Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  We pass the afternoon with a game of football. Despite the chainmail, some quite good moves. Bill Hagerty of the Daily Mirror stays around with a photographer – he is apparently doing a big centre page spread on us. He has a better technique than most journalists. The indirect approach. He just stays around, chats and gets to know us – and only occasionally jots in his notebook. I told him the story of Graham shouting ‘Betty Marsden’ – which will probably end up on ten million kitchen tables!

  Wednesday, May 8th

  The first of two and a half days on the Castle Anthrax scene.

  Spent the morning being drenched by the Perth and Kinross Fire Brigade. Next time I shall think twice about writing a scene in a raging storm. I start behind camera, and before ‘Action!’ I am solemnly wetted down by Tommy Raeburn of Props, with a little greenhouse watering can. I then rush up through rain provided by a fireman from behind a bush, to a castle made of cardboard.

  Thursday, May 9th

  Amazing how much eating one does on filming. If you get up at 7.15 it is nice to have a cup of coffee at least before going over to the Doune Rural Hall (headquarters of the WI) and, with a full breakfast menu available, I am quite often tempted to a kipper or even a piece of toast. Then, at 10.30 on set, there is more coffee and soft, delicious bap rolls with sausages and scrambled egg. Ron Hellard supplies a gargantuan lunch with much pastry and potato, which is also hard to resist. At around 4.00 tea/coffee and cakes (v. good home-made currant buns) and, after a drink back at the hall at the end of the day, and a look at rushes (shown, extraordinarily enough, in the Silver Chalice Bar!), there is a four-course set meal at the hotel. Consumption is about double what one eats at home.

  This was the second day on Castle Anthrax. Doune Castle’s severe granite halls are now filled with about twenty girls in diaphanous white gowns, shivering against the cold. John C, Eric and I are sitting with Neil on an old bench in the Great Hall, singing old Adam Faith/Cliff Richard hits, in a desperate attempt to combat boredom. The bathing scene takes two hours to set up – the girls giggle a lot, and generally it’s about as sexy as a British Legion parade.

  We shoot on late – until 7.30 or so – utterly shattered – but Carol C stood up to it remarkably well and was v. funny. Like Neil, she is an honorary Python, and has very little trouble in clicking into our way of doing things.

  Friday, May 10th

  9.30: In Anthrax Castle again, with Tommy poised with watering can.

  ‘Michael, can you fall about six inches to your left?’ after I have crashed onto the stone floor for three rehearsals already.

  11.00: Still waiting for the shot. Terry J, who tends to become very Ian MacN-like sometimes – ‘Come on, now quick, we must get this shot in before 11.25, we really must!’ Terry G is working away more quietly with the camera crew, checking the shot, putting a candle in foreground here and there. Gerry Harrison, the first assistant director, for all his sometimes alienating head prefect manner, is always very accessible and can get a cup of coffee for shivering actors.

  Out in the main courtyard of the castle, a BBC crew from Film Night are interviewing Graham C. Quite glad to avoid that sort of thing, really

  ‘Alright, the generator’s been refilled with petrol!’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Come on, we must get this shot in by 12.25!’

  We finish Anthrax with a last v. good take, especially from Carol, and that sequence is now finished, and we go out to the front of the castle.

  The BBC doggedly film the filming. Cardboard battlements have to be added on to the castle before John does his taunting. ‘John! Don’t lean too heavily on the battlements, you can see them bending.’

  At about 4.30 there are a few distant claps of thunder, the sky turns a fine deep grey – which Terry Bedford is very pleased about – and we get one shot in with this background before an enormous cloudburst empties the field in front of the castle.

  The cry of’It’s a wrap!’ goes up, and Tommy Props leaps out into the still pouring rain with a look of great exultation and starts to clear up. He particularly has had a fiercely busy week, and no-one wants to work late tonight.

  Back to the Women’s Institute to change, then to the hotel for a drink and rushes. The table I’m sitting on in the Silver Chalice Bar split’s right across, and the manager, Mr Ross, is left rather pathetically holding this broken half table when some non-Python guests arrive to check in.

