Graham Chapman(1941–1989)

Graham Chapman was born at Stoneygate on the south side of Leicester in January 1941, the second son of Walter Chapman, a police inspector with the Leicester City Police, and Edith Towers. He was schooled at Melton Mowbray Grammar School and then Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he went up in 1959 to read medicine. The Footlights, the undergraduate revue club that had produced *Beyond the Fringe* the year he arrived, took him in at the start of the second year. John Cleese, in the same college a year ahead, was already in it. The two became writing partners in their final undergraduate year and stayed writing partners for the next twenty.

He moved to London in 1962, did clinical training at St Bartholomew's Hospital in Smithfield, and qualified as a doctor in 1965. He never practised. The next four years went into writing partnerships on *The Frost Report*, *At Last the 1948 Show* and *Doctor in the House* alongside Cleese, with sketches that established what the Cambridge-Cleese-Chapman manner had been working on through the undergraduate years: the deadpan absurdist set-up, the bureaucratic register collapsing into surrealism, the figure of authority undermined from inside the script rather than from the outside. He took the doctor's coat off and the comic's coat on permanently. On the 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 the founder-member of Python with the leading screen presence, although the public mostly remembered Cleese for it. He played the colonel who stops sketches for being too silly, the upper-class accountant who wants to become a lion-tamer, and the long-suffering officer figures whose calm in the face of escalating madness anchored half the show's gags. The two films of his lead-actor career were the leads of two of the most-watched British comedies of the century: King Arthur in *Monty Python and the Holy Grail* (1975) and Brian in *Life of Brian* (1979). Both performances put a deadpan straight man at the centre of the carnival, and both films passed into permanent cultural reference within the decade.

He came out publicly as a gay man on the David Frost Show in 1972, a year before the Wolfenden recommendations had moved fully into culture and four years after the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised consensual gay relationships in England and Wales. He was, by the historians of British television, the first British television personality to do so on a major prime-time channel. The disclosure was matter-of-fact and brief: he was asked whether he was a homosexual and he said yes, he was. The long partner of his adult life was David Sherlock, whom he met in 1966 and stayed with for twenty-three years until his death. He was also a heavy drinker through the Python decade, drinking by the late 1970s about three pints of gin a day, before he stopped on Boxing Day 1977 and stayed dry for the rest of his life.

Throat cancer was diagnosed in the late summer of 1988. It had begun on a tonsil, then spread to the spine. He died at the Maidenhead house he shared with David Sherlock on 4 October 1989, two months short of his forty-ninth birthday and one day short of the twentieth anniversary of the first *Monty Python's Flying Circus* broadcast. John Cleese, at the memorial service at Great St Bartholomew's, delivered the eulogy that became the most-quoted comic farewell of the century, opening with *Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries* and closing with the news that he had become the first person ever to say *fuck* at a British memorial service. The Chapman name today, the medieval merchant's surname at every English market cross, carries the centre of the Python ensemble in him.