Ian MacNaughton
Edward Ian Macnaughton (30 December 1925 – 10 December 2002) was a Scottish actor-turned-television producer and director, best known for his work with the "Monty Python" team. MacNaughton was director and producer for all but four of the forty five episodes of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" from 1969 to 1974, director of the group's first feature film "And Now for Something Completely Different" in 1971 and director of their two German episodes, "Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus" in 1971 and 1972. In 1973 the production team shared the BAFTA Award for Best Light Entertainment Programme for "Monty Python's Flying Circus".
Monty Python
Having considered the possibility at the end of the second season, Cleese left the "Flying Circus" at the end of the third. He later explained that he felt he no longer had anything fresh to offer the show, and claimed that only two Cleese- and Chapman-penned sketches in the third series ("Dennis Moore" and the "Cheese Shop") were truly original, and that the others were bits and pieces from previous work cobbled together in slightly different contexts. He was also finding Chapman, who was at that point in the full throes of alcoholism, difficult to work with. According to an interview with Idle, "It was on an Air Canada flight on the way to Toronto, when John (Cleese) turned to all of us and said 'I want out.' Why? I don't know. He gets bored more easily than the rest of us. He's a difficult man, not easy to be friendly with. He's so funny because he never wanted to be liked. That gives him a certain fascinating, arrogant freedom." Jones noted his reticence in 2012, "He was good at it, when he did it he was professional, but he’d rather not have done it. The others all loved it, but he got more and more pissed off about having to come out and do filming, and the one that really swung it, in my view, was when we had to do the day on the Newhaven lifeboat."