  Saturday, May 11th

  A rather grey day, with intermittent rain. At the gates of Doune Castle Philip Jenkinson is standing with the Film Night crew.

  I haven’t been chatting with him for long before we have been imperceptibly shuffled into an interviewing position beside a car, and I find myself being filmed at about 11.00 in the morning, the dullness of my replies matching the dullness of the day! After that they move over to a well in the courtyard and interview Graham, who at least managed to get some silly lines in – he deliberately mishears Phil Jenkinson’s rather facetious remark about an ‘insanity’ clause being built into the contract —’There is an insanitary clause, yes.’ Funnily enough, Phil Jenkinson is besotted by Eric Idle’s take-offs of him and constantly refers to them.

  John is doing the Taunter on some artificial battlements at the back of the castle. He’s getting very irritated by TG’s direction of his acting. TG tends to communicate by instinct, gesture and feeling, whereas John prefers precise verbal instructions. So TJ has to take over and soothe John down.

  Then the shot where live ducks and chickens, as well as dead rabbits, badgers, etc, are flying over the battlements. Small boys are recruited to help catch the chickens as they’re flung over. ‘Those spotted roosters are fast,’ warns Tommy.

  A rather jolly day, with much corpsing from John, Eric and myself when Brian McNulty, third assistant director, in rich Glaswegian, reads in John’s Taunter’s lines for us to react to. How can you react without laughing to a broad Glaswegian saying ‘Of course I’m French, why do you think I’m using this outrageous accent?’

  Monday, May 13th

  The day of the Mud-Eater. Clad in rags, crawling through filthy mud repeatedly and doggedly, in a scene which makes the flagellation scene from Seventh Seal look like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Extras all supposed to have plague – boils and pustules everywhere. People really do look wretched and, after two hours wallowing in the mud, because the plague village is such a convincing set, reality becomes fantasy and fantasy becomes reality. The camera crew, the scrubbed and well-dressed line of faces looking at us and occasionally turning a big black machine towards us, seems quite unreal, a horrible dream.

  At the end of the day I have to eat mud. John Horton prepares a mixture of currants, chocolate instant whip, pieces of fruit cake and cocoa, and pours it out onto a patch of soil from which it is indistinguishable.

  That night at dinner the menu began with ‘Various effluents’ – and I asked Mr Ross rather gruffly what this meant, then saw the rest of the menu – ‘Mud cocktail’, ‘Fillet of sole à la slime’, etc, etc. A complete mud menu.

  Later in the meal I was presented with a bowl of mud which I dutifully tasted. It turned out to be solid cooking fat coated with chocolate. So the Mud-Eater seems to have passed into the folklore of the film.

  Thursday, May 16th

  The last three days have been like the start of shooting in Ballachulish. Phoney filming. Sitting waiting to be called. Tranquil mornings at the Woodside. There has been work to do, but none of it very taxing. Twice Graham and I have worked our lines through for the opening scene, and twice it has been postponed. From the end of this week onwards I am going to be in practically every scene, and the only advantage of these lazy days has been a chance to enjoy the sunshine and to keep the journal up to date.

  News coverage has been extensive – the Mirror had a front page picture of John, and a big double-page centre-spread with a large picture of us all in knights’ gear, posed as a football team. A very good ‘entertainment’ p
iece by Bill Hagerty. The Express had a large, much less interesting, half-page, which made the early editions until they found the Mirror had scooped them and was later withdrawn. Newsweek had a whole-page feature on Python (tho’ mainly John —’an ex-Newsweek staffer’). The Times Diary had a short unpleasant piece of gossip – about John hating filming.

  Weston Taylor of the News of the World, a rather dog-eared, but quite amiable sort of chap, has been hanging around. Eric was very rude to him, mistaking, I think, one individual for a newspaper’s policy. But then Eric was also very rude to Andrew Tyler of NME who arrived in Killin on May 4th, and tried to interview Eric on the mountainside, with very little success. Perhaps ‘very rude’ isn’t quite fair, but Eric gave him a rather sharp little homily. ‘Most of my friends who I know and like have done interviews, and I don’t recognise them in the interviews,’ he said.

