Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Thursday, February 1st

  To Portman Square for presentation of the Gibbs film script. Waiting outside the office was Rita Allen, of Selling and Sellers Ltd, who is a conference organiser and valiantly trying to appear relevant to this project. She is mid-thirties, with tired eyes, skilfully concealed in a well-made-up face.

  In the office Colin Hessian deferentially introduces me to his boss, a Mr Finn. We sit round a rather silly table, and I read the script through – Gumby voices and all. It goes down surprisingly well. Hessian roars with laughter. Finn is clearly worried that we all like it so much, and after some discussion we make some simple changes – in order to give it a happy ending.

  There is controversy over the vox-pop ‘I only like toothpaste with crab or hake in it’. Finn doesn’t like this. Hessian, being a good deal more independent than I would have expected, stands up for it strongly. What a silly discussion – it puts me in mind of Terry and Duncan Wood arguing the virtues of ‘masturbating’. Anyway, they accepted the script happily.

  Thursday, February 8th

  Up at 6.30. Terry is here by 6.45. It’s just beginning to get light, but it looks an unpromising day. Heavy drizzle and dark, dull, low clouds. We are hoping to film the entire Elida-Gibbs salesman film today – some six or seven minutes of script. Fortunately we start early, up amongst the faceless 1930s shopping arcades of Colindale, and by 9.20 a longish sound sequence is completed.

  We finish shooting about 6.00, with thirty-seven set-ups in the can. During the course of the day, I have been a filthy, coughing tramp, thrown out of a shop, a salesman in glittering white suit who leaps out of the roofs of cars over shop counters and, right at the end of the day, the most difficult thing, a straight-to-camera hard-sell tongue-twister on the virtues of Close-up Green toothpaste. But I think everybody enjoyed the hard work – tho’ it was cold and wet, there is no stronger feeling amongst a crew than when each person in it knows that the other person is working flat out. Terry was excellent – but does have a tendency to get over-excited, which is not so good when others are getting over-excited as well. This is just the time for icy calm.

  Friday, February 9th

  Arrived at Rules [restaurant] about 1.00. In an upstairs room the Pythons, and several people from Methuen, who had worked on the book [Monty Python’s Big Red]. On the table were individual sugar Gumbies, and a large chocolate ‘Spiny Norman’,1 and menus on which each dish was followed by an appropriate review of the Big Red Book – trout followed by ‘flat, thin and silly’, etc. The meal was to celebrate sales of over 100,000 paperbacks. Couldn’t get excited or impressed about it, though – it only added to my feelings of guilt. Here we were, being given an enormous and expensive free meal, in honour of us earning large amounts of money. Also I can’t help feeling that Python is better employed creating than celebrating. However, it was a chance to overeat.

  From the Methuen lunch – feeling full of cigars and brandy, which ought to be Rules’ coat of arms – walked back through sunlit Covent Garden. Knowing that the whole area will be redeveloped (keeping odd buildings of ‘historical merit’), it’s rather like one imagines walking through London in the Blitz. You know what’s happening is not going to do the city any good, but you’re powerless (almost) to stop it. However, pressure groups of all opinions seem to be more successful now – Piccadilly and Covent Garden have both had big development plans changed by community action and protest. The sad thing is that the basic thinking behind these redevelopment schemes never changes. Blocks (of offices mainly) dominate. Where there was once a gentle elegance and a human scale, there is now concrete and soaring glass. The City of London is rapidly getting to look like a Manhattan skyline, which doesn’t worry me so much – but the blocks creeping into the West End are more sinister, for they are forcing a primarily residential area into acres more of hotels, offices and widened roads, and the scale of London’s buildings – which are, by and large, reasonably small, friendly and non-monolithic – is every day being lost.

  Tuesday, February 13th, Southwold

  Took a day and a half’s break in Southwold – having time off from immediate commitments. On the train at Liverpool Street – a late start, but the train tore through Essex to make up time. I ate breakfast and read the paper. Peace, perfect peace.

