Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Friday, April 24th

  Down at Terry’s in the morning and for lunch, and from there to the BBC, where we all gathered to watch the playback of two of the last Monty Python series, which were being shown to an American named Dick Senior, who is interested in syndicating them in the States, and an American girl by the name of Pat Casey, who is to be in some way connected with the production of our Playboy-sponsored Python film to be made later in the year.

  The first one we were shown was Show 11, and it was painfully slow – the ‘Undertakers’ and the ‘World of History’ were two ideas ground underfoot by heavy-handed shooting and editing and also performance. It made us look very amateur and our face was only partly saved by Show 12 – a much better looking show with ‘Hilter’ and ‘Upper Class Twits’ providing two of the most remembered items of the series.

  Dick Senior seemed a little taken aback, but he was a very intelligent man and could obviously see that there was a cumulative attraction in Monty Python, which an isolated showing could not necessarily convey. Nevertheless, Show 11 is not one to use for sales purposes.

  At 5.00 Terry and I arrived at Pinewood Studios to talk to Betty Box and Ralph Thomas about our rewriting Percy.1 After walking for many yards along corridors and up stairs, which one was never sure were entirely real, we arrived at the office which they share. Both of them younger than I imagined. Ralph Thomas seemed the more genuine and pleasant of the two, Betty Box being kind, but hinting at a hard edge beneath. For about one and a half hours we talked and I got the feeling that they were impressed by our criticisms of the screenplay of Percy, and anxious for us to rewrite as much as we can in the time. (They start shooting in June and we are filming from May 11th onwards.)

  Saturday, May 2nd

  By 10.00 was at the Camden Theatre for the recording of a Monty Python LP The original impetus for this had come from the unaptly named BBC Enterprises, producers of LPs such as Salute to Steam and Keep Fit with Eileen Fowler.

  Straightaway the pattern of the day was established. The record, we were told, was to be done extremely cheaply, we were not going to have it in stereo, we could not afford to pay any copyright for the use of our invaluable music links – so it was all done on an organ, which reduced everything to the level of tatty amateur dramatics.

  Spent the morning in the rather attractive Camden Theatre – a fairly small theatre, with Atlases supporting enormous mock columns, and a rather luxurious intimacy about the atmosphere – reading through the scripts, briefing the sound effects men. Somehow, one felt, this should have been done sooner.

  Helped by Graham Chapman’s bottle of scotch, the actual recording, at 4.30 in the afternoon, was really quite enjoyable. Not having cameras to play to, one could judge one’s audience, and one’s effect on the audience, much more easily. However, the audience was small, most of the sound effects were inaudible and we had never had time to rehearse side two, so there were many things which got little or no response – ‘Hiker’, ‘Nudge-Nudge’ and ‘Soft Fruit’ were especial casualties.

  Tuesday, May 5th

  My 27th birthday – I bought The Times Atlas as my major present – with £3 from Southwold.

  Helen bought me a garden chair, which was immediately put to use. This is real garden weather, our patch has been transformed from the quagmire of April, to a firm little lawn with tulips, pansies, wallflowers filling the border, and the clematis and Virginia creeper suddenly springing to life.

  A hot 27th birthday – as my mother wrote in her letter, it was a very hot day twenty-seven years ago.

  Monday, May 11th, Torquay

  Left home around 10 o’clock in the Triumph and, collecting Graham on the way, set out for Torquay and our first two-week filming stretch away from home.

  Our hotel, the Gleneagles, was a little out of Torquay, overlooking a beautiful little cove with plenty of trees around. Eric, Lyn1 and John were already there, sitting beside the pool. The decor was bright and clean and the rooms looked efficient – and there were colours about, instead of the normal standard hotel faded reddish brown.