  Anyway it turns out that Tyler’s one-week sojourn with us turned out to be a largely accurate, amusing, exhaustive and informative account of Python filming. (Copies of the ‘Python’ issue of NME with Mr Gumby plastered on the front and the flimsy record of extracts from Live at Drury Lane and the big interview arrived on the set when I was doing the Prince’s Room scene. Greeted with much interest by the make-up girls – whom he described as ‘sour-faced’. Much mirth from everyone.)

  Saturday, May 18th

  End of third week’s filming. I’ve had the second longest single speech in the film to do today. A large crowd scene with lots of mutilated extras. Must have done the speech at least fifteen times.

  There’s a party tonight organised by the camera crew – so I’ve had a bath – gratefully washing away two days in wig, beard, moustache and heavy make-up, and I’m thinking how much longer I can delay having a drink!

  Downstairs – Met one of the crew waiting to go to the party. He looks serious. ‘Mike,’ he says. ‘We work bloody hard out there, and I think we deserve it.’

  I’m a little puzzled. ‘Deserve … what, Ron?’

  ‘Women.’

  He looks me in the eye like a man who thinks I can give him medical treatment. ‘Women … Mike … that’s what we need.’

  Monday, May 20th

  Spent a day in the hills above Callander doing a great deal of silly riding.

  Strange surreal moment: a wooden cut-out of Camelot, which stood on the top of the hill, and looked utterly three-dimensional and realistic, suddenly blew away.

  12.00 midnight: whilst soaking in my bath I hear a distant shout. ‘I’m going to bed, but I don’t necessarily have to go to bed alo-o-one.’ It’s Dr Chapman in the passage. He repeats the line three times, like someone selling scrap iron and it recedes along the corridor.

  Friday, May 24th

  In the hotel room catching up on the diary whilst they film the Historian. A very heavy week for me – with two long speaking parts on Wednesday and Thursday. I am not sure, but I don’t feel quite on top of the performances. Something tightens up inside me during a take – the relaxation and control of a rehearsal is lost. Mind you, filming is an appalling process for reducing an actor to the role of machine.

  In the Knights of Ni, for instance, I was to do close-ups first. Directly in front of me are a group of anoraked people squatting down, far more preoccupied with their equipment than with me. Someone reads the lines off in a flat voice, which gives you little encouragement. An eyeline keeps you looking at no-one at all. Two huge white polystyrene reflectors enclose me on either side – it feels like acting in a sandwich. Then you are about to start and the sound isn’t right – and then the sun comes out and that isn’t right, as the camera focus has to be adjusted – and during this so much of one’s spontaneity and relaxation just drain away.

  Yesterday a long day as the Father – for the second day running a part involving heavy make-up, beard, moustache, etc. A great sense of relief when it was finished. Have not done such sustained and exhausting acting as I have this week since the last Python series. Creating new characters suddenly seems an enormous effort.

  A little disappointment at the rushes tonight – saw my first appearance as the Father in the wedding scene, and didn’t feel I was quite funny enough – but again, all the early close-ups of my speech to the crowd were done cold, without the crowd there, to some arbitrary mark, and it was Terry J’s very good idea to make me do another take in close-up right at the end of the day. That, I think, is quite funny.

  Monday, May 27th

  Helen and the children come up from London. Helen, who is probably pregnant again, is feeling worse in the evening than the morning. The boys stayed up to watch the rushes and see their dad in a lot of strange guises.

  Rather pleased to share with Helen and the kids the silly things I’ve been doing over the last four weeks. It was the Knights of Ni, which people seemed to like quite well.

  Tuesday, May 28th

  A rather fraught morning. Today we are to shoot Robin and the Singers’ encounter with the Three-Headed Knight. But Graham, who is one of the three heads – the other two being myself and Terry – is not back from London. It’s a complicated piece of learning, which needs all of us to rehearse it properly, and in the last week or so Graham has lost all his early confidence over lines and can hardly remember even one-line speeches.

