Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Not only did I survive without the second most satisfying smoke of the day, next morning I survived without the first most satisfying smoke of the day and I never bought a packet of cigarettes again.

  So cocky was I that I looked around for other giants to wrestle. As it happened I had, for the first time in years, some free time on my hands. My writing partner Terry Jones was away and I had arranged to travel to Switzerland for a few days with Helen and the baby. Why not have another crack at the diary? It would keep my newly liberated fingers occupied and writing about my post-nicotine lifestyle could only strengthen my resolve to keep it that way. I bought a Ryman’s reporter’s notepad, smoothed down the front page, wrote the day’s date across the top and underlined it. And I’ve been doing the same thing most mornings of my life for the past thirty-seven years.

  There are times when I’ve resented the whole process, when I’ve felt lumpen, dull and inarticulate, when detail has slipped away and the whole exercise has seemed completely pointless. But the longer I’ve kept the diary the more inconceivable it has been to abandon it. It’s become an effective and tenacious parasite, mutating over the years into something as germane to my life as an arm or a leg.

  The motivation for keeping the diaries remains the same as it always was, to keep a record of how I fill the days. Nothing more complicated than that. Though this inevitably involves emotional reactions, I’ve never treated the diary as a confessional. Once I’ve noted the day’s events, usually the next morning, there’s little time left for soul-searching.

  The perfect, well-crafted, impeccably balanced entry persistently eludes me. Prejudices bob to the surface, anger crackles, judgements fall over each other, huffing and puffing. Opinions and interpretations are impulsive, inconsistent and frequently contradictory. But I’m not sure if that matters. After all that’s where a daily diary differs from autobiography or memoir. It is an antidote to hindsight.

  ‘A nice firm pull on a freshly lit,

  deliriously soothing, pungently

  bracing tube of tightly packed

  tobacco, coaxed from a brand-new

  packet of Piccadilly Tipped.’

  _______________________________

  It seals the present moment and preserves it from the tidying process of context, perspective, analysis and balance. It becomes history, but quite unselfconsciously. What proves to be important over a long period is not always what a diarist will identify at the time. For the historians’ sake I should probably have noted every detail of the birth of Monty Python, but it seemed far more important to me to record the emergence of my new family than the faltering steps of a comedy series that would probably last no more than two years. And that, I feel, is as it should be. Legends are not created by diaries, though they can be destroyed by them.

  This selection is culled from thirty-eight hand-written secretarial notebooks amounting to some five times the volume of material reproduced here. The early entries sit a little awkwardly as I search for a voice and a style that relies on more than lists of events. My reward for perseverance, often in the face of tempting discouragement, is to see the diary bed itself in and slowly begin to tell a story, with regular characters, a narrative, and a sense of continuity.

  In the course of these diaries I grow up, my family grows up and Monty Python grows up. It was a great time to be alive.

  MICHAEL PALIN

  London, January 2006

  Michael Palin is not just one of Britain’s foremost comedy character actors, whose inventive genius and astonishing versatility were vividly demonstrated in his widely acclaimed Ripping Yarns series; he also talks a lot. Yap, yap, yap, he goes, all day long and through the night, twenty-three to the dozen, the ground littered with the hind legs of donkeys, till you believe it is not possible, simply not possible for him to go on any longer, but he does. He must be the worst man in the world to take on a commando raid. You might as well take a large radiogram with the volume turned up. On and on, hour after hour, tiring the sun with talking and sending him down the sky, Michael chats, quips, fantasises, reminisces, commiserates, encourages, plans, discusses and elaborates. Then, some nights, when everyone else has gone to bed, he goes home and writes up a diary.

  JOHN CLEESE

  Publicity biography for Life of Brian, 1979

  1969

  Though the first entry of all was April 17th 1969, I’ve opened the diary on the first day of Python filming. All the entries were written at my house in Oak Village, north London, except where otherwise noted.

