Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  The chocolate factory was small and personal. None of the machines was enormous, and the whole process seemed to be on a human scale. We saw Harrods exclusive after-dinner mints being stuffed into their little bags by middle-aged working-class ladies; presumably to be elegantly extracted by rich and well-perfumed hands in some Kensington salon. Also I was amused to see how the delicate marking was placed on top of each Harrods ‘Opera’ chocolate. A matronly cockney lady dipped into the liquid chocolate mixture and inscribed these magnificent chocolates with a deft flick of her nose-picking finger. This was the ‘hand’ in the ‘hand-marked’ chocolates.

  Thursday, December 7th

  In the morning I worked up at home, writing on a little further with the ‘Black and Blue’ script. Terry was returning this morning from Liverpool, where he had been chairing a meeting about ‘cooking and cholesterol’, so I was on my own.

  At 12.30 arrived at TV Centre to see a playback of our controversial Shows 12 and 13, which Duncan Wood and Bill Cotton have told us must be amalgamated into one, on the grounds of their (to them) offensive tastelessness. Today was our last chance to change this decision, for rather than accept their judgement and trim the shows, we had asked at least if we could see again what we were being accused of, and we had asked that Paul Fox might view the shows as well.

  This he was doing in an upper room of the BBC at the same time as we were seeing them in a lower room. Both shows had generally scatological themes, but in nearly every case the naughty material was hardly worth making a fuss about, and most of it was less questionable than some of the material in the first two series (viz. the mother-eating sketch). Neither show was our best, but I certainly could see no earthly reason for combining the two and wasting an entire show.

  That evening I was very glad to hear from Ian that Fox had felt this way too, and had insisted on far fewer cuts than Wood and Cotton – which goes to prove that either prurience or cowardice, or a mixture of both, are important factors in LE’s official judgement. This was the first time we have ever divided the BBC hierarchy – and the appeal to Fox has this time come out to our advantage. I shall be able to approach him in a new light at the BBC LE binge in a couple of weeks.

  Tuesday, December 12th

  Terry and I are now well into a writing routine and we’re making solid progress.

  Rosemary rang from the BBC to say they had received a can of real Devon cream addressed to Mr Pither1 from a dairy in Bovey Tracey!

  Drove home via the BBC to collect my cream – it contained a note from the owner of the dairy thanking us for the free publicity for Bovey Tracey in the ‘Pither’ show, correcting our pronunciation from Bôvey to Burvey Tracey and ending up ‘I think you are all mad’.

  Sunday, December 17th

  Woke up feeling very depressed. I faced yet another Sunday spent working on the script – and I’ve had hardly any time at home for about two weeks. The Atticus article on Python in the Sunday Times transformed depression into mute despair. A terrible photo, and a worthless column, written in pseudo-joke style – all I dreaded – and, what’s worse, wrongly attributing nearly all the quotes – and I was unlucky enough to be given Graham’s! Thus, the remarks I felt least necessary when we gave the interview – like ‘Where is John Cleese, anyway?’ and ‘Make sure you say that John Cleese is the middle-aged one’-were faithfully reported as spoken by me! Also my name at the beginning was spelt Pallin.

  Drove down to Terry’s to work; he didn’t seem to be particularly worried by the article. Graham rang during the morning. Helen told him I was upset, which I don’t think I’d have bothered to do. He and I rang John – John appeared to think it was quite humorous.

  Arrived about 10.00 at the BBC party – which is very much an establishment affair, and Python have always regarded it with some suspicion. However, with the notable exception of John, Eric and Terry G, we decided to go along this year. In fact Terry was even wearing his black tie. General feeling of warmth and well-being about this year’s binge – the food was more imaginative too with ambitious failures like moussaka. Graham C was stalking through the throng, heavily dosed with drink – presumably to cope with the evening – he was wearing a Bill Oddie T-shirt, spelt Bill Addie, and John Tomiczek2 was wearing one spelt Bill Oddle (sic). ‘Who would you like me to insult?’ Graham asked unsteadily. Bill Cotton Jnr occasionally looked anxiously in Graham’s direction, but I think that most people present had learnt what to expect from past experience, and poor old Gra was unable to pick a fight.

