Quotes

Basically, in those days you couldn't be a doctor, unless you were married, that's all there was to it. And Graham's girlfriend at the time was an extremely intelligent, beautiful woman. I think he loved being with her when they were together but he was always off doing other things, extremely busy. I think she was genuinely taken aback when Graham had his coming out party in the summer of '67. He'd invited her along with some friends from Bart's who were kind enough to take her home when she realised that she'd had enough. It took an enormous amount of courage at the time and he had no idea what the reaction was going to be, so he decided to tell the person he thought would be most relaxed about it first, and that was Marty Feldman's wife Loretta, who howled with laughter and then said she would tell Marty. They were in bed at the time and he apparently fell out of bed. So, that over, Graham had his party where everyone was invited and lots of people were deeply surprised. I get the feeling that John [Cleese] was certainly more than a little shocked and surprised, and it took John a long time to get used to it. There is the silly story which Graham used to trot out, that he had to explain to Eric Idle what it was all about, and I actually think Graham regrets having made that comment, because Eric can be quite sensitive and in fact that became an issue in the weeks before Graham died. It came out again in an interview and Eric wrote a rather angry letter to Graham. Graham asked me should he reply to it, and I said, 'No, I think you've got far too much on your mind at the moment.'

Graham was such a dedicated sportsman. He was very good at athletics, and he was a good rugby player. Also he was tall at an early age. At around the age of fifteen he was asked to join the local rugby club and he was thrilled. But of course, after rugby and they'd all cleaned and showered up, it was a Saturday afternoon, so they piled into the pub. Graham told me that if you were going to go into a pub as a fifteen-year-old in those days, when your father's a copper, you'd better damn well look older. So he then took to smoking a pipe which gave him much more gravitas than smoking cigarettes, which he never really liked, and he also took to drinking pints of beer, along with the rest of the boys. So that's the earliest link I can find, looking back to how Graham started his boozing tradition.

I think Cleese is definitely like Gilbert, as in Gilbert & Sullivan, who was an absolute stickler for the words being said correctly. Cleese is incredibly punctilious, drove Graham barmy by insisting for a day and a half that a comma was in the wrong place, and if it was in the wrong place he would work and worry and whittle away at the script until it was right. And Graham was a great believer in a broad sweep. With people he knew and with whom he could be relaxed, Graham would drop his reserve, but there was always a huge amount of reserve and shyness, rather like his father and his brother. This was manifested in very little wasted speech.