Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Thursday, April 6th

  Almost two years and nine months to the day since we shot our first feet of Python TV film at Ham, we were at Windsor to shoot what is probably our last. On July 8th 1969 we started with Terry dressed as Queen Victoria, and today we finished with myself dressed as an Elizabethan.

  Tuesday, April 11th

  Terry and I meet Bill Borrows of the ACTT – the film technicians’ union – to ask about joining as directors (for our summer film). The union, which five years ago was all powerful, and held the crippling ITV strike in 1968, which got London Weekend off to such a disastrous start, is now on its uppers. There are few films being made in England (only eleven this year) and the union has 70% of its members unemployed. Along with many other unions it has refused to register under the government’s Industrial Relations Bill, and it may go under.

  So Bill Borrows was indeed pleased to see Python people. And Now For Something Completely Different was, after all, a very successful British film – it’s breaking box-office records at a cinema in Canada even now. We were given forms to fill in, and it looks as though there will be no trouble.

  Saturday, April 13th

  Cool, but often sunny – this was the nearest to a spring day we have had since the middle of March. In celebration of it, we went ‘en famille’ on the train to Kew Gardens.

  At the station we have to wait for an hour, as a woman has trapped herself underneath a train. I presume it was a suicide attempt. People go and stare at her, but the ambulance is a long time coming, and the railway officials are in a complete panic. No-one knows where the key to the first-aid cupboard is, for instance. Classic English characters emerge in such a situation – a lady, laden with parcels, tells Helen almost regretfully ‘I didn’t see any blood across the line or anything – I don’t think she’d cut her wrists or anything. Why do people do it, that’s what I wonder.’

  We were on the station for an hour – which says a lot for Thomas and William’s patience. Home by 6.30, and Helen and I spent the evening watching the box. I finished E L Doctorow’s Book of Daniel – a novel about the Rosenbergs (who were executed for treason in the early 1950s anti-commie atmosphere in the US). Written through the eyes of their son Daniel, it is good because it shows how complicated are the various reactions of family and friends to what now seems just a monstrously unfair case. It’s full of atmosphere – the Bronx in the 1950s, for instance – and yet another novel which makes me want to go to America. Here I am, nearly 29, and never outside Europe.1

  Sunday, April 16th

  Our sixth wedding anniversary.

  We have reached a kind of material plateau at the moment – a house, two cars, two babies. Now we have more time to think about ourselves, and avoid becoming complacent lumps. We go out by ourselves once a week if possible, to a cinema and a meal, and can always go to the country at the weekends if we become really cheesed off. But we’re no longer the young savers, or the young home-hunters. We have a lot – the question now is, what are we going to do with it?

  I’m fond of Oak Village – with its relative peace from the motor car, and its scale, which enables you to see your neighbours often. Today I sat in the garden and read about rising house prices in the Sunday Times. This place is now probably worth £20,000, which is a 70% increase in four years. We are well-off by most people’s standards – but we don’t really want to move from here, we don’t really want a bigger car. Our biggest luxuries are food and drink.

  Saturday, April 22nd

  Simon Albury turned up unexpectedly in the evening. We’ve missed his schemes and stories over the last couple of months – but he made a great comeback this evening, firing me once again with great enthusiasm to go to the States. I must say all the omens seem right at the moment. I have the money and the time in the summer, and I only have one year to go until I’m 30 – which, rightly or wrongly, I regard as a psychological turning-point beyond which one can no longer lay claim to youthful enthusiasm. Also Simon will be in New York making three films for Man Alive – the BBC programme he now works for. And of course it’s convention time in June, when the American election year really starts to hot up. I’ve always been fascinated by American politics, and I find the idea of attending a convention exciting in itself, as well as giving a point to going to the States.

  Thursday, April 27th, Southwold

  I lunched on the train to Ipswich. Excellent railway-made steak and kidney pie, washed down with a bottle of Liebfraumilch. The weather began to clear, as I got on to the little diesel train from Ipswich to Darsham, and, by the time it arrived at Darsham at 3.30, the sun was shining on the fresh, clean Suffolk countryside.

