JOHN CLEESE: Chapman and I met at an audition for the Footlights my first year at Cambridge. It’s very strange but I remember that my first reaction was quite a strong feeling of disliking him. It was an absolute gut feeling that I was not able to identify at all.

I don’t think I saw him again until the beginning of the next academic year, and the sense of dislike just evaporated. We spent a lot of time, usually in my room, writing stuff. At the end of that year he went down to London to move on to the next step of being a doctor and started to do a cabaret act.

JOHN CHAPMAN, brother: My parents had put a lot into Graham’s education and they were a bit against his being over-adventurous in the show business world.

At that time Graham was president of the students’ union at Bart’s (hospital) and there was an end-of-term jamboree which involved the Queen Mother coming to visit. Graham was asked to join her table at tea. She asked what his interests were and things like that. When he mentioned that they’d been offered the chance of taking Cambridge Circus (a satirical revue) over to New Zealand, the Queen Mother called over the dean of the medical school and said, “You must let him go.”

He went off to do an eight-week tour, at which point they got an offer to do a Broadway run in New York. By then my parents were beginning to feel, “Well, maybe there is something to this.”

ERIC IDLE, future Python: The thing about our generation at Cambridge was we went straight into television. That Was The Week That Was was on and that was all of the people who’d previously been at Cambridge; (David) Frosty and people were writing for it. There was a link there. Natural recruitment. They came looking for you at Cambridge. The same as MI5 or Russian intelligence came looking.

MICHAEL PALIN, Oxford humorist and future Python: Cleese and Chapman were kings of the castle as writers, and we rather liked Graham as a performer and John was just the best around.

TERRY JONES, Palin’s writing partner and future Python: You could see exactly where John was coming from as soon as he walked on the stage. You could see he was very, very funny and accomplished. But Graham came on the stage and you had no idea what he was doing there. Graham was like a mystery. A wonderful mystery. Why was he funny? Was he funny?

IDLE: Graham was weird, there was no question he was on his own planet.

CLEESE: Many years later we were filming on the Yorkshire moors. When you’re filming you just hang around for hours and there are times when I find I’m going almost crazy with boredom. You can’t sit anywhere and read because there’s nowhere comfortable to sit, you can’t do anything, and so you play all sorts of games. And on this particular occasion I saw Graham put his pipe down. What I did was very silly, but it was because I lacked the insight to understand the meaning of what I was doing.

I took his pipe and I popped it in my pocket, and when he turned round and found his pipe was gone, he became so agitated that I realised after quite a short time that something was going on that I didn’t understand. So I told him that I’d taken it for a joke and handed it to him, at which point he stepped towards me and literally kneed me in the groin. Fortunately he did not hit the testicles, he hit the bone which hurt a bit but not a lot, and I remember afterwards thinking, “What on earth was that about?” And then I began to see that his pipe meant a great deal more to Graham symbolically than just being a pipe.

Chapman’s homosexuality was still in the closet; but he came out after a writing trip to Ibiza where he had met David Sherlock, who became his lifetime companion.

SHERLOCK: It took an enormous amount of courage at the time and he had no idea what the reaction was going to be, so he decided to tell the person he thought would be most relaxed about it first, and that was Marty Feldman’s wife, Loretta, who howled with laughter and then said she would tell Marty. They were in bed at the time and he apparently fell out of bed. I get the feeling that John was certainly more than a little shocked and surprised, and it took him a long time to get used to it.