  Tuesday, July 8th

  Today Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble and Boot1 came into being, with about five minutes of film shot around Ham House. It was exhilarating to wake up to the first day’s filming of a new show, especially as the sun was streaming down the village and, despite it being only 7.00, I decided to travel to the BBC on the bus and tube. Sure enough, the clouds came up as I put my foot outside the door, and this April-like weather pattern of showers and sunshine was repeated during the day. We arrived at Ham House about 9.30.

  It is a Jacobean house, of pleasing proportions, very restrained, but in a more homely and welcoming way than a classical building. A line of Greco/Roman busts in oval niches along the line of walls leading up to the house give you something to remember it by. We were filming Queen Victoria’s slapstick film with Gladstone, and the beautifully kept lawn and flower beds at the back of the house provided just the right kind of formality to play off against.

  In the afternoon the changes in light from sudden brightness to dullness caused us to slow down a little, but by 6.00 we had quite a chunk of ‘Queen Victoria and Her Gardener’ and ‘Bicycle Repairman’ done, and it had been a very good and encouraging first day’s shooting.

  Wednesday, July 9th

  Arrived at TV Centre by 10.00, and was driven in a BBC car, together with John [Cleese], Graham [Chapman] and Terry [Jones], out beyond Windsor and Eton to a tiny church at Boveney. Dressed to the hilt as a young Scottish nobleman of the Walter Scott era, I was able to cash a cheque at a bank in the Uxbridge Road, without the cashier batting an eyelid.

  Thursday, July 10th, Bournemouth

  Up at 7.15; Graham C called for me in a mini-cab; we got to Waterloo in plenty of time to catch the 8.30 to Bournemouth. We had breakfast on the train. At Bournemouth we were met by a mini-van and driven to the Durley Dean Hotel, where we were to stay that night. I don’t think words can fully convey the depression that swept over me as I entered the Durley Dean. From outside it was bad enough – a five storey red-brick block of indeterminate date, but I should guess 1920s – it looked completely ordinary, if anything institutional. Inside there was firstly a dimness, secondly a pervading smell of gravy and thirdly a total lack of any colour – in the carpets, the lino in the passages, the paintwork in the rooms – everywhere the management had opted for the colour most like stale vomit.

  One saw a few guests, mostly elderly, about half of them crippled, wandering about, as if looking for someone to tell them what to do. What with the grey weather, the lack of much to do (it was mainly Terry’s ‘Changing on the Beach’ film) and the gradual realisation that all Bournemouth was as drab and colourless as the Durley Dean, I felt very low all morning.

  After lunch we filmed on, collecting crowds of people watching Terry take his trousers down. Graham and I, finishing early, went back to the Durley Dean. The depression I had felt in the morning was lifted slightly by the sun shining into my room, and plenty of hot water for my bath. After that Graham and I drank at the hotel bar until the rest of the unit returned. I made the mistake of telling the barman that Graham was a doctor, and soon he was telling Graham about his insomnia and his sweating and his bad feet.

  John C arrived from London and, together with Graham, a lady designer, a lady extra, a focus puller and one or two others, we sampled the nightlife of Bournemouth. We ended up in the Highcliffe Hotel night-club where, for 7/6 each we enjoyed 45 minutes sitting in dimness with a drink, whilst the band had thei
r break. When they arrived back (three middle-aged men, looking like failed Sam Costa,1 who played ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ in quite a forgettable way), Graham asked them to play ‘Happy Birthday’ for John Cleese (it wasn’t his birthday at all). But the amplification was so bad that we couldn’t hear the announcement and the point of the joke was lost.

  Friday, July 11th, Bournemouth

  Drive over to Shell Bay, beyond Poole, along a flag-lined route – the Queen is visiting Poole today.

  In the afternoon filmed some very bizarre pieces, including the death of Genghis Khan, and two men carrying a donkey past a Butlins redcoat, who later gets hit on the head with a raw chicken by a man from the previous sketch, who borrowed the chicken from a man in a suit of armour. All this we filmed in the 80° sunshine, with a small crowd of holidaymakers watching.