  However, Mr Sinclair, the proprietor, seemed to view us from the start as a colossal inconvenience, and when we arrived back from Brixham, at 12.30, having watched the night filming, he just stood and looked at us with a look of self-righteous resentment, of tacit accusation, that I had not seen since my father waited up for me fifteen years ago. Graham tentatively asked for a brandy – the idea was dismissed, and that night, our first in Torquay, we decided to move out of the Gleneagles.2

  Tuesday, May 12th, Torquay

  At 8.00 I walked down to Anstey’s Cove below the hotel. It was a dry, fine morning, the sun was in and out, it promised to be a better day. Down by the sea, surrounded by high basalt cliffs, it was tremendously peaceful. The calm of the sea affected me, made me feel relaxed and gave me a great sense of well-being. The sea, waves gently turning over on the shore, is so tranquil compared to the antics of the people who want to get near it – the amusement arcades, the 6d telescopes, the hotels with greasy food, the guest houses with sharp-tongued landladies, the trousers rolled up, the windbreaks, the beach-trays, the sand-filled picnics, the real Devon cream ices, the traffic jams at Exeter, the slacks, the sun oil – all of this endured in order to get near the sea. Two-thirds of the world’s surface is water, why should seaside resorts always seem to have so little room?

  Back at Gleneagles, I avoided breakfast and Graham, Terry and I asked Mr Sinclair for the bill. He did not seem unduly ruffled, but Mrs Sinclair made our stay even more memorable, by threatening us with a bill for two weeks, even tho’ we hadn’t stayed.

  We checked in for the night at the Osborne, a four-star hotel which is really a converted Georgian terrace overlooking the sea. They were so conditioned to middle-aged and elderly guests that, when I asked at reception for vacancies, she looked at me with some uncertainty and said ‘Staff?’

  That afternoon we filmed ‘Derby Council v. The All Blacks’, at Torquay rugby ground, and then in the evening some night-time election sequences at a vast neo-classical mansion in Paignton, which used to belong to the sewing machine millionaire, Singer, who married Isadora Duncan.

  Here we filmed until midnight, and arrived wearily back at the darkened Osborne, for sandwiches and late-night drinks and a discussion, later very heated, with Graham about the worth or worthlessness of keeping a diary.

  The diary withstood all pressures to end its life. In bed at 3.00.

  Wednesday, May 13th, Torquay

  After breakfast Terry went off to film at a rubbish dump a piece of Jean-Luc Godard ciné verité involving an exploding lettuce.

  It was another hot day and Graham and I, in leisurely fashion, paid our bill and drove round to the Imperial. Here we spent what must rate as one of the most luxurious and effortlessly pleasant mornings of my life. We lay in the sun beside a beautiful heated sea-water pool, and had gin and tonics brought to us.

  After a swim and drinks and sunshine, we went into the restaurant, where we ate a most excellent meal, accompanied by a half-bottle of Meursault. After that, we drank Grand Marnier and I smoked a cigar in the lounge.

  I hope I never get used to that way of life, I hope I can always enjoy self-indulgence as much as I enjoyed it, that first, sunny perfect morning, at the Imperial.

  We drove out to the location and spent the rest of the afternoon playing football dressed as gynaecologists.

  Tuesday, May 13th, Torquay

  A day on the beach. We start filming ‘Scott of the Sahara’, an epic film/sketch scheduled for three days. I play Scott, a sort of Kirk Douglas figure swathed in an enormous fur coat with perpetual cigar, looking more like George Burns. John plays the drunken Scottish director James McRettin, Terry plays Oates, Mike, a coloured ex-van-driver with a disconcerting Devonshire accent, plays Bowers and Carol1 plays Miss Evans. An absurd looking bunch, we set up on Goodrington Sands, a stretch of rather stony sand south of Paignton. Signs saying ‘Deck Chairs’, ‘Beach Tray
s’, ‘Ices’ abound – this particular stretch of sand has been mercilessly tamed by the holidaymaker.

  It’s remarkable how our evening entertainment revolves mainly around food and meals, whereas two or three years ago, when on location for, say, The Frost Report at Litdehampton, or Twice a Fortnight at Minehead, the first thing we did was see what was on at the pictures. I suspect it’s largely the Chapman hedonistic influence, which is also partly to blame for us wasting money at the Imperial.

  But then, we are a lot richer than three years ago.

