Gilliamesque by Terry Gilliam

Author:Terry Gilliam
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Canongate Books

Jester’s cap and bells, optional; non-speaking roles a speciality; Michael Palin Knee attachment, model’s own.

Alongside his many other gifts, this capable feline also learned to straddle so he could see in my human toilet rather than the cat litter box … a trick which Jinxy, the cat in MEET THE PARENTS, would later emulate to global acclaim.

By the time the Flying Circus was properly up and running, Glenys and I had moved down the route of the number 14 bus from Ovington Square to a flat near Putney Bridge. Python was only paying standard BBC money at that stage, but it was already nice to be able to pay the rent. The flat was in a modern block and we were always bumping into Kenny Everett – then a Radio 1 DJ and producer of The Beatles’ 1968 Christmas single – who lived on a floor below us. He was a very funny guy, who never complained about the noise as my studio door became the punch-bag for my deadline-related frustrations (eventually there wasn’t much more than a hinge left).

It wasn’t just my neighbours who were on the up. I’d bought myself a Morris Minor convertible for £35 before Python began, and I upgraded to a Triumph Spitfire when the BBC payments started to roll in. But when Glenys and I split up shortly after Python started, she got the Triumph and I got the flat (although she did also come back and take the vacuum cleaner).

The other important possession I got to keep was the Siamese cat that defeats the Killer Cars in the Python animation. It was just called ‘Cat’ – I never asked him his name – but I remember my dad being over from America and holding him up for the photograph I took, ‘. . . as he rampages through London’. Siamese cats are really smart – a fine example of the breed. John Cleese had his sibling, so it was kind of a Python-esque dynasty.

Although I didn’t see it this way at the time, Glenys and my break-up was the best thing that could have happened to both of us. She ended up marrying – and having a daughter with – Dougie Hayward, tailor to the stars (and alleged inspiration for Michael Caine’s Alfie) and working as a feature writer for the Daily Telegraph and then the Mail on Sunday (where she still writes the occasional article mentioning me in studiedly neutral terms to this day). And I was left footloose and fancy-free at exactly the right moment to meet my wife-to-be Maggie Weston, who was working in the Monty Python make-up room – a form of employment a teenage Lon Chaney impersonator like myself had no option but to find irresistibly attractive.

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