I watched a very interesting documentary on BBC2 yesterday about the story of Monty Python.
Around December 1988, I was fortunate enough to secure a portrait sitting with Graham Chapman. Graham had come to visit a mutual friend of ours – namely TV writer Peter Spence (writer of ‘To The Manor Born’ and many other hit programmes), who was also based in the same building as I was. Peter knew that I was a Python fan and he asked Graham if he would mind sitting for some photographs. Graham kindly agreed. Above is one of the photographs from that sitting.
He was very different from his Python persona – indeed I found him to be quite shy and very quiet. As I didn’t have much time with him, I only took around 15 frames.
A year after this photo was taken, Graham died of cancer. I’m lead to understand that my sitting was one of the last he did before he died.
Photograph / text: © David Calvert 2009