  Wednesday, May 20th, Torquay

  In the evening, another session with Terry J on Percy. Again slow work, stymied by the sheer amount of rewriting needed to make the vacuous last scene work. One good thing about the evening – we discovered the Apollo, a Greek restaurant in the centre of Torquay. The TV is always on, and the kebabs and hummus were excellent. As soon as we ordered kebabs, the proprietor, a large Greek, asked us if we were from London. He said, sadly, that no-one from Torquay ever seemed to eat the Greek food – it was always the sausages, chips and peas.

  Friday May 22nd, Torquay

  Our last day in Torquay. By a mighty effort of work, from 8.30 to 11.30 on Thursday evening, Terry and I had typed out three-quarters of our Percy rewrites (running to twenty-four pages of foolscap) and sent them off to Betty Box.

  Today’s filming, consisting mainly of short bits and pieces with the milk-float (‘Psychiatrists’ Dairies’) had very much the end-of-term flavour and, by 6.30, John, Connie,2 Eric, Lyn, Graham and both the make-up girls had started back to London. Terry and I shared a room at the Links Hotel for our last night in Torquay. The Links is where we should have stayed all along – the cost of living there is about 60% lower than the Imperial, but the bed was more comfortable, it’s open all night, the bar does not charge extortionate prices, and just in one evening we got to know the manager and his wife and many of the guests, including two hard-drinking Catholic priests.

  Saturday, May 23rd

  4.00 a.m. A soft light in the sky, fresh smells, and the far-off sound of a car, then silence again. Shown out of the back door of the Links by a night porter, a quick cup of black coffee and one of last night’s sandwiches, then into the car and off to London. Even at 4.30, the roads coming south were very busy, but the Devonshire countryside at 5.00 looked so beautiful that I kept wanting to stop.

  Hardly any traffic going my way, but plenty going west as I tore over the Salisbury Plain. Stopped at a lay-by overlooking Stonehenge, and drank more black coffee and ate the remainder of the sandwiches. By 7.45 I was on the outskirts of London. By 8.45, 270 minutes and 214 miles later, I was back home. Thomas was standing on the bathroom stool cleaning his teeth, with no trouser bottoms on. I just cried, I was so pleased to see him.

  Sunday, June 7th

  Terry and I had to spend the morning working on another of our small-earning sidelines. This time it was a rewrite of a film called ‘How to Use a Cheque Book’ for the Midland Bank.

  Thursday, June 18th

  General election day. Ideal polling weather, dry with warm sunshine. Every public opinion poll in the last two months had put Labour clearly ahead – the only possible shadow on the horizon was a 1½% swing to the Tories published in the latest opinion poll – taken after the publication of the worst trade figures for over a year, and Britain’s exit from the World Cup last Sunday. Nevertheless, everything looked rosy for Labour when I left Julia St at 10.00 to go down to Camberwell.

  The morning’s work interrupted by the delivery of a large amount of dung. We were sitting writing at Terry’s marble-topped table under a tree sheltering us from the sun. All rather Mediterranean. Suddenly the dung-carriers appeared. Fat, ruddy-faced, highly conversational and relentlessly cheerful, they carried their steaming goodies and deposited them at the far end of Terry’s garden. As they passed I gleaned that they had come from Reading, that they had started loading at 5 p.m., that one of them was about to go on holiday to Selsey Bill – his first holiday for seven years. After about twenty-five tubfuls they were gone, but at least they left a sketch behind.1

  When I turned on the election I heard that in two results there was already a confirmed swing to the Conservatives. I watched until about 2.30, when it was obvious that the opinion polls were wildly wrong – the country had swung markedly to the right. Edward Heath, perhaps more consistently written-off than any Opposition leader since the war, consistently way behind Wilson in popularity, was the new Prime Minister.

  My feelings are mixed. What I fear is a shift to the right in the national psyche; there are many good and honest and progressive Conservatives, but there are many, many more who will feel that this election has confirmed their Tightness in opposing change, student demonstrations, radicalism of any kind. There are also those who will take the Tory victory as an encouragement to ban immigration (Enoch Powell doubled his majority), bring back hanging, arm the police force, etc, etc.

