Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  1 Mark Forstater, an American film producer living in London, originally introduced to us by Terry Gilliam.

  1 Christine, a neighbour and the wife of Richard Guedalla, my occasional squash partner.

  2 Adrian is a poet, playwright and novelist. His wife Celia started the Ripping Yarns secondhand bookshop, a treasure trove on the Archway Road, north London.

  1 Hazel Pethig, Python costume designer; Andrew was her partner at the time.

  2 Successful West End producer for, among others, Michael Frayn, Harold Pinter, Simon Gray and Alan Ayckbourn. Gave me my first and last West End break in the Oxford Experimental Theatre production of Hang Down Your Head and Die, in 1964 when I was 21.

  1 John Goldstone was a film producer brought in by Michael White. I’d first met him at Barry Took’s in the days before Python.

  1 National Film Finance Corporation, government-sponsored agency with money to invest in British films.

  1 British character actress and author of two bestselling novels, The Sioux and The Gold-Tipped Pfizer. I’d grown up with her wonderfully distinctive voice on the radio.

  2 He’d just been promoted to Head of Comedy.

  1 Managing Director, Television.

  1 The result of petrol shortages after the Arab-Israeli war.

  1 Prompted by my reading out a sketch about a knight using coconuts instead of a horse, we agreed around this time to investigate the King Arthur story as a basis for the new film.

  1 Journalist and co-writer of Now!, the TV pop show produced by TWW in Bristol, on which I spent six months as a presenter in 1965—6.

  1974

  Friday, January 4th

  The industrial trouble with the mines and railwaymen has now eclipsed the oil crisis. The government decided on an all-out confrontation with the miners and the railwaymen. Mr Heath’s bluff with the three-day week has been called. Now both sides are sweating it out, while the country gets darker and colder.

  Met with Graham and John Gledhill at lunchtime. Graham is going to assemble a trial script for Jimmy Gilbert at the BBC to satisfy their need to see what Python may be like without John. A humiliating experience to start the year with. John Gledhill has at last some money from the Canadian tour – £350 each, but JG has managed to get us assurances of £1,500 each for a week at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in February.

  Left JG’s in a hurry to get back home to collect Thomas and take him to the Mermaid to see Treasure Island. I wanted to have a pee, but decided to wait till I got home. I must have underestimated the urgency of the situation, because no sooner in the car than I wanted to go desperately. Every traffic light was agony. I drove my Mini like a stunt driver, passing whole traffic jams, overtaking on the inside, outside and middle in my agony to get back. But I made it, rushed in and hung over the lavatory in a cold sweat, eventually being forced to lie on the bathroom floor, still in my long black coat. Thomas was sympathetic. I told him I had a stomach ache and he patted my doubled-up shoulders with kindly consideration and said that he gets stomach aches as well.

  We set off at 2.00 and arrived about five minutes late at the Mermaid. An action-packed version of Treasure Island played for all it was worth. Enormous explosions, violently realistic stage fights – in one of which young innocent Jim Hawkins knees an evil pirate in the balls – much to the kids’ delight.

  Tuesday, January 8th

  Met Eric and Terry for lunch at Pontevecchio in Old Brompton Road. Eric ordered a bottle of champagne and orange juice and we sipped this whilst waiting for T to arrive. Outside a really angry day, with heavy rain lashed against the windows by gale-force winds. The grimness of the weather rather matched my mood.

  Left with the feeling that our futures are distinctly unsettled. Lots of offers, but few which seem to have much sense of direction. We haven’t done a new series for eighteen months, and the current repeats are the last time we will have a series of Python on BBC TV, unless Jimmy Gilbert can get the go-ahead for a non-Cleese show. The film is a development, and certainly the best thing we have around, but so far no final word on finance. To spread further despondency, all I needed was a call from J Cleese.

