Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Once in Tethers, Terry J asked Mark to outline his criticisms of the contract which John G had asked us to sign at the book launching party last Thursday night. As Mark ran through the clauses, it was increasingly clear that we were being asked to sign away our copyright on the film – which is tantamount to signing away every bargaining counter Python ever had. Mark will draft a new agreement, with his solicitor, and we will present it to Goldstone later in the week.

  Wednesday, November 7th

  Met Irene Handl1 at Studio G today where we were both to do a voice-over. A lovely lady who immediately talks to you as tho’ you’ve been friends for years. If Bill Tidy is the spirit of the Snug Bar personified, then Irene Handl personifies the warmest, most comfortable armchair by the fire.

  Monday, November 12th

  Esther Rantzen has rung to ask if I will do an interview about the Brand New Monty Python Bok on her prog, Late Night Esther. I agreed, and found myself leaving home at 11.00 p.m. to go down to the studio. Nervous, I’m afraid, despite many interviews, etc. I still find projecting myself less easy than it used to be – maybe I’m just more self-conscious now. Sit in an ante-room clutching my ‘Bok’. The Producer, small, bearded, bespectacled, appears. He doesn’t look like the kind to take risks, so (with some difficulty) I select a fairly inoffensive passage about what to do on meeting the Royal Family.

  On the air about 11.45. A dull old prog with lots of stock BBC muzak to put everyone to sleep. Esther doing her bit very well, with great energy considering she had done a radio prog at 9.00 in the morning as well. We have a rather unimpressive chat. Esther reads the extract from the ‘Bok’ rather badly (afterwards I find this is mainly because the bearded, bespectacled little Producer keeps screaming through her earphones to tell her to stop before she reads anything compromising).

  Tuesday, November 13th

  Met with Jimmy Gilbert at BBC in the morning.2 Jimmy very genial, welcoming – very much the feeling of a nostalgic reunion, for all of us, except Gilliam, had helped to keep Jimmy in material for two series of Frost Reports. He had only inherited Duncan Wood’s office the week before, and it was still in the process of changeover. The walls were bare, a disembowelled record-playing unit lay against one wall, and Jimmy looked far from at home in it.

  I’m not sure if he really grasped what we wanted – which was, in effect, a new series of Python, without John, and different in style from the others by being unified, organic half hours, and not just bric-a-brac, loosely slung together. He is going to see Alasdair Milne1 next week and will put the programme suggestion to him. Quite a substantial part of our future is now in genial Jimmy’s hands.

  Thursday, November 15th, Southwold

  I went up to Southwold on the train to see how the parents were. Found Mother looking fairly chirpy and less tired than when I saw her last. Daddy is slower and less capable each time I see him. However, he still responds to my visits in much the same way – it’s obvious that he enjoys them and that he’s pleased to see me. But his mind wanders and he is easily distracted, which is making Mother very irritable. I always remember him as an irritable man easily moved to the sharp reproof, happier with the sarcastic put-down, embarrassed by the open compliment. Now, unable to marshal his thoughts and actions very clearly, the tables are turned and he is the victim of another’s bottled-up bitterness and impatience.

  While I was there we went for a long walk in the cool bracing sea air at Minsmere, with a big red sun sinking behind the bird sanctuary as we walked. He has had more hallucinations recently. He talks about ‘When that man was in the kitchen …’ and so on. Recently he locked the door in the evening, in case ‘those men’ got in. He knows by their accents that they are quite cultured, and they are apparently friendly, but it is frightening that they should be so real to him.

  Saturday, November 17th

  Ate breakfast on the Ipswich—London train, and read some of Ivan Illich’s book Tools for Conviviality. In the words of the old cliché, a most thought-provoking book, and very depressing – for he so clearly and radically tackles the problems of’progress’ and social organisation that I was left with a feeling of profound dissatisfaction and yet at the same time helplessness.

