Ojril: The Completely Incomplete Graham Chapman

Rating:
Summary: Uneven But Still Very Funny
Review: I didn't know what to expect when I ordered 'Ojril-The Completely Incomplete Graham Chapman', but as a lifelong Pythonphile, I was interested by any original content from Graham.

Essentially, this is a book of unpublished and unproduced scripts written by Chapman with others, notably Douglas Adams. Including the very short "VD", "Jake's Journey", a pilot for an American sitcom written immediately prior to Graham's death, the odd conceptual piece "The Concrete Inspector", and the hilarious highlight of the book written in collaboration with the equally offbeat Douglas Adams, "Our Show For Ringo Starr", which was a avant-garde script for an hour long TV show promoting Ringo's then current album "Goodnight Vienna". (The best line is when Ringo gets to say: "The concept of a four-dimensional space-time continuum inevitably suggests that the universe looks like a prawn omelette.") I found "Jake's Journey" a bit tedious and formulaic, and the Ringo piece utterly brilliant, with everything else falling somewhere in between. Also of great use to the collector is a 'Chapmanography' of videos, recordings and books in which Graham somehow contributed.

This book is a very quick read, and I recommend it to people interested in Graham or Monty Python, just realize that it really isn't a biographical work as much as a set of quirky skits.

Rating:
Summary: Great Fun!
Review: I never knew Graham Chapman (the mad man of Monty Python) had written so much stuff! This book is a treasure trove for any Python fan, or for anybody who just likes funny scripts. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Definately Maybe
Review: If the author's track record is any indication, he'll be primed and ready for the 10 metre run in Australia. Just keep up those morning wind sprints, watch your grammar and stay in the margins. Still receiving transmissions and manuscripts from the beyond, this book manages to keep the completely dead (though not completely recognized as dead) Graham Chapman alive. How does he do it? Mirrors? Ventriloquism? Necrophilia? If I know Jim, he is using all of those writing techniques. After all, making a long deceased person type their own memoirs is a little tricky (not to mention smelly) so we have Jim to thank for putting these things to paper and letting Graham do the resting (and mouldering). Several pages into the book you will realize there are several more to be read... and you will hungrily devour each morsel (in keeping with the spirit of the Undertakers sketch). Add this book to your collection of Jim's Python writings and you'll be the envy of your friends and their friends as well. Display it proudly on national holidays and freely quote from it in social situations and at business meetings. Make it your own. Love it.

Rating:
Summary: Not So Lazy After All, Were You Graham?
Review: If there is any doubt left that Graham Chapman could write effective comedy outside of his partnership with John Cleese, this delightful collection of unreleased scripts should do the trick. Sadly, unlike Cleese, Chapman could never get his solo projects truly off the starting blocks (we'll skip the sub-par flop that was YELLOWBEARD), and as a result he never had the solo success each of his fellow Pythons have enjoyed in various degrees. Nevertheless, this book is a vivid demonstration of the uncompromising comic spark Graham brought to Python and to Cleese's writing in particular. Without Chapman's brilliantly intuitive and raging insanity, Cleese's humor became safe, formulaic, smug and user-friendly (as in FIERCE CREATURES and -gulp! - WANDA). By the same token, Cleese's shrewd grasp of language and structure were sorely missing from Chapman's undisciplined, inaccessible and scattershot script for YELLOWBEARD. Still, if you're a fan of the blond, pipe-smoking doctor, this is a must-own. There are four separate pieces here, each compiled by Jim Yoakum, who collaborated with Graham on and off in the years before Chapman's death. Graham's longtime companion, David Sherlock, also offers commentary. "Our Show For Ringo Starr," a TV special written by Chapman with Douglas Adams kicks things off, and it is by far the longest piece. It's awkward in places, but the best of it has a manic narrative feel that would not be out of place in a series four Python episode. The story concerns Ringo's adventures with a robot that behaves like an early version of Marvin the Paranoid Android. In fact, Adams recycled the B-Ark sequence from this script for one of his Hitchhiker books, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe." Ringo is mistakenly given powers by this robot, who confuses him with a Rinog Trars. The script is punctuated by proto videos featuring songs from Ringo's (so-so) album GOODNIGHT VIENNA. Some of it is very funny, but after a while the story begins to chase its own tail. The pilot script for "Jake's Journey" is next, and it is my favorite piece in the book. The story centers around an American teen who is sucked into a surreal adventure with a crusty old knight called Sir George (who comes across as a wised-up, more assured version of Chapman's King Arthur from "Holy Grail"). It has a warmth and gentleness that's unique for Chapman, whose humor was usually more aggressive and disturbing. He'd clearly come a long way since the "The Undertaker Sketch". Graham wrote this with Sherlock, who no doubt played a hand in toning down his partner's excesses. It would have made an imaginative TV series, had CBS had the nuts to put it into their schedule (and Graham not had the gall to die from cancer). "The Concrete Inspector," the script for a surreal short film, was mainly penned by Yoakum, but Chapman's touches are nevertheless distinctive. The 'It's technical' joke came directly from Terry Southern's novella MAGIC CHRISTIAN (the film version of which Chapman contributed material to). According to Yoakum, Chapman conjured a scene involving the unfolding of an "actual size" map of the Earth on his own. "Concrete Inspector" tells the story of a man who records cracks in concrete sidewalks. An original idea, but the story's shaggy dog aspects (what's the deal with that pink cabinet anyway?) don't really come off. Frankly, this reads like more of a Yoakum solo project than a true collaboration with Chapman. Finally, there's "Tonight: VD", a short sketch in which a TV announcer tries to dispell myths regarding sexual diseases, only to be cut off by TV censors. Oddly, the collection omits the script from OUT OF THE TREES, Chapman's one-shot BBC comedy special from 1976. It's a shame, for sketches like "Peony" and "Ghengis Khan" (penned with Douglas Adams and Bernard McKenna) would fit in perfectly here. All in all, a mixed bag, but as Chapman's output (barring LIAR'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY) is the most obscure of all the Python alumni, it's a godsend to all of us fans who wondered just what happened to him after YELLOWBEARD.