  It came in the evening. There had been the suggestion, from his very own lips, when we put the film together in December, that we should spend a week on it in mid-January. Tonight, when I ask him about availability, he tells me that he can only make one and a half days’ meetings during January and none at all until the first two weeks of February. This bombshell is dropped quite unapologetically. I swallowed for air and within a moment or two my reaction came – but it wasn’t as I expected. It was a reaction of relief rather than anger, a sudden welcome burst of indifference about John and his future and his work. He may come in with us, he may not, but as from this evening I couldn’t care less.

  Friday, January 11th

  Down to Joseph’s for a haircut at 1.00. He has just bought his own electricity generator – for unlike food stores, restaurants, cinemas and TV stations, hair-dressers are not exempt from the emergency electricity restrictions and can only work half-days. All the lights were switched off, but J was taking advantage of an anomaly in the law which allowed him power to dry the hair of people who had been washed in the morning shift.

  Small hints of emergency life around. The Radio and TV Times are now very slim, with only a couple of pages devoted to indirect programme information. Cardboard boxes and, indeed, packaging of all kinds, are increasingly short. In shops now tins, etc, are packed on a slim cardboard base with polythene wrapped around them.

  In the evening Helen and I went to see Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe at the Curzon. A stylish, revolting, very funny and very sad film about four men1 who decide to eat themselves to death. Some of those heavy, over-rich meals at restaurants taken to ultimate, absurd lengths. Outrageous but never offensive, never heartless, never cheap. Sad to think that it can’t even be given a national certificate and has to be restricted to London viewing.

  Monday, January 14th, Southwold

  Mother looked encouragingly well on her 70th birthday. She is living testimony to the fact that people can thrive on a difficult life. Her face may have aged, her stoop increased a degree in the thirty years I’ve known her, but her energy, mental and physical, is barely diminished. It’s great that at 70 she seems as likely to survive the next twenty years as myself or Thomas or Willy. There is no hint of age withering her.

  I took them out to the Crown Hotel in Framlingham for a celebration lunch. The hotel was warmed by a blazing log fire, the food was good and simple and the main hall of the hotel had as extensive and fine a selection of Tudor beams and timbers as I’ve seen. Very gemütlich. Afterwards we walked along the battlements of Framlingham Castle. It was a cloudy, but bright and mild day, and the expedition was quite a success.

  I left Southwold to get back to London at about 5.00. Heard on the car radio that the latest and maybe the last attempts at conciliation between government and TUC had broken down, and there was to be a full rail strike tomorrow.

  Tuesday, January 15th, Southwold

  Python meeting at T Gilliam’s. We decide to do two weeks at Drury Lane, tho’ I have a feeling in my bones that we would have done better to concentrate on one smash-hit week and leave people wanting more, rather than expose ourselves and our material to the spotlight for two weeks.

  There was some fairly bitter debate over timing of the film and rewriting. In the end, after the personal differences had been aired, we got down to some fast and efficient business, dates were agreed and there was a very useful hour’s discussion of the film. An idea I had for the gradual and increasing involvement of the present day in this otherwise historical film was adopted as a new and better way of ending it, so I felt that I had done a bit of useful work over the last hectic month.

  We decide to call our Drury Lane show Monty Python’s First Farewell Tour (repeat) and overprint it with the words ‘NOT CANCELLED’.

  Thursday, January 17th

  At lunc
htime, met Tony Smith, John Gledhill, Terry J, Terry G and André at Drury Lane to have a first look at the theatre in which we will be spending two weeks at the end of February. A gloomy first encounter. In the dark foyer, flanked by dusty, heavy pillars and classical columns, the eye is immediately drawn to a war memorial – to the fallen in two wars.

  The approach to the auditorium, the passageways and halls, are furnished and decorated in the grand classical style. Doric columns, porticoes, domes, balustrades and statues of great actors in niches. On the walls flanking the wide and impressive staircases are huge oil paintings. It somehow feels as likely and as suitable a venue for Python as a power station. The size of the auditorium would a year ago have made me laugh and run out straightaway to return Tony’s contract, but having rehearsed in the Rainbow, and played the Wilfred Pelletier Theatre in Montreal, both of which hold over 3,000 seats, the wide open spaces of the Theatre Royal (2,200 seats) no longer hold quite the same terror. Nevertheless, the sight of three balconies and innumerable lavishly decorated boxes, and a general air of London opulence and tradition, tightened my stomach a little.

