got circumcised, and I suppose $2 wasn’t a bad deal, given the excessive amount they took off. I’ve suffered with that all my life, but that’s another story – let’s call it the director’s cut.
Going to church was the big social event of the week, and any other large-scale gathering which took place at the weekend – a square dance or a barbecue – was likely to be organised around that same social hub. It gave you a real sense of community. The same way that knowing that if you wanted to buy something, you’d have to save hard to get the money, prepared you for the realities of your working life as an adult.
When I was eleven years old, our family underwent what should in theory have been a great upheaval. Like so many of our fellow Americans before – and after – us, we sold our house and drove out West to try our luck in California. A two-wheeled trailer was hired, all our moveable possessions packed into it – including my grandmother on my mother’s side (although eventually we heeded her protests and let her come in the car with the rest of the family) – and we set off into the future.
The whole thing felt like a big adventure to us kids, but must have been pretty stressful for the adult members of the party, given my dad’s uncertain employment prospects. He knew there were possibilities with a company called 3M, which had been based in Minneapolis, but it was nothing definite. And by the time we’d moved into a little pink house in one of aluminium giant Henry J. Kaiser’s tract developments – serried ranks of more-or-less identical brand-new houses, with much less space around them than we’d been used to back at Medicine Lake – the Gilliams’ California dream was losing a little bit of its lustre.
My mum’s diary recounts my reactions in the same melodramatic terms she so often (and so mystifyingly) tended to ascribe to me: ‘Terry was very disappointed. He said, “I thought we were coming to Paradise.”’
It was true that at first everything did seem kind of contained and not natural, but LA hadn’t been completely valleyised by then. From where we lived in Panorama City, you had only to go fifteen minutes down the road to reach open fields. If you were willing to drive a little further, you could get to the mountains or the beach in under an hour. And by the time we’d gone into the mountains a few times