Wednesday, January 8th
After the excesses of rain and wind in October and November, the weather lately has settled down into a meek routine of still, lifeless, grey days. The IRA New Year truce lasts until January 16th and the total absence of any bomb attacks since the day the truce started shows how well-controlled the IRA is. The feeling in the press is that we have a bad year to come – increasing unemployment, steeply rising prices, etc, etc, but it’s as if the worst is over. The nation is now entering a year bad enough to bring out all the Dunkirk spirit, whereas last year it was a year of such sudden and bewildering change that no-one knew quite how to react.
Everywhere the talk is of cuts, savings and ‘trimming back’. Notable exceptions, of course, being the now blue-eyed coal industry and the railways – five years ago the twin symbols of decline in a world of technological evolution.
Thursday, January 9th
Another sign of the times. The Beatles’ company, Beatles Ltd, officially and finally ceased to exist today. The company, which held the Beatles group as such together in various legal obligations, has become increasingly obstructive to their various separate careers. The group haven’t played together since 1969. We began when they finished.
Friday, January 10th
By one of those strange coincidences, today was the day that Python and the Beatles came together. In the last two months we’ve heard that George H has been using ‘Lumberjack Song’ from the first BBC LP as a curtain raiser to his US stage tour. So it seemed almost predictable that the two groups would be sooner or later involved in some joint venture.
Terry J, Graham and myself on behalf of Python and Neil Aspinall and Derek Taylor1 on behalf of the Beatles, found ourselves at lunchtime today in a hastily converted office at the Apple Corp’s temporary headquarters in smart St James’s, to watch the Magical Mystery Tour – the Beatles’ TV film made in 1967. At that time I remember the film being slated by the critics and it vanished, swamped by an angry public who doubtless felt the Beatles had let them down by not subscribing to the image of success and glamour which the public had created around them. When it was suggested at a meeting late last year that we should try and put out the Magical Mystery Tour as a supporting film to the Holy Grail, there was unanimous agreement among the Python group. After several months of checking and cross-checking we finally heard last week that the four Beatles had been consulted and were happy to let the film go out. So today we saw it for the first time since 1967.
Unfortunately it was not an unjustly underrated work. There are some poor and rather messy sequences, it’s very obvious when the group is miming to playback and there’s a cutesie Top of the Pops-type look at Paul during ‘Fool on the Hill’, which is very tacky and dated. However, it is extraordinary still, it is far too impressionistic and odd to be just outdated and many sequences are very successful. It’s also quite long – nearly an hour, but all in all we were pleased. It will have great curiosity value and should be complementary to the Python film, because much of it looks like familiar Python territory.
Ringo was suddenly there, talking with Graham and Terry. He was dressed like a British Rail porter, with a black serge waistcoat and black trousers. I noticed his hair was streaked silvery at the sides. He looked rather ashen-faced – the look of a man who needs a holiday.
I was given George Harrison’s number by Aspinall, who said he thought George would appreciate a call – he’s apparently the all-time Python fan, and it was at his mansion near Henley that they had been last night looking at the last Python TV series.
Later in the evening, fortified (why did I feel I needed fortifying?) with a couple of brandies, I phoned George Hargreaves (as Derek Taylor and Aspinall referred to him). An American girl answered – or rather a girl with an American accent. She sounded bright, but when I said I was from Monty P she positively bubbled over and went off to get GH. George and I chatted for about 20 minutes or so. He adores the shows so much – ‘The only sane thing on television’ – he wants to be involved in some kind of way with us in the States. He said he had so many ideas to talk about, but I was a little wary – especially when he told me he envisaged a Harrison-Python road show, with us doing really extraordinary things throughout the show, such as swinging out over the audience on wires, etc. Hold it George, I thought, this is hardly the way to get John Cleese back into showbusiness! But he’s clearly an idealist who has warm feelings towards us and it’s very flattering to hear one of one’s four great heroes of the ‘60s say he’d ‘just like to meet and drink a glass of beer with you, and tell you how much I love you.’
Monday, January 13th
Monday, 13th January was only one and a half hours old when Helen woke me lightly and said she thought we ought to go in. There was no fuss or panic, but the contractions were now at five minute intervals.
At 2.00 we drove through Camden Town and the deserted Hampstead Road in the direction of UCH, over which the GPO Tower flashed its red light, like a twentieth-century Bethlehem.