  His diagnosis – that we have gone too far, too fast, that we are the slaves, not the masters of technology, in short that the contribution an individual can make to society has become so limited and so insignificant is very clear, but where do we begin to change things? How can we eventually start renouncing what we have in order to go back to a less complicated society but one with greater respect and freedom for the individual? Suddenly I am aware that aggression and greed are not vices which suddenly spring up and are crushed in a war, they are institutionalised in the system we live in.

  Back home to complete and utter disorientation. There are men on my roof erecting a corrugated iron temporary roof atop some scaffolding. This new structure towers over our house only marginally less conspicuously than the hand of God actually pointing at the front door. I suppose I felt like the soldier returning from leave in the war only to find his house had gone, except in this case it had grown.

  Monday, November 19th

  William is three today. The day when he was born now seems so remote. Those were the days when everyone seemed to be having kids. Now everyone seems to have mellowed and settled. After all the excitement we’ve all calmed down a little. There are not so many babies, there are more little people now.

  I took Tom to school, then down to Terry’s for another meeting on the film. Some good stuff from Eric – and some of the pieces I’d written at S’wold went down well, which was encouraging. At lunchtime Terry had a shouting match with John which blew up from nowhere, and the intensity of T’s outburst took even John by surprise. It was all about T feeling oppressed by John’s rather dismissive handling of any suggestion of Terry’s. In fact John is trying to be fairly accommodating, but he does tend to dominate the group more than he used to.

  In the afternoon he suddenly had to leave and Terry Gilliam had to leave in order to drive John and Graham in to the Centre. Eric went off to see a film, and Terry and I were left with the fag-end of the afternoon and the dirty coffee cups.

  Saturday, November 24th

  Drove up to Abbotsley at 50 mph as the government had requested. Most people appeared to be observing the unofficial limit.1 It was rather like being in a slow-motion film.

  Tuesday, November 27th

  Worked at Terry’s in the morning. A very poor session. We both wrote 75% tripe, and seemed unable to summon up excitement or concentration about the film. The most I could manage was a sketch about Galahad having smelly breath.1 This was the level. But after a lunch of cold spring greens and beans, we decided to call it a day, and went through our mutual morale-boosting act about bad days and good days and the amount we’d done last week, etc, etc. Terry didn’t cheer up much until I dragged him into London.

  We parked in Leicester Square, then took in one hour of Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales which Terry G had recommended. Superb recreation of mediaeval England – the kind of style and quality of shooting that we must get in our film, to stop it being just another Carry On King Arthur.

  Wednesday, November 28th

  Met at TG’s later. He has been reading various fine-looking books on mediaeval warfare, and found that much of the absurd stuff that has already been written for the Holy Grail film has healthy precedents (e.g. taunting one’s opponents and, as a last resort, firing dead animals at them during a siege – both quoted as mediaeval tactics by Montgomery). Then over to John’s for a script meeting.

  Mark F was there. The film deal is still not finalised. Apparently our Fairy Godmother, Michael White, is being quite businesslike with us – his cohort, John Goldstone, wants 12½% and a fee for a job whose function we cannot quite pin down, and Michael White wants his name prominently on the credits, plus various controls and final word on appointment of crew, production staff, editing, etc. So Mark has not signed
yet. At the same time, Tony Stratton-Smith has come up with an offer of £45,000 from Pink Floyd, so there are alternative sources giving us a stronger hand against White.

  Thursday, November 29th, Bradford

  Woken by alarm at 7.00. Collected Graham from Belsize Park, and we got down to King’s Cross by 7.30. Joined the rest of the Methuen party for a trip to a literary lunch in Bradford – where we were expected to give some sort of speech, along with Denis Norden, Gyles Brandreth and Leslie Thomas. Breakfast on the train. Jilly Cooper, of the low breasts and alluring smile, was also there.

  At Leeds we were met by a coach which took us on to Bradford – a puzzling piece of planning this, as the train went on to Bradford anyway. We drove past a tripe works and into the grey centre of the city, spattered with a light covering of snow. Even since we were last in Bradford for Python filming three years ago, the demolishers have started to attack and replace some of the finest Victorian buildings. The stylish glass and steel curved roof of Victoria Station is going, a marvellous, grimy, black Baroque hall in the centre of the town is being knocked down, and so is an old, fine, stone-walled market. They are being replaced by the usual faceless crap. Four-lane highways and insurance company offices, with no style, or beauty, or sympathy. Our literary lunch was held in one of these new and faceless blocks – the Norfolk Gardens Hotel.