  My father met me and drove me to Southwold. He seems as slow as usual, but one can’t help feeling that he still has a lot of untapped potential for enjoying life. For instance, he had been on a choir outing to see ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show’ in Norwich, but he and the Vicar left the main party, and went to see The Go-Between1 instead. Ostensibly not the kind of film my father would like at all, but he enjoyed it so much that he wants to see it again. This was very encouraging – and I can’t help feeling that, as his old irascibility decreases, and he is forced to take things more slowly, he does enjoy diversion more.

  Unfortunately he is still no conversationalist, and, although still interesting and jokey in his own stories, he finds it impossible to follow anyone else’s. This is clearly very difficult to live with, and my mother has become sharp and rather quick to reprove him. I can’t blame her. Her mind works so fast and she has for so long lived with someone who shares hardly any of her interests. The sad thing is that both of them suppress each other’s potential instead of developing it. My visits are a sort of escape valve for both of them.

  Sunday, April 30th

  In between showers, I took Thomas and Willy out to the Zoo. The new monkey house is being feverishly finished off in preparation for the Duke of Edinburghal opening on Thursday. It is not completely satisfactory as the glass fronts of the cages tend to reflect the faces of the crowd. Perhaps it’s a subtly intended reversal. The gorillas, orang-utans and chimps bask in rather aseptic glory in their new premises. The sea lions were the only animals who really gave us value for our 80p – and the wild boar had new babies, which gave her a bit more box-office appeal. Thomas was most interested in the dead mice in the owls’ cages. In fact he seems preoccupied at the moment with dead things. Any animal not actually moving encourages Thomas to ask ‘Is it killed?’

  Friday, May 5th

  Awoke aged 29. It was sad that the early May sunshine had vanished – to be replaced with grey drizzle. I broke my dietary controls on breakfast and ate eggs and bacon and toast.

  We drove on to rehearsal at the new BBC Rehearsal Rooms in North Acton. Although in a drably industrial area, with a view from the window as depressing as that from the old London Weekend Rehearsal Rooms in Stonebridge Park – the block is well equipped and still smart. There are all your favourite telly faces Dr Who, John Paul from Doomwatch, Harry Worth, etc, etc. For the footballers amongst us, there is a spacious, soft-rubber covered floor, ideal for indoor footy. Eric is going to buy a ball.

  Saturday, May 6th, Abbotsley

  A quick lunch, and then to Winhills Junior School in St Neots. At 3.00 I had to be one of the judges in the May Queen contest. Helen, her mother, and three parents, Thomas, William and myself sat at a long table in the playground, whilst no less than fifty-seven entrants for the May Queen competition paraded before us at the top of some steps. It was not a very pleasant experience seeing these 8—11-year-old girls reduced to such nervous wrecks by the combination of the booming PA system and our appraising stares. Also it took a great deal of time, and the wind was now cool and strong. In addition, William kept climbing up the steps towards the girls, and playing to the audience quite appallingly. However, in the end, a girl was selected. Not my particular choice, but she was a bonny, cheerful-looking redhead, with an English-Rose-like honesty about her. It was
rather a revelation to be told by a little girl next to me, ‘I don’t know why you chose ‘er – she swears all the time!’

  Sunday, May 7th

  Got to talking politics with Helen’s mother – she is equally shy of arrogant Conservatives and doctrinaire socialists – and she sees the worst of both on her committees.1 She says how sad it is that party politics mean so much in local government. There are even fewer chances of an independent like herself being elected when the new areas come into force next year.