  Met by Mother and Father in the car. Now he doesn’t drive long distances. A few weeks ago he had a skid on the way home, and it clearly worries him greatly. He is also very worried about being left at home alone. Apparently he watched a TV programme about Parkinson’s Disease, and at the end was almost in tears, and kept telling Ma how lucky he was to have her.

  He is now definitely thinking of himself as an invalid, the times when he tries to make out how incredibly active and busy he is are getting fewer. I think he knows now that taking an hour to dress is a long time for an active man. He is aware of his mind and his concentration drifting. He cannot grasp any concept, statement, idea, argument that isn’t utterly straightforward.

  My mother looked well, I think she is almost happier now that she knows that all she can do for him is just to look after him. When he was fit and well, it must have been more difficult for her to accept that there was hardly any sympathetic contact between them, now he is more an invalid, their relationship is at least clear-cut.

  Thursday, March 1st

  In the afternoon we went to see Mark Shivas at the BBC. He hopes to have either James Cellan Jones or Ted Kotcheff to direct our’Black and Blue’script. Talking of the future, he showed considerable interest in the Pythons’ second film – and suggested a man called David Puttnam1 as a source of money. Terry afterwards thought Shivas himself might have been interested in the producer’s job. He seems very confident in us – when we mentioned to him about the waiter script which we have been working on, he said he could almost certainly get a ‘Play for Today’ slot for it – which is the kind of talk we’re not yet used to.

  Saturday, March 3rd

  I went out shopping in Queen’s Crescent market before lunch. In many ways it’s a sad place – you notice especially old, shuffling ladies, poorly dressed, with twitching mouths. You hardly ever see them in Hampstead or Belsize Park. These are people who make a complete and utter mockery of ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ – they’re the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That’s all.

  Take Thomas and William on to Parliament Hill. It’s the English cross-country championships, quite a sight. Over 1,000 runners streaming round the Heath. It was like a Boy’s Own story. David Bedford – the hero who failed at Munich – was leading the field, as he ran lightly down the hill a foot or so away from us.

  Behind Bedford trailed hundreds of runners with no hope. Men whose chins were already flecked with white dried spittle, small, bespectacled balding men with shoulders smartly back, lank, long-haired boys striding down the hill like Daddy-Long-Legs. We moved up to the top of the hill to watch the second lap, and Thomas was running all over the place in his little green duffel coat, trying to emulate the runners. The sun came out as they ran around the second time, and the Heath suddenly seemed small as the long line of multicoloured vests stretched as far as the eye could see. Bedford was pipped in the second lap by a New Zealander. It was an exhilarating feeling to have been present at a big national sporting event, without having to pay any money, squeeze through any turnstiles and sit where one’s told.

  Sunday, March 4th

  My parents have been married forty-two years. I wonder how many of those were happy.

  Sitting writing my diary up in the afternoon when there is a noise outside. A parade with banners passes up Lamble Street towards the new blocks at Lismore Circus – a loudspeaker van follows up. It urges non-payment of the extra 85p a week rent, made necessary by the government’s Fair Rent Act. Camden was one of the last boroughs in the country to give in to this act. It’s good to see someone still fighting – but like a protective hen, I bec
ame all at once aware of feeling alarmed at this civil commotion – a momentary fear that these are the voices of the have-nots, and they somehow threaten us, the haves.

  Rung up this evening by a girl who is organising a pageant of Labour. A re-affirmation of socialist ideals – largely sponsored by actors such as Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave and others. Heartening to know so many of one’s favourite actors are anti-establishment, but I react against her rather vague left-wing patter, and her presumption that so long as anything was anti-Tory it was good. I go along with her most of the way on this – but in the end, rather than argue, or ask her to explain any more, I agree to send £25. All she seemed to want was money. Money to bring coachloads of workers down from the north.