  We disembarked from our coach (a funny thought, somehow – a coachload of writers) and were taken into a carpeted ante-room leading to the dining room, where we were given drinks whilst the guests assembled. Mostly ladies, but a number of younger ones who didn’t look quite like the hangers and flog-gers we’d expected.

  We started our communal Python speech with Graham doing ‘Thank you very much and now some readings from the “Bok”’ as a very prolonged mime. Then I got up and read some ‘Biggies’ in Swedish and then out of the book. Quite rude stuff, I suppose, but no-one seemed to worry unduly. Terry read the ‘Horace’ poem and John finished up by reading a rather disappointingly unfunny piece from the ‘Fairy Story’.

  Then we sat outside in the ante-room and signed endless copies of the ‘Bok’. Jilly Cooper was sitting next to us and, as she wasn’t signing as many as we were, Terry passed one lady’s Python book to Jilly to sign. The woman grabbed the book back, saying ‘I don’t want her to sign … I don’t agree with her.’

  Too rushed to keep a daily diary for the next month, I rounded up the salient events after Christmas.

  Friday, December 28th

  It’s a still, grey, anonymous afternoon.

  At the beginning of December I had been working with Terry J down in Camberwell [on the script of what was to become Monty Python and the Holy Grail] and had a wearying week travelling as much as possible by public transport, owing to the ‘oil crisis’ – the 30% cut in Arab supplies to the West which has resulted in near-panic this week at the petrol stations. Many only open for two or three hours a day, and police have had to sort out traffic-jamming queues at many garages. London Transport, with a 30–35% undermanning problem, is no longer as efficient as it used to be, and it’s quite common to wait 10 or 15 minutes for an Underground train, on a dusty, dirty platform (Victoria Line excluded). However, I arrived only about 15 minutes late at Tony Stratton-Smith’s office. Tony, smiling and benignly jokey as ever, opened a bottle of sparkling wine and detailed his proposals for raising £75,000. £25,000 was to come from Led Zeppelin and £20,000 from Pink Floyd. Tony Stratton himself would make up the last £25,000, and small investors like Michael Wale1 wanted to put in £2,000. Tony asked one or two routine questions, but altogether his offer seemed a lot more attractive than White—Goldstone. All he wanted for supplying finance was 5% – but Mark, a steady negotiator to the end, got him down to 4½%.

  Both Led Zeppelin and Floyd were prepared to write or play theme music for us – an additional bonus, which could boost our chances in the States.

  In the second week of December the weather improved – we had long sunny spells and clear skies. The oil panic passed its worst stage, but it was clear that the Arabs, by the simple expedient of controlling the exploitation of their own oil, had at one stroke brought the era of unquestioned expansion to an end. The very suddenness of the effects of the oil cutbacks is amazing. Only a month ago Anthony Barber [Chancellor of the Exchequer] and Heath were telling us that Britain was at last heading for sustained economic growth, and if we all pulled together, an era of prosperity and boom would be on us by the end of ’74. On December 12th I was at Belsize Park Post Office collecting petrol rationing coupons – old-fashioned Suez coupons, still bearing the authority of the Minister of Power!

  The government of expansion and progress has introduced an Emergency Powers Bill, which bans all display lighting, enveloping London in pre-Christmas gloom. Railways and coal, both despised and run down in the last fifteen years, are now being talked of, together with North Sea oil, as Britain’s hope for the future.

  The film script was completed on Friday 14th – but still without enough group work on the links and plot scenes. But some very funny writing from all sources, Graham and John in particular were back on form.

  On Christmas Eve collected Grandfather and took him to an afternoon carol service at Westminster Abbey. On the way he talks some complete nonsense. Strange non sequiturs, as his mind gropes from subject to subject, forgetting where he began and what he was trying to say. But it clearly is a great source of pleasure to him to sit in the Abbey for an hour. I left him there and drove around Westminster.

