Tuesday, August 5th
Another workday at Eric’s.1 A good morning, but then a rather winey lunch at Pontevecchio in Brompton Road. That is the trouble with working at John or Eric’s – both are surrounded by a very good selection of restaurants, temptingly easy to go to, especially after a good morning’s work, but debilitating and expensive.
Wednesday, August 6th
A thought struck me as I saw a man in an open-necked shirt walking up Oak Village – and that was that, for at least twelve successive years, the first half of August has meant Palin family holidays – either at Sheringham in Norfolk or, later, at Southwold.
I have some wonderful memories of those holidays. Of sitting in the lee of the hill above Sheringham where the golf course was and watching the steam train pulling away towards Weybourne. Of enormous games of tennis on the beach with the Sanders family, of plastic macs and wet days (they do seem to be predominant), of sitting excitedly in the back of the Austin 10 (which we inherited when Granny Ovey2 died in 1951) and the yearly thrill of seeing a pebble-house, and of seeing the sea for the first time.
Now August 6th has no special significance, it’s another working day – but it’s a token of the enormous difference between my life and that of my father or most people in the country. I have no fixed timetable. I may go away any time of the year, for any length of time, at little more than two weeks’ notice. This degree of unpredictability is beyond the sphere of most people – it is an awful thought how regular people’s lives contrive to be.
On this August 6th 1969 I am at home. Terry and I are determined to make this a really productive day, to make up for the semi-productive, rather frustrating Monday and Tuesday. We work on till 8.00, finishing our big’Them’ saga. An 85% success day. Very satisfying – and we really worked well together.
Thursday, August 7th
Drove down to Camberwell Grove (where Terry was living) at lunchtime. Lunched with Terry and D Quick, who has a week’s break from filming Christ Recrucified for BBC2. In the afternoon we worked rather slowly – lots of diversions, e.g. Terry’s telescope, which he has bought for his father’s birthday, a film which Terry bought that morning, and finally a walk. It seems at last, after almost a year of waiting, that Terry and Alison may have got the house they made an offer for in Grove Park, Camberwell. We walked past it – tall, solidly suburban, in a quiet road on top of the first hill you come to going south from Westminster.
In 1966 my parents (Edward ‘Ted’ Palin and Mary Palin, née Ovey) retired to the village of Rey don, just outside Southwold in Suffolk. Southwold had already played a big part in my life, for it was on the beach here in 1939 that I first summoned up the courage to talk to a tall, slim, mischievous-looking girl called Helen Gibbins. This led to a holiday romance, which led to marriage, in 1966, and birth of son Thomas (now known to everyone as Tom). The different names I use for my father show, I suppose, how my relationship with him changed as I grew older and the children came along. In these early entries he is, as often as not, ‘Daddy’, as he had been throughout my childhood, but I was also trying out the more formal (and grown-up) ‘Father’, and later, seeing him through my children’s eyes, he was to become ‘Grandfather’.
Sunday, August 10th, Southwold
The weather again very fine and warm, and the lunchtime bathe was once more an enjoyment rather than a challenge. In the afternoon, Daddy and I walked from Potter’s Bridge, on the Lowestoft Road, across uncharted fields to the sea at Easton Bavents – the seaward limit of Reydon Smear. Here I bathed again. The sun was shining down, undiluted by any wind, as we walked back through the barley fields to the car, the road smelling of melting tar. In the evening D went to sing his second anthem of the day at S’wold Church – his activities as a chorister seem to be about the only outside activity he can partake in. He can’t swim, or pull the bells, or even ride his bicycle. Suddenly, from being very active, he is a spectator. Since his coronary in 1964 he has had confirmed Parkinson’s Disease (for which a possible cure, L-Dopa, was mentioned in the Sunday Times today), back ailments, etc, etc, and has aged very rapidly.
We ate salmon and drank a bottle of white wine for supper, and afterwards Helen and I walked along the sea front. For the record, it is ten years, almost to the day, that we first met here.
Monday, August 18th
Started off for the TV Centre in some trepidation, for this was the first day’s filming, and, in fact, the first day’s working, with John Howard Davies, our producer for the first three shows. However, as it turned out, the day could hardly have gone better.