  Thursday, May 25th

  The last Python TV recording for at least eighteen months. Our last show contains the ‘wee-wee’ wine-taster, ‘Tudor Jobs’ – with a long bit for myself- both sketches which John doesn’t like at all, so there is a slight tenseness in the air. It’s a very busy last show, with plenty for everyone to do, and only a small amount of film. A fairly smooth day’s rehearsal, but it was unusual to see Duncan Wood [Head of Comedy] and Bill Cotton at our final run-through. Apparently they later told Ian that there would have to be cuts in the show. This is the first time they’ve ever suggested any censorship – in what has been quite an outspoken series. The recording was chequered. Graham was in a very nervous state – he had been worried by his pulse rate, which he said was 108 before the recording – and was drinking as he hasn’t done since December and January’s recordings, so in one sketch he skidded to a halt, and it was about eight retakes and ten minutes of recording time later that the sketch was eventually completed.

  After the show there was hardly time to feel relief or regret, as Python was cleared away for maybe the last time ever. After a drink in the club, we went on to a Python party at the Kalamaris Tavern in Queensway. We crammed into the basement with cameramen, vision mixers, make-up girls, Python people and their hangers-on

  Saturday, May 27th

  In an attempt to get most of our Python work out of the way before the summer recess at the beginning of June, we worked all yesterday on material for the German show, and this morning there was still no time off, as I had to gather scripts, props, train times, etc for our first foray into mass cabaret – at the Lincoln Pop Festival tomorrow. It is a frustrating business trying to buy simple things like vases to smash. People are so keen to sell you the unbreakable one. I hadn’t the heart to tell the man who sold me on the many virtues of plastic flowers – ‘they can be cleaned when they get dirty’ – that all I wanted them for was to smash them with a wooden mallet.

  Sunday, May 28th, Lincoln

  Dawned cloudy and grey yet again. But at least the high winds of the past two days have gone. It’s still not good weather for open-air pop festivals, and the Sunday papers are full of reports of mud, and tents blowing down and general bad times from Bardney. We took the 10.15 from King’s Cross to Lincoln and British Rail did little to dispel the gloom of the morning by keeping the buffet car locked, and not even a cup of coffee available for the whole journey. We read the papers and rehearsed.

  At about 4.00 we set out for Bardney, about ten miles east of Lincoln, and the Open-air Pop Festival [the first to be staged in England since the Isle of Wight in 1971].

  In many ways this festival is being used as a test case. There is a great deal of opposition from property owners and Tories generally to the festivals – which they see as insanitary occasions catering for insanitary people who want to take all kinds of drugs, fornicate en masse in England’s green and pleasant land, and listen to noisy and discordant music. Locals will be terrorised, property laid waste and traditional English rights generally interfered with. So this festival has only been allowed to go on on condition that if there has been unreasonable nuisance caused, its organisers, Stanley Baker1 and Lord Harlech, are liable to prison sentences.

  The first evidence of this mighty gathering, estimated at 50,000 people, was a long traffic jam stretching from the village of Bardney. People later confirmed that the jams were caused by sightseers who had come to ‘look at the festival’. Most of the audience clearly couldn’t afford cars, and there to prove it was a constant stream of kids walking beside the road making for the site.

  The weather had been really bad for the start of the festival, with gales blowing two marquees down on the Friday night. The marquees could not be salvaged as fans had torn them up and used them as protection from the elements. Real Duke of Edinburgh’s Award stuff.

  It was about 9.15 when we eventually got through the village. As we were supposed to be on at 9.55, and traffic was at a standstill, we walked. Terry especially was becoming most agitated, and in the end we asked a policeman if there was any chance of a police escort or a police car to take us the remaining mile or so up to the site. He managed to get us a lift with two plain-clothes CID officers. The first thing they wanted was our autographs, and then they embarked on as vicious a piece of driving as I’ve ever seen. Speeding up the side of the column of cars, they drove maliciously hard at the straggling groups of long-haired pedestrians, blaring their horns and giving ‘V’ signs.