  We finished at tea-time and were driven to take our leave of Durley Dean and catch the 5.56 train back to London. On account of an unofficial signalmen’s strike, the train took two and a half hours to get to London and left Bournemouth half an hour late. But John, Graham, Terry and myself took a First Class compartment and talked about Shows 4 and 5 and decided that we really had an excellent week filming. Ian Mac1 is marvellous – the best director to work for and, with a fellow Scots cameraman, Jimmy Balfour, he really gets on with it.

  Back in London 9.00 – taxi from Waterloo, end of one of the great days.

  Wednesday, July 16th

  Filming today in Barnes. The weather continues to be excellent – if anything a little too hot – 80°+ all day.

  After lunch we watched Apollo 11 blastoff, on its trip to the moon.

  Ended up the afternoon prancing about in mouse-skins for a documentary about people who like to dress up as mice. That really made the sweat pour down the chest.

  To the many life-changing experiences around this time – fatherhood, quitting smoking, keeping a diary – must be added the alarming discovery that teeth I’d always thought of as glowingly healthy were found to be precariously attached to considerably less healthy gums – a legacy of poor care and too many sweeties in my misspent youth. Treatment involved a series of surgical procedures in which the gum was opened, cleaned up and stitched together again. These were undertaken by Mr Robin Powell, a robust Australian periodontist who once likened it to working on his rockery at home.

  Saturday, July 19th

  Up early to go to Mr Powell for the fourth and last of my dental operations. I was at his surgery by 9.10. He hadn’t arrived, but the nurse sat me down and gave me her Daily Telegraph to read. He arrived about ten minutes later, cheerfully announcing that he’d had a late night and a lot of drinks, however he said his hand was steady. It needed to be, for this was the most difficult of all the operations. One tooth was obviously more badly infected than he had expected. I even had to go into the next-door surgery during the operation so that he could use the extra-high-speed drill there. He also took out one of the roots of the tooth, and also a nerve, which gave quite a lot of pain. Mr Powell kept apologising, but I felt at least that I was getting my moneys worth. I was finally patched up at 10.10 and drove off to the TV Centre to have a look at the week’s rushes

  After the rushes, made the final organisational decisions about the Great Picnic, which Gilliam had suggested a couple of days ago and which was now becoming reality. Helen, Thomas1 and myself, Graham and David,2 John and Connie, Terry G and his girlfriend and Alison and Terry J set out in our various cars for Henley – loaded with food and wine. It was a very cloudy day, but warm, and along the motorway a patch of sun made us seem less foolish. We drove out to Remenham church, which I had chosen from pot-luck as being a convenient place for an idyllic riverside picnic. Everything could at this moment have gone hopelessly wrong – the sky was glowering, it was 2.30 and everyone was getting hungry – but Remenham proved to be just the right kind of place – through a gate and we were walking along a flat bank of pastureland with the Thames flowing beside us. We picnicked opposite Temple Island – ham off the bone, pate, salad, several kinds of cheeses, cherries, apples and strawberries, beer sausage, smoked pork, red and white wine and coffee – it was a wonderful spread. Thomas scavenged amongst the food, and was to be seen eating vast chunks of French bread on and off for about an hour. Everyone, Gilliam especially, became infected by picnic madness and there was a hopping relay race and a lot of fighting. The generous doses of wine numbed any possible after-effects of my gingivectomy.

  Thomas stood without holding on today.

  Monday, July 21st

  At 3.00 this morning I woke Helen, and we both watched as the first live television pictures from the moon showed us a rather indistinct piece of ladder, then a large boot, and finally, at 3.56, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the lunar surface. He said the ground beneath his feet (I almost wrote ‘the earth beneath his feet’) was composed mainly of dust – for a moment one felt he was in danger of falling into a kind of quicksand – but soon he was reassuringly prancing about and telling us that the one-sixth gravity conditions were less hazardous than in simulation.