Rating:
Summary: Enter the mind of Graham Chapman
Review: Let's face it: Graham Chapman was weird.

Which isn't to say he made no sense. I'm sure he made perfect sense to himself and other alcoholics, but a lot of times he was just plain weird. Still, it's fun to step into his mind just simply because you never know what you'll find. Never predictable, always unexpected, if you ever enjoyed Monty Python you'll enjoy this unique look at Graham's unpublished work. Personally as a Pythonite, I relished and adored it. But even a casual fan will appreciate the unusual sketches and bits that this gem contains.

Pick it up. Read it twice. You won't understand all of it, but laugh, because you're not alone.

Rating:
Summary: Spotty but moments of brilliance
Review: This book shows quite clearly exactly what Chapman's role in Python was: to show up late, do very little work, but contribute one or two outrageously out-there ideas to really stir things up. The Our Show For Ringo Starr script (too bad this was never produced!) reads much more like Douglas Adams than Python, but with occasional bizarre Chapmanisms to keep things interesting (and completely absurd.) The rest of the book echoes things that Chapman has worked on before, and even includes a few lines lifted directly from Python sketches. All that said, however, the book was a bracing, inspiring read -- a refreshing blast of insanity that makes for great (easy) (...) browsing.

Rating:
Summary: TV Producers: Listen Up!
Review: This is a really funny book. No kidding. Really funny. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. Why doesn't some clever producer snap up these sketches and put them on TV then we'd be spared another season full of dreck!

Rating:
Summary: Cobbled-together rubbish does a comedy legend no favours
Review: What we have here is two interesting Chapman scripts padded out to book length with a few bag-of-a-fag-packet unfunny 'sketches' and some poorly reproduced photographs. Graham Chapman was a comedy legend but his memory is not well-served when the so-called 'Graham Chapman Archives' throw stuff together like this to make a quick buck.

The book is worth getting if you're a Python completist for the early 1970s unproduced Ringo Star Show script co-written with Douglas Adams and for the unbroadcast pilot of Jake's Journey, but the rest of the book is so much wasted trees. And that's 'worth getting' but not 'worth buying at full price'. Fortunately the book was very swiftly remaindered on both sides of the Atlantic.

The presentation is tatty in the extreme, including a mistake-ridden filmography copied verbatim from the internet and a grainy photo of the Pythons positioned in suuch a way that Chapman himself is invisible in the fold between pages! There's almost no context, no actual stills from Jake's Journey, nothing of any value beyond the two main scripts themselves. The other sketches are short, unfunny nothings written when Chapman was very ill and don't deserve to see print, but evidently the 'Chapman Archives' from where this stuff originates is rather sparse when it comes to good, publishable stuff.

What a shame that Chapman's papers have ended up in the possession of someone who neither knows anything about him nor knows how to edit a book.