  London was quiet and empty. The lack of public display lighting (except for the Norwegian Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square, which has been given a dispensation for today and Christmas Day), the feeling of impending industrial crisis, only temporarily stemmed by Christmas, the various IRA bomb explosions in the last two weeks, all couldn’t help but create a melancholy atmosphere.

  I rather liked it actually. I drove into Soho, and drank a coffee and bought the last croissants before Christmas at a little French bakery, and it seemed that people were more ready to smile – were a little more aware of each other, rather than the headlong rush to buy, sell, display, offer, wrap, fill. But I could just be over-romanticising.

  Python has been directly hit by the new emergency fuel-saving powers. TV has been ordered to close down at 10.30 and our repeats, scheduled at 11.25, arenow presumed cancelled.

  1973 is the year which saw the break-up of the Python group. I was unable to accept that it was happening – indeed there were possibly more combined projects in 1973 than in 1972. The Brand New Bok, the First Farewell Tour from April to June, the Matching Tie and Handkerchief LP, the film script. But all these projects were, to a certain extent, Python cashing in on a comfortably receptive market, rather than breaking new ground. The only project of ’73 requiring new creative effort was the film – and although much good new material came up, there was nothing like the unified enthusiasm of the first two series. A freshness has gone, and 1974 will see just how we pick up the threads again.

  1 Graham Chapman’s close friend. They’d both studied medicine at Bart’s, but Alan went on to practise.

  1 Not to be confused with Tony Stratton-Smith, whose Charisma label put out our albums.

  1 Mr Gumby wore knotted handkerchiefs on his head and shouted very loudly. Spiny Norman was the giant hedgehog which the gangster Dinsdale Pirhana was convinced was watching him.

  1 Produced Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields and Local Hero, but his only major credit at this time was That’ll Be the Day with David Essex.

  1 In the end, Dusty Springfield made an on-air introduction to Python’s first appearance on New York’s Channel 13.

  2 Due to Boundary Commission recommendations, Huntingdon ceased to be a county and was absorbed into Cambridgeshire.

  1 Maggie Weston, ace make-up artist who became Mrs Gilliam.

  2 Birkdale Primary School, Sheffield, which I attended from 1948 to 1957.

  1 Mary Whitehouse, concerned at the decline
in public morals, started the Clean-Up Television Campaign, which became the National Viewers’ and Listeners’Association. She never directly attacked Python, but saw the BBC as a den of impropriety.

  1 At that time Glasgow was a dry city on Sundays.

  1 The Magic Fingers Bed Relaxation System was a way of vibrating your bed to lull you comfortably to sleep. A quarter of a dollar would wobble you gently for about five minutes. It always worked for me, until it stopped, whereupon I woke abruptly.

  1 Pepperpots was the generic name for the screechy ladies in Monty Python. John and Graham coined the name because of their shape.

  1 Daddy, Dad, Pa, Father, ‘the old man’ has, as Thomas and William grow older, morphed into ‘Grandfather’.

  1 And which didn’t materialise for another eighteen months!

  1 Comedy actor and writer. Linked closely with Marty Feldman.

  1 Sean Kenny, one of the cool young stage designers of the 1960s, died in 1973, aged 41.

  2 Hang Down Your Head and Die, an Oxford University theatre show about capital punishment. Terry J, Robert and I were in the cast. It came to the Comedy Theatre, London, in 1964, produced by Michael Codron.

  3 He later wrote The Henry Root Letters, amongst other things.

  4 The Love Show was a theatrical documentary about attitudes to sex through the ages. Brainchild of Willie D, who brought in Terry J to write it. Never produced.

  1 Comedy writer (‘Doctor’ series), actor, terrific fan of modern jazz and bullfighting.

  1 Al Alvarez (b. 1929) is a poet, critic and poker player. He was a keen squash player too, and most of our conversations took place half-naked in the changing rooms.