  Graham, Terry and I huddle into the cab of the camera van to learn the words. (One thing we MUST have on future filming is a caravan or, even better, a Dormobile, which is purely for the actors to use. When there is nowhere to sit, nowhere to relax while they spend one and a half hours setting up the shot, one can get very ratty.)

  Anyway, we huddle in the camera van, a magazine of film sticking into my back, a battered little jackdaw beside me in its box (John Welland, the camera operator, found it and is trying to nurse it back to health on Ron Hellard’s scrambled egg). I wasn’t enjoying myself at all. Graham couldn’t get it right.

  Finally we are strapped into our Three-Headed Knight costume at about 5.00. All my apprehensions about it were unfulfilled. Graham, with just a little prompting, was fluent and funny, and Terry J was the one who seemed to be physically suffering in the uncomfortable costume. We were released about 6.30!

  Wednesday, May 29th

  John, dressed as a magician, spent much of the morning on the narrow top of an extremely impressive pinnacle of slate, across the quarry from us.

  Twice the cameras turned. Twice John, towering above the green and pleasant vistas of the Trossachs, gave the signal to summon forth mighty explosions. Twice the explosions failed, and John was left on this striking, but lonely, pinnacle. He kept in good form, reciting his old cabaret monologues across the quarry, but it was a hard start to the day for him – and he was cold and subdued by the time he came back.

  Once again it was a day where visual effects took the major amount of time, leaving John’s quite long passages of dialogue to the later part of the afternoon. John’s performance was good, but he had passed the point when it might have become inspired. But then you never know on film.

  Thursday, May 30th

  God appeared to us in the morning – with the help of John Horton’s fireworks. Tom came down to the location and was quite impressed to see my now rather shabby Galahad gear – especially the sword. He and Willy played around with the other kids on the mound leading up to the castle.

  Finally called to do the opening sequence of the film at the end of the day. Usual difficulty with ‘swirling mist’, as it was a totally unmisty day. But beautiful views all around from the castle battlements – rolling green hills stretching into the distance, tranquillity, peace. I will remember standing up on those cardboard reinforced battlements with John, looking round on a view that can’t have changed much since Doune Castle was built.

  Tomorrow is the last day of filming. Already an end of term atmosphere. Eric left at lunchtime with Lyn and Carey [their son] – to spend a night at Edinburgh on the way home. John will not be seen again after we’ve finished on the battlements. The WI hall is no longe
r looking like an over-stocked jumble sale – the majority of the costumes are packed away in their skips, ready to be taken back to London.

  Friday, May 31st

  The weather seems to have turned at last. Today is cloudy and it’s been raining quite hard in the night.

  The long and wordy Constitutional Peasants scene. Feel heavy, dull and uninspired – wanting above all else for it to be the end of the day. Arrive at a bleak location in the hills above Callander. Mud is being prepared.

  Terry Bedford is angry because Mark has been trying to economise by buying old film-stock. Some of the film which has arrived today is six years old. Terry will not use it – in fact he threw a can into a nearby moorland stream – so we have 1,000 feet on which to do this entire scene. Very little chance of re-takes. Somehow it takes a supreme effort to get the words and the character together. We do the scene in one long master shot and, thank God, we get through it first time without a hitch. Ideally would have liked another take – just to see if any part of the performance would be better, but there is not enough time or enough film. The day gets greyer as it progresses, blending perfectly with our peasants’ costumes and mirroring the generally downtrodden air.

  Willy and Helen arrive midway through the afternoon. Willy is a little apprehensive of me at first, what with sores on the face, a shock of red hair, blackened teeth and rags, but he stays long enough for doughnuts and milk at tea.

  I’m almost too tired to enjoy fully the elation at the end of the day, when the filming, or my part of it anyway, is finally completed. Want to leap up and down, but can’t. So I just stand there looking out over the Scottish hills, all grey and dusky and hazy as evening falls, and feel wonderfully free.