Calcium Made Interesting is the title of a newly published collection of Graham Chapman's writings. Chapman (1941–1989) has been called 'the only true anarchist in Monty Python' (Jonathan Lynn). Trained as a doctor, but turning to comedy sketch-writing and then emerging as a comedy actor/performer, he nearly ran on to the self-destructive rocks of alcoholism. Michael Palin:
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.
Eric Idle said of Chapman's A Liar's Autobiography, 'This is life viewed as comedy, that only a doctor faced constantly with the physical comedy of our bodies can see'.
John Cleese's famous speech at Chapman's memorial service can be read here and a clip viewed here:
I remember his being invited to speak at the Oxford Union, and entering the chamber dressed as a carrot---a full length orange tapering costume with a large, bright green sprig as a hat----and then, when his turn came to speak, refusing to do so. He just stood there, literally speechless, for twenty minutes, smiling beatifically. The only time in world history that a totally silent man has succeeded in inciting a riot.
I remember Graham receiving a Sun newspaper TV award from Reggie Maudling. Who else! And taking the trophy falling to the ground and crawling all the way back to his table, screaming loudly, as loudly as he could. And if you remember Gray, that was very loud indeed.
It is magnificent, isn't it? You see, the thing about shock... is not that it upsets some people, I think; I think that it gives others a momentary joy of liberation, as we realised in that instant that the social rules that constrict our lives so terribly are not actually very important.
The new book is reviewed today in the Telegraph by John Preston (not online — yet?), and two things in this piece caught my attention:
From the start he seems to have been beset by conflicting impulses: orthodoxy on the one hand and extreme unorthodoxy on the other. When he was a child, Chapman once put a chair in the kitchen sink and sat on it for several hours in order to gain a different perspective on the room.
And the other, a stage direction to a script:
A corridor, fairly butch.
And then there is this quotation, via Eric Idle: 'After all, who of us in our lives hasn't set fire to some great public building or other …'
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