John has an unfortunate manner at first – rather severe and school-prefectish – but he really means very well. He consulted us all the way along the line and took our suggestions and used nearly all of them. He also worked fast and by the end of the day we had done the entire ‘Confuse-a-Cat’ film, a very complicated item, and we had also finished the ‘Superman’ film. All this was helped by an excellent location – a back garden in a neat, tidy, completely and utterly ‘tamed’ piece of the Surrey countryside – Edenfield Gardens, Worcester Park.
Wednesday, August 20th, Southwold
At 8.30, John and Terry, in the Rover, and Eric and myself, in Eric’s Alfa Romeo, set off for sun, fun and filming in Suffolk.
Terry and I went round to the Lord Nelson, a pub almost on the cliffs. A step down took us into a warm, low-ceilinged room, which seemed to be mainly full of locals. The barman recognised us from ‘Do Not Adjust’, so we felt even more at home there. Ended up drinking about three and a half pints each and leaving at ten past eleven in the traditional convivial manner.
Back at the Craighurst (Hotel), Terry giggled so long and loud that Heather, the production secretary, thought I had a woman in my room.
Thursday, August 21st, Southwold
A very plentiful, well-cooked breakfast at the Craighurst, and then out to Covehithe, where we filmed for most of the day. The cliffs are steep and crumbling there and the constant movement of BBC personnel up and down probably speeded coastal erosion by a good few years.
Mother and Father turned up during the morning and appeared as crowd in one of the shots.
In the afternoon heavy dark clouds came up and made filming a little slower. We ended up pushing a dummy newsreader off the harbour wall, and I had to swim out and rescue this drifting newsreader, so it could be used for another shot.
Saturday, August 23rd
Mr Powell looked at my teeth and was very pleased with their progress. In the afternoon I went over to the TV Centre for a dubbing session. Everyone was there, including Terry Gilliam, who has animated some great titles – really encouraging and just right – and Ian MacNaughton, short-haired and violent. He seems now to have dropped all diplomatic approval of John H-D, and is privately cursing him to the skies for not shooting all the film he was supposed to. I think this sounds a little harsh, as the weather was twice as bad with John as with Ian.
Thursday, August 28th
This morning rehearsed in front of the technical boys. Not an encouraging experience. I particularly felt rather too tense whilst going through it.
Watched the final edited film for the first show. A most depressing viewing. The Queen Victoria music was completely wrong, and the Lochinvar film1 was wrong in almost every respect – editing and shooting most of all.
Terry and I both felt extremely low, but John Howard Davies, relishing, I think, the role of saviour, promised to do all he could to change the music on ‘Victoria’. We went off to the bar and who better to meet there than John Bird, in an unusually expansive mood. He greeted us as warmly as when we were doing A Series of Birds2 two years ago. He is somehow so untarnished by clique or cliché or any conditioned reaction, that talking to him can only be entertaining. But one doesn’t say much as his knowledge is infinite.
Saturday, August 30th
The first recording day. Fortunately Friday’s fears did not show themselves, so acutely. From the start of the first run the
crew were laughing heartily – the first really good reaction we’ve had all week. The sets were good, John kept us moving through at a brisk pace and our fears of Thursday night proved unfounded when ‘Lochinvar’ got a very loud laugh from the crew. In the afternoon we had two full dress run-throughs, and still had half an hour left of studio time.
As the time got nearer for the show, I had a pint up in the bar and by the time the ‘guests’ began arriving at 7.30, I felt as relaxed as I have done for days. Tim Brooke-Taylor noted that we seemed very unruffled.
Barry Took1 won the audience over with his warm-up and, at 8.10, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was first launched on a small slice of the British public in Studio 6 at the Television Centre. The reception from the start was very good indeed, and everybody rose to it – the performances being the best ever. The stream-of-consciousness links worked well and when, at the end, John and I had to re-do a small section of two Frenchmen talking rubbish, it went even better.
Afterwards there was the usual stifling crush in the bar, the genuine congratulations and the polite congratulations and the significant silences. Our agent, Kenneth Ewing, did not appear to like it – but then he’s probably waiting to see what other people think.