  Monday, March 5th

  A Python meeting at Terry’s. The first time since the third LP in September that we have all contributed to a creative enterprise – in this case the second Python film. It was in many ways like a typical Python working day. Graham arrived late, and Terry made the coffee – and there was the usual indecision over whether to have a small lunch in, or a blow-out at one of Camberwell’s few restaurants – we even played touch football on the lawn, for the weather is mild and sunny – a sort of Indian summer at the wrong end of the year. But for me, the most heartening thing of all was the quality and quantity of the writing that Python has done over the last week. John and Graham, writing together apparently untraumatically for once, had produced some very funny material. Eric had a richer selection of ideas – which sparked off a lot of other ideas, and Terry and I had a rag-bag of sketches – more than anyone else, as usual, but with a pretty high acceptance rate. Today we proved that Python can still be as fresh as three years ago, and more prolific.

  Thursday, March 8th

  Worked at home – as there was a rail strike, and reports of enormous traffic jams. Outside they’re pulling down the line of old houses remaining in Lamble Street. There’s something compelling about destruction – as tho’ it’s really more in our nature than building. I decided to make a photographic record of the rebuilding of Lamble Street from start to finish – all on a single three-minute piece of film.

  I heard on the lunchtime news that a bomb had been found in a parked car near Scotland Yard – and it was believed to be connected with the Ulster border referendum being held today. It wasn’t until the early evening news that I heard that there had been two big explosions in London. A bomb had gone off outside the Old Bailey – over 200 people were injured and one man killed – another had gone off in Whitehall. The impact on the media was tremendous – ‘Outrage’, ‘Belfast comes to London’, etc, etc.

  Friday, March 9th

  Left for Terry’s at 11.15, after a good couple of hours’ work. London is under siege, or so it feels. Traffic solid around Tottenham Court Rd – partly because of limited rail service owing to the prolonged go-slow and yesterday’s total stoppage, and partly (as I discovered as I tried to take a short cut through Fitzroy Square) due to bomb scares. The area around the Post Office Tower had been totally cleared and cordoned off after a caller had said a bomb would go off at 11.30. Nothing went off. Neither did it at Thomas’s play school in Kentish Town, which was also evacuated after a scare.

  Sunday, March 11th, Abbotsley

  Stricken, during the night, with a strange malaise of the bowels. Spent from about ten to three until six o’clock on the lavatory reading much of Norman Collins’ London Belongs to Me. Spend the morning in bed with the Sunday papers and no breakfast or lunch. Thomas is fascinated and keeps coming up to see if I’m alright – bringing me Lego and finding some medicine for me – and talking ever so sweetly and politely. Gradually the visits become more frequent. He brings Willy along with him. A plateful of four thin pieces of toast (all I wanted for lunch) has only two left on it by the time Thomas has brought it upstairs. Around two o’clock both he and William ended up in my sickbed listening to stories, so I decided that it was no longer worth being ill and got up around three.

  Friday, March 23rd

  It has been a glorious week of sunny weather. We have been working for three days on the Python film script with maximum productivity. Ideas have been pouring out, and we have had very concentrated, but quite tiring writing sessions. Today at Terry’s we sat outside in the sunshine to write, and for the first day this year I caught the sun. Al fresco lunch with wine and a Chapman salad. John busy writing biographies for the press – ‘Despite what Michael thinks, he is not good company.’

  Thursday, March 29th

  At 5.30 we met Mark Shivas at the BBC and went to meet James Cellan Jones, who is to be the director of Secrets, our play for the ‘Black and Blue’ series. We took bets on what he would be like as we drove along the A40. I envisaged him as a rather burly, stocky man, with a loud voice. I was right, except I may have over-emphasised the loudness of his voice, and I didn’t know that he’d have no socks on. He may be brilliant, but I didn’t feel an awful lot of sympathy for our play, nor an awful lot of knowledge of it and, when Terry asked about writers attending editing, he closed up like a shell. But as we will be on the Monty Python tour when it’s rehearsed, filmed and recorded, there is little we can do, so we might as well leave him the play, and see what comes out the other end. I can see embarrassment and disillusionment somewhere along the line, I’m sure.