  Half-way through the evening Bill Cotton made a farewell speech to David Attenborough. He delivered his paean holding his cigarette behind his back, like someone who wasn’t meant to be smoking, but who certainly wasn’t going to waste a good cigarette. Attenborough accepted, to rapturous applause, what looked like a BBC litter bin.

  Towards the end of the evening Terry and I plucked up enough courage to approach some of the greats – Milligan, the elder statesman, who has had a remarkably successful year, first his autobiography, Hitler – My Part in his Downfall, then a mini-Goon Show revival – with a special last Goon Show recorded in October for the BBC’s fifty years anniversary – and patronised by royalty. He remained sitting through most of the evening, with no shortage of visitors and well-wishers and sycophants like ourselves coming over to see him. He walked very obviously in front of Bill Cotton, just as Bill was selling David Attenborough, and was heard to shout irreverently during the speech. Eric Morecambe is another one who never dropped his comic persona all evening. If one talked to him, or if one heard him talking to anyone else, he was always doing a routine. He has a very disconcerting habit of suddenly shouting at the top of his voice at someone only a foot away.

  Almost exactly true to the pattern of two years ago, one of the last people I spoke to was Eric Sykes, who has a series on Thursday nights1, two hours before us, which gets about the same rating. He’s very much easier to talk to than someone like Milligan or Morecambe, because he’s a gentler character altogether – even when performing. He was very impressed with the ‘Pither Cycling Tour’, and was generally flattering about my performances.

  So at 12.00 the band of Light Entertainment workers disbanded. I was struck by how young we still are compared to most of the people there. Apart from the Goodies and ourselves, nearly all the performers and writers there are in their forties or even fifties.

  Wednesday, December 20th

  An interesting piece of work could come our way. This morning I was rung by Memorial Enterprises – who have made films like Charlie Bubbles, If and Gumshoe – in short, some of the best British films of the last few years. Michael Medwin wanted to speak to me. I was quite excited, but it turned out that he wanted to talk over the question of our writing a 20-minute promotional film for the States to put out as advance publicity for O Lucky Man, the latest Lindsay Anderson film, with Alan Price and Malcolm McDowell. Alan had suggested that I might have some better ideas for a promo film than Warner Bros’ own publicity men.

  I met them at the editing rooms of De Lane Lea in Wardour Street. The film was likely to be very prestigious, and clearly they are gambling on a big commercial success. It has been edited down to three and a quarter hours, and is due to be first screened as the official British entry at Cannes. They are a very pleasant group of people – Lindsay, serious and mock-serious by turns, the kind of person who seems to invite you to make jokes about him, Alan, as self-deprecatingly gloomy as ever, and Medwin, very like the cheerful Cockneys he used to play in 1950s British war films – though much less over the top. He was pleased to hear that Helen and I enjoyed Charlie Bubbles,1 he said we were members of a select club – not of those who enjoyed it, but of those who saw it, for somehow it never found favour with the big distributors.

  1 Drugs were a source of great interest at the time. It was quite respectable to have experienced them in some shape or form. Simon had worked on a research paper on drug use for the Home Office.

  1 Directed by Carl R
einer (Rob, his son, and director of Spinal Tap, appears in a minor role). It starred George Segal and Ruth Gordon.

  2 As Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, tried to defend the British Army’s killing of thirteen civilians on what became known as Bloody Sunday, the MP Bernadette Devlin, 21 years old and the youngest woman ever to be elected to Parliament, crossed the floor of the Commons and punched him in the face.

  1 Luigi and Dino Vercotti, two hugely ineffective Mafiosi, created by Terry J and myself.

  1 Donald Stokes, Chairman of British Leyland Motor Company.

  2 Emanuel ‘Manny’ Shinwell (1884—1986), socialist peer, the longest-lived politician of his times.

  1 Barry and Marty Feldman were the two writers who welcomed me when I arrived for the first script meeting on The Frost Report. Barry and I and Terry J later wrote and performed for Late-Night Line-Up, from which we were eventually sacked.