About sixteen of us finished the evening at the Palio de Siena in Earl’s Court Road, in festive mood. Full of relief.
Sunday, August 31st
The end of August, it feels like the end of the summer, with the weather cool and changeable, the garden looking waterlogged again.
On the Isle of Wight, 150,000 people gathered to hear Bob Dylan – the gutter press are having their work cut out to track down smut in a gathering which seems to be happy and peaceful. 150,000 people and all the violence that the Mirror could rake-up was a man getting his head cut on a bottle. It shows how evil papers like the News of the World and, I’m afraid, the Daily Mirror are. They have chosen to pick out isolated incidents – a couple making love in a bath of foam, a girl dancing naked – and make them seem like crimes. They are trying their best to indict a young generation, who seem to be setting a triumphant example to the older generation – an example of how to enjoy oneself, something which most Englishmen don’t seem really capable of, especially the cynical pressmen of the News of the World. It’s all very sad.
Saturday, September 6th
Today was the final of the Gillette Cup between Yorkshire and Derbyshire – so for a Sheffielder and a Yorkshireman it was quite an afternoon. As I hurried along St John’s Wood Road I wondered to myself whether it would be all over and how empty it would be (brainwashed, perhaps, by the Daily Mirror, which had already billed it as an ‘undistinguished’ contest). But Lord’s was actually full. There were, apparently, about 25,000 people there – 3,000 less than at Highbury a couple of hours earlier, but many more than when I went to see the Test Match v the West Indies. Derbyshire were in retreat. 136 for 7 against Yorkshire’s 216, with 15 or 20 overs left. But they lasted for an hour, until, shortly before 7.00, the last Derbyshire batsman was caught and the pitch was immediately invaded by happy, beer-filled Yorkshiremen, young boys, vicars and a very few women. Speeches and presentations were made and the MCC Establishment was heartily jeered, and Colin Cowdrey was happily booed as he came forward to present the Man of the Match award. But it was Yorkshire’s evening at Lord’s, and around the Tavern were gathered those nightmarish faces. Sweaty, splenetic and sour. Not pleasant really.
The diary almost buckles here under the weight of writing, filming and recording as well as learning to be a good father to my son and a good son to my ailing father. My resolve weakens and the 1960s slip away without another entry. How could I miss the creation of the Spanish Inquisition and ‘Silly Walks’? To be honest, because at the time neither I, nor any of us, I think, saw Python as a living legend, pushing back the barriers of comedy. We were lightly-paid writer-performers trying to make a living in a world where Morecambe and Wise, Steptoe and Son and Till Death Do Us Part were the comedy giants. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a fringe show, shouting from the sidelines. It was another job, exhilarating at times, but in the great scheme of things not more or less important than changing nappies or hoping for a lucrative radio voice-over. When I pick up the diary again, we’re into the 1970s and times are beginning to change.
1 The name of a fictional forward line from a John Cleese soccer monologue, and the current name for what was later to become Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Among other titles we tried unsuccessfully to get past the BBC were ‘Whither Canada?’, ‘Ow! It’s Colin Plint’, ‘A Horse, a Spoon and a Bucket’, ‘The Toad Elevating Moment’, ‘The Algy Banging Hour’ and ‘Owl Stretching Time’. Increasingly irritated, the BBC suggested the Flying Circus bit and we eventually compromised by adding the name Monty Python.
1 Sam Costa was a heavily moustachioed TV presenter, actor, singer and DJ.
1 Ian MacNaughton produced and directed all the Python TV shows, apart from the first three studio recordings and a few days of film, which were directed by John Howard Davies.
1 Our son, born in October 1968, so nine months old. The only Python child at the time.
2 David Sherlock, Graham’s partner. They’d met in Ibiza in 1966.
1 Directed by Kevin Billington, executive producer David Frost, it came out in 1970. Surely the only comedy in which Peter Cook and Harold Pinter appear in the acting credits?
2 Diana Quick and Ken Cranham – actors, friends, neighbours of Terry J, and, at the time, an item. Philip John was a work colleague of TJ’s botanist girlfriend Alison Telfer. Gerald was a friend of theirs.