At about 2.15 I left Helen with the midwife and was shown into the waiting room. A cluster of fathers there – one in a white hospital gown smoking a cigar, who had clearly just become a father, and one other, a nervous-looking man, biting his nails and staring at the floor. The orderly switched the radio on, to loud and raucous strains of Oliver or Mary Poppins. ‘Better to have this than no noise at all,’ he said.
Helen began to have major contractions at about 3.00. She counted six of them and on the sixth Sister Whitbread announced that she could see some hair! Excitement – hair! We’ve never had a baby with hair before. Then a few more pushes. Helen managing really well. Keeping in control. I was telling Helen it had hair – dark hair – when a look of pure, spontaneous joy filled her whole face – ‘It’s a girl!’ That was the best moment of all. A great moment -not seeing it was a girl, but seeing Helen’s face at the exact second when she saw Rachel for the first time.
Now she was out – the usual greyish-purple colour which so frightened me when Tom was born. Sister Whitbread was cleaning out her nose. She was big, they all said. Helen could not believe it. Her enjoyment was total. It was twelve minutes past three.
Monday, January 27th
Terry Gilliam rang about 9.30 and set off a whole chain of calls which resulted in a total replanning of the year ahead.
TG had seen Ian MacNaughton at Sölden – he had driven over from Munich with Eke to ski with them for a day or two. On the slopes Ian told TG that he was highly dissatisfied with the way the BBC and Fraser and Dunlop (Ian MacN’s agent as well as ours) were treating him. He has a job in Israel, which both the BBC and Jill knew about, which would prevent him from working on the Python TV show until May (i.e. until after our filming). So it appears that, if we want Ian to direct our shows, and I think everybody does, we cannot start filming until May. This would mean studio dates running into August, which I know will be unacceptable so, as TG said, the alternative is to put it all off.
I rang off and digested this new situation – and the more I thought about it, the more attractive postponement of the recordings became. TJ was keen and, when I rang Eric, he was not only keen, but as positive about Python as I’ve heard him in a long while.
Tuesday, February 4th
Good news from New York – Python is top of the PBS Channel 13 ratings there, beating even Upstairs Downstairs, which has just won an Emmy and all. Sales to other stations increase – far away places with strange-sounding names – to Pensacola, Florida, to Utica, Illinois, Syracuse, NY, Athens, Georgia and so on. It sounds as though there’s been a mistake and we’ve sold it to Greece.
Thursday, February 6th
We have written a synopsis of the Holy Grail for the EMI publicity people. Eric wrote it some time ago and it is extremely funny and totally unrelated to anything that happens in the film. ‘Might this not be a bad thing?’ says Mark to me over the phone today. EMI are worried that Up North there are critics who often review the film entirely from th
e synopsis, without ever seeing it; surely therefore we should provide a straight synopsis as well. My mind boggles at asking Python to help incompetent idiots who haven’t time to see the film they’re talking about.
Monday, February 10th
Mark rang, as he usually does when I’m having an enjoyable evening, this time on a matter of great profundity – the invitations for the Magazine Critics’ showing of the Holy Grail.
I am so sick of being Python odd-job man, and yet the alternative is to not know what’s going on in your name – which is infinitely more dangerous. I think of this when Mark rings and it just keeps me from physical violence.
Saturday, February 15th, Southwold
A drizzling, grey morning. We are going to Southwold for the weekend. Manage to pack three kids, carrycot, ourselves and Tom’s new bicycle in the Citroen and we arrive, after a slow run, at about 2.45. A late lunch. But at least the weather has improved – it’s sunnier and colder than in London. A fresh Suffolk wind off the sea clears the nostrils and freezes the fingers. We are staying at the Swan Hotel.
Funny that, fifteen years ago, when Helen and I first met in Southwold, the Swan Hotel represented the unattainable – the comfort and sophistication which we were never likely to know. Heavy tweed suits, ladies in suede jackets moving between heavy leather armchairs and through finely carved doorways – it was a world miles away from our own.
And now we are here, part of it all, in rooms which are floodlit from outside, with wrought-iron balconies and a view out onto a square that, in scale, feels like Toy Town – a neat, little miniature, into which at any time you expect a Victorian coach and four to appear, with ladies in big bonnets and men with side whiskers.
Wednesday, February 19th
Am now reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals, so watch out for hypersensitive observations on the weather. If she were alive now she could totally transform the image of the Meteorological Office. Weather forecasts would become works of art.
Me, myself, personally having always rather keenly felt the changes in atmosphere and attitude which different kinds of weather create, took it as a good omen that today was a sunny, brilliantly sunny, neo-spring morning, for the first gathering of all the Pythons for six months or so.