  Once at the site we were taken by John Martin, the organiser, to Stanley Baker’s caravan to have a drink and last-minute rehearsal. In Baker’s caravan there was iced champagne, and Mike Love and Al Jardine of the Beach Boys (who were appearing after us) sitting around. Slade were over-running – we weren’t likely to be on until 10.30. I had a second glass of champagne. We seemed to have cleared everyone out of the caravan. Baker looked in occasionally, smiled rather a strained smile, and disappeared into the night.

  At last we were called on. It was about 10.45 when we embarked on what was certainly the most spectacular cabaret I’ve ever done. The whole occasion seemed to be only comprehensible in terms of comparisons. For instance, here I was doing ‘Tide’ to 50,000 people, when I first did it nine years ago to about thirty in the Union Cellars at Oxford. Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys came up to me and shook my hand and congratulated me, when only seven years ago I was packed in the Odeon Hammersmith trying to catch a glimpse of him.

  They started with our signature tune, and there was a roar of recognition from the audience. The lights were very bright, so one couldn’t really see the audience, and it was difficult to judge the laughs, which came as a distant rumble – like the beginning of an avalanche. There seemed to be more people on the stage behind us than the entire audience we usually get at cabarets. I had the feeling that we had a certain interest above those of the other groups because revue has never really been attempted on this scale before. On either side of the stage were 60 x 40 foot Eidiphor1 screens with TV pictures of our faces, and the sound was very good. We tried some new material from the third series – and one of the sketches, the Proust competition, lay there. Otherwise the response was pretty good and ‘Pet Shop’ went tremendously well – with great surges of laughter. At the end we did seem to get a mighty ovation, and there were shouts for more long after John Peel’s announcement.

  Before we left Bardney, I felt that I really ought to correct my lingering impression of the day as being one big traffic jam, so we went out into the press enclosure to watch the Beach Boys. The stage itself was high above the crowd – the angle of it giving the same sort of impression as the terrace in the Kremlin from which Soviet leaders are always seen saluting. The figures, even from where I was, were tiny, but the huge screens and the sheer power of the sound, made them seem gigantic.

  We were driven back to London in a mini-bus, drinking brandy and eating chicken sandwiches, as the first light of dawn appeared over the Hertfordshire hills.

  Wednesday, August 2nd

  John Gledhill phones with news of the advent of Python in the States. The first commercial manifestation has been the recent release by Buddah Records of our second LP, Another Monty Python Record. Already Buddah seem to have scored a minor coup by getting extracts from the LP onto the stereo-sound selection of Pan Am’s transatlantic flights. They have also got the ‘Spam’ song onto Current, the first issue of an audio magazine – an LP consisting of interviews with Presley, Manson, Ted Kennedy and ot
her significant Americans. It’s only in the experimental stage at the moment, but full marks to Buddah. I think that the curiosity value of this strange LP – coming out of nowhere – might work well for it in the States.

  Thursday, August 3rd

  My new black Mini was delivered this morning. Don Salvage, who personally brought the car round, has such an unfortunate manner about him when describing the car that I almost assumed it must have been stolen. Especially as when I rang him about buying a Mini automatic, he first of all told me it would take at least three to six months. Then next day he rang to say he could find one immediately.

  Monday, August 7th

  Visited Mr Powell’s surgery at 10.45 for a session with the hygienist. She turned out to be the girl who had been Mr Powell’s nurse during my early batch of gingivectomies, so she must have known my mouth as intimately as only a dentist can. I was given a short, but severe introductory talk about the generally poor state of hygiene in my mouth – and the dangers it presented – whilst at the same time being given the sop that I cleaned my teeth 99% more thoroughly than the rest of the filthy British public. But this wasn’t enough, as a vivid red mouthwash indicated. It contained some ingredient which showed red wherever there was a bacteria-carrying layer on my teeth. She rubbed my face in it by showing me the offending red patches in a mirror – complete with epicene red lips. I was cleaned up and given two toothbrushes, a reel of dental floss, and red tablets to show whether my cleaning was getting better. Left at 11.30 feeling quite inspired, and determined to fight this battle for dental survival, against all odds.