  The extraordinary thing about the evening was that, until 3.56 a.m. when Armstrong clambered out of the spaceship and activated the keyhole camera, we had seen no space pictures at all, and yet ITV had somehow contrived to fill ten hours with a programme devoted to the landing.

  To bed at 5.00, with the image in my mind of men in spacesuits doing kangaroo hops and long, loping walks on the moon, in front of a strange spidery object, just like the images in my mind after reading Dan Dare in the old Eagle comics – only this time it’s true. A lot of science fiction is suddenly science fact.

  Thursday, July 24th

  Met with Ian and the two Terrys at the BBC. We listened to some possible title music – finally selected Sousa’s march ‘The Liberty Bell’ from a Grenadier Guards LP. There’s something about brass band music that appeals to me very strongly. Probably it’s all to do with my subliminal desire to march along whistling national songs. It’s very difficult to associate brass band music with any class of people. Most enthusiasts perhaps come from north of the Trent working class, but then of course it has high patrician status and support from its part in ceremonial. So in the end it is a brass band march which we’ve chosen – because it creates such immediate atmosphere and rapport, without it being calculated or satirical or ‘fashionable’.

  An hour is spent from 5.30—6.30 watching colour pictures of Apollo 11’s return to earth. Again how old-fashioned a) the landing (they landed upside down), b) the scrubbing of the spacecraft and the space-suits, in case they are carrying deadly lunar germs, c) the whole business of helicopter rescues, appears. One is almost conscious of the laughter and amazement of viewers in thirty years’ time, as they watch film of the first men on the moon returning home.

  Friday, August 1st

  The days seem to merge one into another without particular distinction. It’s tending to feel like that with the writing at the moment. We have four shows completed, but apart from the two weeks’ filming in July, there has been no feeling yet of concerted effort on behalf of the show (now, incidentally, renamed Monty Python’s Flying Circus). Partly because John and Graham have fingers in a lot of other pies – especially their film, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer.1 However, it seems that the next two weeks will be much harder work. At least, there is some kind of urgency. August 30th is our first recording date and we have another week’s filming starting on the 18th. Time is getting shorter. But at least it’s nothing like the hectic pace which we were starting on this time last year with the first Frost on Sundays. Accordingly, I’ve had much more time at home and, as I write this, I’m in the sitting room with Helen sewing and Thomas being fascinated by the sewing machine.

  Terry took Helen and myself and Quick and Ken, Philip John, Gerald2 and a girl from Germany whom Terry and Al had met on holiday in Crete, to the Hiroko Japanese restaurant in Wigmore Street.

  Before entering our room we had to
remove our shoes. Here Ken and myself made what I expected to be the first of many faux pas. After taking our shoes off, we noticed some oriental style slippers nearby and presumed that we ought to put these on in true Japanese style. Grumbling that they were all too small, we eventually selected two pairs and were tottering to our room when one of the Japanese ‘attendants’ – it wouldn’t be quite right to call them ‘waitresses’ – stopped us excitedly and told us to take off the shoes. Then we realised the awful truth – that they belonged to people already eating there.

  Sunday, August 3rd

  John C rang up in the morning to ask if I felt like working in the afternoon, so I ended up in Knightsbridge about 3.00. It’s funny, but when one has written in partnership almost exclusively for the last three years, as Terry and I have done, and I suppose John and Graham as well, it requires quite an adjustment to write with somebody different. Terry and I know each other’s way of working so well now – exactly what each one does best, what each one thinks, what makes each of us laugh – that when I sat down to write with John there was a moment’s awkwardness, slight embarrassment, but it soon loosened up as we embarked on a saga about Hitler (Hiker), Von Ribbentrop (Ron Vibbentrop) and Himmler (Bimmler) being found in a seaside guest house. We do tend to laugh at the same things – and working with John is not difficult – but there are still differences in our respective ways of thinking, not about comedy necessarily, which mean perhaps that the interchange of ideas was a little more cautious than it is with Terry. However, by the time I left, at 7.15, we had almost four minutes’ worth of sketch written.