  Friday, March 30th

  Mark Shivas rang early to apologise for what he called J C-Jones’ ‘scratchy’ behaviour towards us. Had we not thought he was being like a prima donna? I said it hadn’t worried us, but there were one or two points when we felt that he had the wrong end of the stick, and Shivas promised to talk to him. I feel Shivas is on our side rather than his, but this is probably the feeling he gives everyone, which is why he’s such a good producer.

  Monday, April 16th

  Our seventh wedding anniversary, and fourth year of the diary. Over to B&C Records to talk about promotional work for the tour. On the steps of B&C met the beaming and effusive Tony Stratton-Smith – one of those few people who cheers me up whenever I see him. He was especially full of himself today for he has, almost single-handedly, secured Python’s first TV foothold in the US – a deal with the Eastern Educational Network to put out the shows, uncut and unabridged. It’s not a lucrative deal, but it’s a great breakthrough. Tony now has to get two sponsors for the show and has high hopes of Apple, the Beatles’ company – George H is very interested.1

  Back home to write some programme copy for the stage tour. Helen had a good suggestion yesterday. All its pages will be on one big sheet, which can be folded up into a programme, or kept as a poster. Good Python thinking.

  Easter Monday, April 23rd

  The first official day of the ‘First Farewell Tour’, but Terry G, Terry J and myself have been working hard on it for about two weeks, collecting the film, writing and creating the programme, making slides, organising the sound tape with André. The much looked forward to holiday, which Helen and I were to take last week, evaporated under intense pressure of work. We left for Abbotsley at lunchtime on Good Friday. Took some champagne to celebrate Helen’s mother’s election to the new county council2 as an Independent.

  Rehearsals started at 9.30 at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park. It’s a mammoth 3,500-seater theatre, with wildly flamboyant interior. The huge ceiling is studded with twinkling stars and above the proscenium and along the side walls are passageways, alcoves, balconies, in Spanish-Oriental style, with lights in as if for the start of a massive Shakespearean production. It’s a magnificent folly – and it seems an obvious target for developers. However, it continues in being as a rock concert theatre – probably helped by the decision of the Albert Hall not to stage any more rock concerts.

  Friday, April 27th, Southampton

  Woke about 7.00. Slept fitfully until 8.15. Feet sweating, but fairly calm. A bath and breakfast. It was a fine, sunny morning, so we walked to the theatre. In the distance we could see the enormous liners in the docks, and some way ahea
d, the steel letters on a grid high above the surrounding buildings read ‘Gaumont’. Altogether rather an epic place to start the tour. There was an almost tropical feeling – as if we had come 700, not 70 miles south from London. I became aware of blossoms everywhere, of lush chestnuts in bloom, and a warmth in the air, with a healthy sea edge to it.

  The sound is clearly going to be a difficult problem, for, in addition to music and sound f/x on tape (now being worked by André), we have film and animation sound from the projector, voice-overs from two off-stage mikes and six radio mikes, all to be mixed and controlled by Dave Jacobs, a short, dark, grey-eyed young guy, who has had about six hours’ sleep in the last three days. In fact everyone looks tired, but the adrenaline of an imminent first night keeps everyone going.

  Graham was using more than adrenaline to keep him going. He arrived at 10.00, already a little bleary from drink, and violently angry that he had not been told where to meet us. Gradually he calmed down, but unfortunately the damage was done – what everyone feared might happen, but hoped that for once it wouldn’t, did happen. By 6.00 Graham was very drunk. We finished a dress run-through at 5.15, with many imperfections still not sorted out, and some difficult costume changes keeping us all tense.