  The Labour government was courageous and humane in abolishing hanging, legalising abortion, reforming the laws against homosexuals, making the legal process of divorce less unpleasant, and banning the sale of arms to South Africa. I am very sad that they are out of power, especially as I fear that it is on this record of progressive reform that they have been ousted.

  To bed at 3.00. A long, hot day.

  Friday, June 26th

  Yesterday we recorded the first of the new Monty Python series. Although there was only about 15 minutes of studio material to record, it had gone remarkably smoothly. There were small problems during the day, but generally there was an optimistic air about the show. None of us had all that much to do, so there was perhaps less tension than usual. We even managed a complete dress run-through, which is almost a luxury compared to some of our hectic recordings in the last series.

  The audience was full and, even in our completely straight red-herring opening – the start of a corny pirate film which went on for nearly five minutes – there was a good deal of laughter, just in anticipation. Then John’s ‘Hungarian Phrase Book’ sketch, with exactly the right amount of lunacy and scatology, received a very good reaction.

  Out to the Old Oak Common Club for a rehearsal of Show 3.

  A most strange atmosphere at the rehearsal. Ian seemed a good deal less happy than last night; everyone seemed rather quiet and unenthusiastic. Perhaps it’s the structure of this particular show, which consists mainly of myself as Cardinal Ximenez and Terry J and Terry G as the two other Cardinals, so the other three members of the cast have comparatively little to do. Perhaps it’s also this very dull, oppressive weather. The near-80s temperature of the last month is still here, and the weather is generally overcast and muggy.

  Sunday, June 28th

  In the morning I pushed Thomas across the Heath to Kenwood House. He loves being taken through the woods and now points excitedly at the trees, and gives bread to the squirrels, who will come right up to the push-chair.

  After lunch I went down to the St Pancras Town Hall to rehearse our short Monty Python contribution to a show called ‘Oh Hampstead’. The title is, to say the least, equivocal – as it is a charity show, directed by John Neville1 in order to raise funds for Ben Whitaker, the Labour MP for Hampstead up till ten days ago.

  John and I rehearsed ‘Pet Shop/Parrot’, and Graham and Terry were to do the Minister whose legs fall off. Struck by how very friendly people are when there is the feeling of a cause about. The stage manager and the lady who offered us cups of tea were so matey that it made up for John Neville’s slightly detached theatricality.

  As we waited to go and perform, we were all taken with unaccustomed nerves. It was live theatre now – no microphones, no retakes, and it brought us up with a jolt. But the audience knew we were giving our services free for the Labour Party – and they’d paid from £2 10s to £10 to watch, so they must have been pretty strong Labourites. Anyway, it went well.

  Decided to take up our invitation to Ben Whitaker’s after the show party.
He lives in a sensibly, modestly furnished Victorian house backing on to Primrose Hill.

  I think the party may have been rather foisted on him – he seemed to be opening bottles of white wine with the somewhat pained expression of a man who cannot reconcile the joviality around him, or, indeed, the money he’d spent on the wine, with the fact that he had ten days earlier lost his seat in Parliament, his job as a junior minister, and his chance of political advancement for at least ten years. It would be fairly appalling to be told one could do no more shows for four years and yet for a man of any ambition that’s what it must be like. How ungrateful Hampstead has been to Ben Whitaker, I thought, as I shook his limp hand and left his limp party at about 1.00.

  Saturday, July 11th

  My consumption of food and drink is increasing in direct relation to a) the money I earn and b) the amount of time spent with Graham Chapman, the high priest of hedonism. Terry Gilliam recently gave what seemed a good clue to Graham’s attitudes. Terry suggested that Graham, having once made the big decision – and it must have been greater than the decisions most people are called on to make – to profess himself a homosexual, is no longer concerned with making important decisions. He is now concerned with his homosexual relationships and in perpetuating the atmosphere of well-being which good food and drink bring, and in which the relationships thrive. He doesn’t want to think too much about himself now, and above all he does not want to have to struggle. He seems to feel that having stated his position he now deserves the good life.

  Helen’s elder sister Mary, and her husband, Edward, had recently become third-part owners of Roques, a collection of dilapidated farm buildings among the wooded hills of the Lot Valley in France. This was the first of what were to become almost annual summer pilgrimages.