1 Eric Idle.
2 My grandmother, Rachel Ovey, from whom we inherited our first fridge as well as our first car.
1 John C dressed as Rob Roy is seen galloping urgently towards a church where a beautiful girl is about to be married. Cleese arrives in the nick of time – ignores the girl and carries off the bridegroom.
2 A John Bird, John Fortune series, directed by Dennis Main Wilson, on to which Terry and myself had been drafted as script editors.
1 Co-writer of many shows including Round the Home. Father figure of Python. He pushed our series forward, and lent it an air of respectability at the BBC.
1970
Wednesday, January 14th
Since the last entry, just over four months ago, we have completed the first series – 13 episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The press were unanimously in praise of the show – Milton Shulman wrote a major article on it after the BBC mysteriously dropped it for two weeks after the fourth show, Jimmy Thomas of the Daily Express attacked Frost on Sunday for not realising that Monty Python had changed humour and brought it forward when Frost was trying to put it back, we were favourably compared with Broaden Your Mind in the Telegraph, have had an article in the New York Times and, two days ago, received the final accolade: an appearance on Late-Night Line-Up1!!
Otherwise reaction has been less uniformly euphoric. Doctor Stuart-Harris – now Sir Charles Stuart-Harris since the New Year’s Honours2 – loves it, and a lot of people say it is the only thing worth watching on television. Ian MacNaughton’s mother sits through it in stony silence. Letters of congratulation came from Spike Milligan,3 Humphrey Burton,4 to name but two.
Viewing figures averaged out at three million, not bad for 11.10 on Sundays. Practical results are promises of another series, repeats of this series at a popular time, an entry for Montreux, and a possibility of a 90 minute cinema film of the best of the series for showing in the States. This last is the pet project of Victor Lownes, London head of Playboy, who raves about the show and is, at this moment, in Chicago selling it to his boss, Hugh Hefner.
The most gratifying feature of the show’s success is the way in which it has created a new viewing habit – the Sunday night late-show. A lot of people have said how they rush home to see it – in Bart’s Hospital the large television room is packed – almost as if they are members of a club. The repeats – at popular time – will show us how
big the club is!
Yesterday we went further into negotiations about forming Python Productions Ltd – which now seems to be decided – and next week we will set to work producing a film script for Victor Lownes.
In the morning I took Helen to the Tate’s exhibition of Elizabethan portrait painting – called the Elizabethan Image. There were some fine portraits – particularly by Hans Eworth, William Larkin and Nicholas Hilliard – but the subjects were usually titled persons, formally posed, and one longed to see a painter who recorded Elizabethan life on a rather more broad pattern. Two interesting paintings were by Henry VIII’s court painters and were blatant and virulent anti-Papal propaganda. One of them showed the Pope being beaten to death by the four apostles, with all his trappings – the rosary, the tray of indulgences, etc – on the ground beside him.
Tuesday, January 20th
The houses around Lismore Circus are fast disappearing – Gospel Oak is being laid waste. I get the feeling that Oak Village is like a trendies’ ghetto, hanging on for dear life, until the mighty storm of’civic redevelopment’ is over and we can walk once again in a neighbourhood free of noise and mud and lorries and corrugated iron and intimate little rooms with pink flowered wallpaper suddenly exposed by the bulldozer.1 It will probably be another two years before there is any semblance of order from all this chaos – by then I’ll be 28 and Helen will be 29 and Thomas will be three and going to nursery school.
Monday, February 16th
Terry and I have completed two films for Marty’s2 special – written in reluctance, conceived in duty, they are based on ideas of Marty himself. They’re long, but that’s about all. Somehow, since Monty Python, it has become difficult to write comedy material for more conventional shows. Monty Python spoilt us in so far as mad flights of fancy, ludicrous changes of direction, absurd premises and the complete illogicality of writing were the rule rather than the exception. Now we jealously guard this freedom, and writing for anyone else becomes quite oppressive. The compilation of all the last series, plus new links, into the film script ‘And Now For Something Completely Different’ has been completed and the script should be with Roger Hancock.3 No further news from Victor Lownes III, under whose patronage the work was done.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 3