The Pythons: Spam, spam, spam. A lot

The mavericks who broke the mould of British comedy are cleaning up in the West End

Monty Python's Flying Circus has rarely, if ever, touched the ground. From its inception in 1969 to its present reincarnation with the stage musical Spamalot, its troupe of surreal comics has collectively and individually remained airborne, with few exceptions.

Their sketches and songs have entered the comedy pantheon and the lingua franca of schoolboy copyists - The Dead Parrot, The Ministry of Silly Walks, The Lumberjack Song.

Now, it appears, they've won the "Spamalottery". Eric Idle's musical fashioned from bits of previous Pythonry and bolted onto the central narrative of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is the Pythons' musical pension. No wonder the surviving members turned out to celebrate the first night in London, apart from John Cleese who was filming in Australia.

Idle wandered for a number of years in the wilderness of America, where his ageing cheeky-chappie style and comic songs failed to ignite the kind of solid career enjoyed by those who stayed behind. Only Cleese made it in the USA, marrying three American blondes in succession and taking cameos in a variety of good movies. He had already made a pile of money by selling his sales training film company, Video Arts, and was becoming increasingly interested in therapy and education. And after the towering achievement of Fawlty Towers he had nothing left to prove.

Michael Palin and Terry Jones, meanwhile, had diversified successfully. Jones, who yesterday revealed that he is fighting bowel cancer, went back to his academic roots, mischievously and persuasively exploring medieval culture on television, in between directing films (Erik the Viking, Personal Services, The Wind in the Willows) and writing anarchic books for children.

Palin began his post-Python career as a relatively serious actor (The Missionary, A Private Function, Brazil) before globe-trotting on television and, most recently, publishing the first volume of his toothsome diaries: 1969 to 1979: The Python Years.

Before his death from cancer in 1989 at the age of 48, Graham Chapman wrote, directed and starred in Yellowbeard - a bad film with some great jokes embedded within it.

Terry Gilliam was always the wild card. The token American, he neither acted nor appeared to any great extent in the television shows, but his madcap animations knitted the sketches together. He has forged a genuine niche in film history: from Time Bandits to Brazil, and from The Fisher King to Twelve Monkeys, Gilliam has pushed the envelope of fantasy cinema.

As Idle tried to persuade the others that Spamalot was a really good idea, doubts were voiced. Terry Jones saw the opening night of the US version and was vociferously unimpressed. Now they must eat their words. Recycling old material has rarely proved so profitable.

Cleese, Chapman and Idle went to Cambridge, Palin and Jones to Oxford. They were all in revue and writing for BBC television comedy shows such as The Frost Report, Do Not Adjust Your Set and At Last the 1948 Show. Cleese (family name, Cheese), was le grand fromage.

"John was a big name," writes Palin in his diaries. "One of their great new discoveries of the Sixties. The rest of us, we were journeyman scriptwriters." Their champion was Barry Cryer, who suggested to the BBC that they might come up with something completely different if thrown together in a roomful of paper and pencils. A 13-episode series was duly commissioned.

"We had a vague notion that we wanted to break all the rules of comedy," Jones once told me. "Running gags that didn't mean anything, open-ended sketches without a pay-off." But someone was ahead of them.

"Spike Milligan had been working on his first Q series," he recalled. "When we all sat down and watched the first episode we thought, 'Shit! He's done it.'"

They needn't have worried. Milligan may have paved the way but the Pythons popularised the New Comedy far beyond the dreams of Spike. Once they had settled on a name - "Whither Canada", "Owl Stretching Time" and "Bunn, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot" were rejected - the Pythons took their wacky wares on to the small screen for the first time in 1969 and British television comedy changed for ever. From 1969 to 1974 they produced three series of Monty Python's Flying Circus, as well as spin-off projects - albums, stage shows and films. But the internal relationships between the six wildly different personalities became increasingly fraught.

Cleese, the eldest, was constantly threatening to leave, to pursue other projects; Chapman was an alcoholic and a closet gay who finally came out; Jones was the peacemaker, dedicated to the Python concept but sorely tested by the internecine conflict between the others; nice guy Palin was caught between his disapproval of Chapman - it was claimed that he wrote only 10 per cent of the sketches but that his material was the funniest - and frustration at Cleese's authoritarian recalcitrance. Idle was motivated almost solely by money. Gilliam stood on the sidelines, bewildered by the antics. Arguments raged over who should be credited with what.

By September 1973, Cleese was sick of Python and wanted nothing more to do with the television series, although he was prepared to perform in the stage version. The final six shows were made with very little from him.

However, following the cult success of their first feature film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they planned another film, Monty Python and the Life of Christ. More arguments followed - Cleese was originally considered for the role of Christ but dropped in favour of Chapman, to his fury. In 1978, with help from George Harrison, a friend who had set up Handmade Films, Idle secured finance for The Life of Brian. "Made for life," said Gilliam.

Although there were other projects, spin-off stage versions (including a very odd French theatrical version) and one last movie, Monty Python and the Meaning of Life (1983), the Python team more or less parted company after The Life of Brian.

As the various members went their separate ways, Idle fared least well, though not for lack of industry. Having written and produced several musicals that flopped commercially, he secured the agreement of the remaining Pythons to loot old material and put it together in a new show, Spamalot. He persuaded them when he played them one new song, an Andrew Lloyd Webber pastiche entitled "The Song That Goes Like This". They even agreed to the terms: Idle took two-thirds of the profits, the last third to to divided equally between the remaining members. Spamalot opened in 2004 in Chicago, Idle's wife's home town. As Idle put it, "We knew at least 120 people there."

Now they are all set to profit from his efforts. "Those young men are long since gone," said Idle recently. "They were smart, young and terribly clever. We older, wider and greyer men are their descendants." Older, wider, greyer and now richer. Don't forget richer.