Graham Chapman(1941–1989)

Graham Chapman was born at Stoneygate in Leicester in January 1941, the son of a Leicester City police inspector. He went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1959 to read medicine and was taken into the Footlights revue club in his second year, where he met John Cleese; the two became writing partners and stayed so for the next twenty years.

He moved to London in 1962, did his clinical training at St Bartholomew's Hospital and qualified as a doctor in 1965, then turned to comedy writing full time, working with Cleese on The Frost Report, At Last the 1948 Show and Doctor in the House. On 5 October 1969 the BBC broadcast the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. He was twenty-eight.

Across the next decade he was a founder member of Python with one of the troupe's strongest screen presences: the colonel who stops sketches for being too silly, the accountant who wants to be a lion-tamer, the officer figures whose calm anchored the chaos around them. He then carried two of the most-watched British comedies of the century as their straight-faced lead, King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and the title role in Life of Brian (1979), both films passing into permanent cultural reference within the decade.

In 1972, on The David Frost Show, Chapman spoke openly about being a gay man, the first British television personality to do so on a major prime-time channel, four years after partial decriminalisation. The disclosure was matter-of-fact and brief, and it made him a quietly significant figure in the public life of his generation. His partner of twenty-three years was David Sherlock.

He died at Maidenhead on 4 October 1989, one day short of the twentieth anniversary of the first Flying Circus broadcast. John Cleese's eulogy at the memorial service at Great St Bartholomew's became the most-quoted comic farewell of its era, affection disguised, in the Python manner, as abuse. The Chapman name, the medieval merchant's surname at every English market cross, carries the centre of the Python ensemble in him.