  1 Rectified two months later, when Terry J and I made our first trip to America for three weeks of sightseeing from New York to New Orleans, the Grand Canyon and San Francisco.

  1 Directed by Joseph Losey, script by Harold Pinter. Set in East Anglia, close to Fakenham where my father was born and brought up.

  1 Helen’s mother was on the Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire county council as an Independent, specialising in education.

  1 Rugged Welsh actor who was also a shrewd businessman and founder member, with Lord Harlech (former British ambassador to Washington), of Harlech TV.

  1 Large-screen television projector devised by Dr Fritz Fischer. Last used in 2000. From the Greek eido: image and phor. phosphor/light-bearer.

  1 Footballer (Brentford, Fulham), administrator (credited with invention of 3 points for a win system) and panellist (Match of the Day).

  1 André Jacquemin had engineered several sessions with me, going back to 1966. His committed, efficient, no-nonsense skills impressed me and he became Python’s engineer of choice.

  2 The Fred Tomlinson singers had played, among other things, the original Mounties in ‘Lumberjack Song’ and the original Vikings singing’Spam! Wonderful Spam!’

  3 Where we were to be based for the second of two Python specials made for Bavarian TV

  1 Eke Ott was the sister of Max, who designed the German shows. Ian MacNaughton fell in love with her and she became his second wife.

  2 Thomas Woitkewitsch, translator of the Python German shows.

  1 Python production assistant. A lovely, soft-spoken man with an interest in Norfolk churches. When we filmed a football match between a team of gynaecologists and Long John Silver impersonators, Roger was the one whom Graham persuaded, in the interests of medical authenticity, to go out and buy eleven vaginal speculums.

  1 Terry Jones’ elder brother. A journalist.

  1 I had got to know Terry’s mum well in the days when I visited the family home in Claygate, Surrey. She was an endearing lady and we were very fond of each other. Some of Terry’s drag roles on Python were uncannily like her, though absolutely not Mandy in The Life of Brian.

  2 Our German wardrobe mistress.

  1 I was auditioned for this series myself, but John was judged to be funnier and got the job. Quite rightly. He later, of course, became ITN’s political correspondent.

  1 Reg Pither was the bobble-hatted cyclist on a tour of the West Country whom I played in the ‘Cycling Tour’ episode of Python.

  2 A young Liverpudlian who Graham and David adopted.

  1 Called simply ‘Sykes’.

  1 Directed by Albert Finney, and starring himself as a hugely successful Mancunian returning to his roots. Co-starred Liza Minnelli. It was written by Shelagh Delaney.

  1973

  Monday, January 1st

  A good start to the New Year – Python has won the Critics’ Circle award as the best comedy show of the year; beat Terry at squash; and at 3.00 we had a meeting with Mark Shivas and Richard Broke to hear their verdict on our ‘Black and Blue’ script, which was favourable. I think they were surprised how over-cautious we were about our ability to write anything longer than sketches. It restores my faith in myself as a writer – not just someone who left university seven years ago, with no real qualifications and a lot of lucky breaks. Terry’s eyes are really on direction – it is this urgent desire for complete technical control that is for him the most important aspect of creation, whereas for me the personal satisfaction of having written or performed something well is usually enough – for then my ambition tends to lead away from the editing room and the dubbing theatre to travel abroad, to reading, to being with my family.

  Friday, January 5th

  9.30 – arrived at De Lane Lea editing rooms in Dean St to see the 3¼ hour version of Lindsay Anderson’s new film O Lucky Man. It still needed some editing and dubbing to be done, but it was a very impressive film – and tho’ some sequences worked better than others, nearly all of it was of a very high standard – in performance and photography and direction and conception, and there were many moments when I felt a very strong and complete sense of involvement.

  At the end, as the lights went up in the little viewing theatre, Lindsay appeared through the door of the theatre with Alan. He laughed and said he’d been spying on us from the projection room. I mumbled my appreciation – but had hardly time to get my thoughts together, and felt rather inhibited about saying anything in the presence of so many people intimately concerned with the film.