  Friday, January 18th

  GC and I, at GC’s suggestion, went to the BBC to talk to Jimmy, who is vacil-lating still over a BBC series. Frightfully welcoming and anxiously effusive. He took us to lunch and straightaway brought up the subject of the series. He wanted to check one or two details – just so he could make a clear suggestion to his superiors, he said. From then on he talked as if the series was in the bag.

  It seemed as tho’ some decision had been made in the Beeb to treat us nicely again, and Graham and I completed a tidy half-day’s work on behalf of Python by collecting a list of seven studio recording dates from Jimmy G, which, being in November, would fit in well with our year’s schedule.

  Suddenly it seems that 1974 could be our busiest and most creative since ‘71.

  JG told us that to date The Brand New Monty Python Bok has sold 161,000 copies, and the new record is selling faster than any of the previous ones. Less hopefully, he showed us a decidedly gloomy letter from BBC sales people in New York; despite all Nancy is doing, they do not seem any closer to a US TV sale of the series.

  Indeed, one station in New York had, apparently, ‘indicated a positive distaste for the program’. But the sales people, who are part of Time-Life Films, have evidently been affected by something like the same masochistic enthusiasm for the programme that Nancy has. At the end of the letter they did say that, for them, selling the programme was becoming rather like a crusade.

  Sunday, January 20th

  Took the kids for a short walk up to Lismore Circus with Sean1 (Thomas’s godfather) and Simon (Willy’s godfather). They rode their bikes for about ten minutes, when a window in Bacton (the tall tower block in the Circus) opened and a vehement old lady shrieked at them to ‘go away and play where you live’. I’ve always felt sorry for old ladies in high-rise blocks of flats, up till now.

  Tuesday, January 22nd

  The national situation looks depressing. No deal with the miners or with the railwaymen. The restrictions on lighting, TV and the Government’s SOS (Switch Off Something) campaign, have now become quite accepted aspects of national life. The three-day week is still in operation.

  Thursday, January 24th

  I was still talking to the man from Coverite Asphalters on the roof at 11.30 when I remembered I should have been at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, for a press party to launch our two-week ‘season’ at the end of February.

  Eventually reached Theatre Royal by cab at 11.55. Monty Python, not over-announced, on the outside. At least we have our name on paper, if not in lights. (When will anyone ever have their name in lights again?) Inside, a box-office without a queue. Up the wide staircase to the Circle bar, which is of the proportions of Adam’s library at Kenwood House, with four huge Corinthian columns dwarfing a motley collection of about thirty press folk.

  Nicholas de Jongh of The Guardian, looking tubby and rather windswept, moved amongst us with an uncertain, rather indulgent smile and a notebook, asking us for witty things to say. At least Eric had something reasonable (which appeared next morning in the paper). He was feeding his son Carey at the time, and replied ‘It was all right for Oscar Wilde, being gay. He didn’t have to feed babies, he had both arms free for being witty.’ N de J: ‘But Oscar Wilde had children.’ EI: ‘Trust The Guardian to know that.’

  Sunday, January 27th, Abbotsley

  Today, a pleasant lazy day. Thomas and I made a bonfire, we sawed some wood and played football and went off on an archaeological trip around Abbotsley. Thomas had uncovered pieces of old china in the garden, and pursued this new interest quite keenly during the day. A joint of beef and Yorkshire pud for lunch. I don’t think I’ve ever not enjoyed a Sunday at Abbotsley – it’s one of those unchanging, unexceptional, but unfailingly satisfying institutions, when the whole pace of life slows to a comfortable, convivial saunter.

  Home at 8.30 to find the plasterer, Bill Berry, at work. Bill Berry is quite a character. He’s a tiling man by trade, and is at present relaying a marble floor at London Airport’s Terminal One. He’s done Buckingham Palace and the National Gallery as well, he told me.