  Terry and I drove over to the Medical Centre in Pentonville Road, for a complete physical check-up in modern computerised conditions – which normally costs £30, but had been given to us free by Alan Bailey.1 The relevance of the film suddenly seemed uncannily close. Only an hour ago we had been watching a film which took horrific looks at scientific medicine, and in which the charming smile and the ‘Would you come this way please sir?’ were usually a prelude to something most sinister. Now here we were, in the clean, aseptic atmosphere of a rich man’s clinic, being shown into a small cubicle and asked to strip off down to shoes, socks and pants. Alan fortified us beforehand with a large whisky – he really is the most wonderfully cheerful and reassuring man. The tests included a blood test, a urine test, a very thorough Question and Answer sequence, which worked by pressing buttons, and looking at a screen, the answers being fed straight into a computer. I found the alternative answers fascinating – from ‘I have never coughed blood’, ‘I have coughed blood, but not in the last year’, to the appalling and inevitable ‘I have coughed blood often in the last year’.

  Tuesday, January 9th

  Reading my Daily Mirror, my eyes fall on an item ‘Monty Python Axed’. The story ran that the BBC were stopping Monty Python and were not making any more. It also ran the story of two sketches being cut from the last show, as if to imply that the show had been cut by the Beeb on grounds of indecency. The inaccuracy of the headline, and the fact that it appeared in a paper which boasts on its front page ‘Largest European Sale’, moved me to ring the Mirror. The TV man who had instigated the story was very pally and ‘Hello Michael’ with me, but I think a little taken aback that I attacked a small news item so bitterly. It was, he said, part of a much longer article which he had written, and the headline had not been composed by him.

  However, Jill Foster did ring the BBC and Bill Cotton did send out a press release denying the story. But the Evening Standard rang up during the day to say that they noticed some confusion between the Mirror story and a Philip Purser interview with me in the Daily Mail (implying that Python would go on) and Radio Sheffield sent round a man to do an interview about Python’s plans. So I became a minor celebrity for a day – and lost a lot of work time too.

  Thursday, January 25th

  Met Tony Smith1 – the man who is probably going to land the first ever Python road tour.

  He was a surprise. Longish hair, unkempt, shirt pulled over what must be a beer-belly – a friendly open face, and a total absence of traditional promoter’s accoutrements – cigars, sharp suits and big talk. He
was quietly confident that a Python tour would be a sell-out. Bannister Promotions have offered us a guarantee of £17,500, but Tony Smith reckons that we could make 21 or 22 grand – on a percentage split with him. I must put this to the rest of the team. Smith has fairly impressive credentials, including recent sell-out tours with The Who and Led Zeppelin.

  At 1.15 gave an interview to a Belgian journalist for a radio programme which is featuring the new Python record on one of its shows – which is more than they do here, and the record isn’t even for sale in Belgium! I said Mr Heath ought to take his trousers off once a year. The Belgian evidently felt this was quite a risible Eurojoke.

  Saturday, January 27th

  Winter this year is being very unfriendly to romantics. No snow, let alone a blizzard, winds moderate, weather warm, and now, to cap it all, bright sunshine. At 2.00 we had a Python meeting at John’s. We decide to do the Python tour with Tony Smith. We talk about details of performance and dates and places. I find it extraordinary that John can undertake such a violent month of really hard work repeating basically old material – and yet will not countenance doing another series of Python. I suppose it’s all a question of time and money. My God, we’re getting so mercenary. Eric is almost totally involved in ads. He has been the most successful of us – with his ‘Nudge-Nudge’ selling Breakaway chocolate, and another ad in the offing. This afternoon he rang me to say that Gibbs toothpaste had approached him to ask if he could set up a five-minute film for their sales conference. It had to be made quickly and fairly cheaply. Eric proposed that we set it up as a package, with the two of us and Terry. It sounded like good experience – it wasn’t for general commercial purposes, and it could be rude. What’s more, it’s work. I accepted on behalf of us both.