  He’s always coming out with strange non sequiturs. You’ll be talking to him about terrazza tiles and he’ll suddenly say ‘Croup,’ with an air of great finality. You look around bewildered. ‘Croup,’ he repeats, even more positively, and points at Thomas, ‘That’s what he’s got.’

  Friday February 1st

  Drive into town for a meeting with New Musical Express, who want us to review the week’s new singles for them. Their offices in Long Acre are securely locked, but after much bell-ringing, tall, rangy features editor T Tyler leads me through deserted corridors up to an eyrie high in the building, where various members of NME staff sit in candlelit gloom.

  They are all fairly cock-a-hoop over press reaction to their Marianne Faithfull interview, published yesterday, in which Marianne said quite quotable little things about how she’d slept with three of the Stones to find out which one she liked best.

  In the evening Helen and I and Mary and Edward went to see Truffaut’s Day for Night – a film about filming, which left me with the kind of happy escapist pleasure that old Hollywood comedies used to. Afterwards we ate at Rugantino’s, where I had brains for the first time. They tasted like roe, soft and spongy. It’s funny, one can happily eat a cow’s liver or a sheep’s kidney, but eating brains seems to encroach on dangerous, mystical and spiritual areas. Like eating roast mind.

  Friday, February 8th

  An election has been announced for February 28th – depressing news, for the Tories will probably win and they don’t deserve to. Heath has been stubborn to the extreme with the miners, who are now to start on a full strike. He was elected on a pledge to create ‘one nation’ – and he’s now whipping up Tory middle-class anti-worker feeling as hard as he can. One of the points of the Tory manifesto is that the government should not pay security benefit’s to strikers’ families. It is as near as Heath has yet gone to outlawing strikes, and is indicative of an across-the-board tightening of controls on personal freedom, which is becoming very sinister. We may not have a 1984 like George Orwell’s, but if the Tories have their way we will be a very carefully controlled society indeed. All very sad, especially as Labour and the left are muddle-headed and ideologically dogmatic.

  For me it’s just head down and keep working. The three-day week does not so far seem to have damaged the country too much. The only real shortage is toilet rolls! But the foreign press make out we are almost in the state we were in in 1940, on the verge of collapse. Heath’s propaganda seems to be every bit as effective as Hitler’s was.

  Monday, February 11th

  Into London with Terry J to a meeting with Geoffrey Strachan at Methuen. He had read and liked our material for the Fegg book,1 would like to commission it – and started talking about size of the book, paper, art director, etc. Drank a K
ronenbourg at the Printer’s Devil to celebrate the birth of Bert Fegg.

  Friday, February 15th

  Today Geoffrey rang to say that a board meeting of Methuen had officially approved our book project and he was going to go ahead and commission it. Meanwhile we have had meetings with a cartoonist called Martin Honeysett, who has in the last year drawn some very funny, Python-like cartoons for Punch and Private Eye. Terry was especially keen for Honeysett to be involved, as he had met him at a Punch party and taken a great liking to him. However, it turned out that Martin Honeysett had never met Terry in his life and was pleased, but a little bewildered, to get such an enthusiastic phone call from him. Terry had, in fact, met quite a different cartoonist.

  Sunday, March 3rd

  We have now completed seven shows at Drury Lane – ending last week with a grand flourish of two shows on Friday and two shows on Saturday. I am chewing pastilles and gargling with honey and lemon three times a day as a result.

  The gilded, glittering Drury Lane must have been amazed by the scruffiness of the audience on the first night. Kean and other great British actors of the past would have turned in their graves if they could have seen the front row full of Gumby-knotted handkerchiefs on the opening night on Tuesday.

  The reviews have been surprisingly extensive – it takes a second-hand collection of old TV material for critics to start taking Python really seriously. Harold Hobson was greatly impressed and called us true Popular Theatre – and Milton Shulman, perhaps our first critical friend on the TV series, was equally enthusiastic. Despite the fact that it’s an old show, already toured in the provinces and Canada, London critics have devoted enormous space to analysing it, even in the grudging Observer review (which described Terry and myself as ‘virtually indistinguishable’ and tending’to screech a lot’).