At any rate, Eric and John were at the Henshaws’ when I arrived – both tanned. Eric was back from a week in Tenerife with Barry Cryer, and John from Africa. Anne Henshaw was a good deep skiing brown. I felt like the skinny schoolboy whose mother never lets him go out. Fortunately Mark looked more sallow than usual and Graham when he arrived looked truly dreadful. Pale as if he had just come out from under a stone and hobbling with a broken bone in his foot. He’d done it on a chair. Graham seems to be going through his body breaking every bone at least once.
But there is a good feeling to the group and, when we start to talk about publicity ideas the chemistry works and ideas bubble out in a stream.
When we suggest a ‘Dummy Premiere in the presence of Her Royal Highness the Dummy Princess Margaret’ – with a car laid on to transport this now famous Python dummy lady to the theatre,1 and us all lined up shaking hands, Mark says that EMI just wouldn’t wear it. Terry J said’Mark, if you don’t feel that you can fight EMI for the things we want, then someone else ought to be doing the job.’
Well, at the end of the meeting, Mark is still doing the job.
This evening dinner at the Henshaws’. A famous bearded playwright is there. Yes, David Mercer himself.2 Odd to sit opposite a man you have unflatteringly impersonated on TV. Also an American writer called Al Levinson. A sort of Earth Father figure in his fifties, solid, smiling, sensitive, dependable. He shut himself in the kitchen at one point, trying to soothe Rachel’s cries on his broad shoulder.
‘You’re much better looking than you are on television,’ he started, before I’d hardly been introduced to him. He was a great fan of the show, and I still get a kind of kick from hearing someone talk about friends in New Jersey who will never miss a Python episode.
Famous Playwright Mercer describes himself as ‘a sort of rich man’s Alan Bennett’. He delivers this in tones which demand a reaction so we all laugh. I even say ‘very good’ and retreat as though outclassed by Oscar Wilde on his best form. And then I realise that I laughed because I didn’t know what he was talking about and, on reflection, I don’t think anyone knew what he was talking about.
Oh, I nearly forgot the best bit of news today – a letter from Stephen Frears at the BBC, asking if I would be at all interested in taking a part in a new TV version of Three Men in a Boat which he is filming in the summer. He is a superb young director,1 much involved with Alan Bennett, and I hear that Tom Stoppard is writing the adaptation. Given the new Python schedule, I could do it without unduly buggering anyone else up. Am not raising any hopes – but it is the most exciting work prospect since we first talked about Monty Python.
Thursday, February 20th
Another Python meeting. This time to discuss affairs of Python generally and to plan our future in general.
When I arrived, Eric was the only one there, stretched comfortably in a corner of the sofa, wearing what looked very much like a bower boys outfit, with TUF boots and jeans with rolled-up bottoms.
Good news at the beginning of the meeting – Nancy rang through to say that a US record deal was signed today with Arista Records – we would get an immediate $10,000 advance on Matching Tie and Live at Drury Lane. So good work there from Nancy, who has also secured her pet consideration on a record contract – $50,000 set aside just for publicity.
It was on the subject of paying off Gledhill2 that the meeting suddenly and abruptly took off. As I remember it, Graham was on the phone to Jimmy Gilbert to check the autumn TV recording dates, John Cleese was being unusually co-operative and had even indicated that he might consider coming on this publicity tour to the US in March, when Eric suddenly became quite animated, attacking the Terrys and anyone around for being mean with Gledhill. From here Eric went on bitterly to criticise Python for becoming nothing more than a series of meetings, calling us ‘capitalists’ and ending up by saying ‘Why can’t we get back to what we enjoyed doing? Why do we have to go through all this?’ It was rich dramatic stuff.
Terry J was on his feet – ‘Well, if that’s how Eric feels, we might as well give up,’ and he nearly left there and then. GC and JC looked at each other in amazement. Only the entirely admirable Anne H managed to cool everything down by giving out cheques for £800 each from Charisma – an advance for the LP made last May!
A selection of letters are read out to the assembled gathering. From CBC Canada – ‘We would like the Python group to contribute up to ten minutes of material for a special programme on European Unity. The group can decide -’ the reading was interrupted here by farting noises and thumbs-down signs. On to the next.
‘Dear Sirs, I am writing on behalf of the Television Department of Aberdeen University …’ An even louder barrage of farting.
‘Dear Monty Python, we are a production company interested in making TV films with Python, George Harrison and Elton John …’ Despite the fact that £36,000 is mentioned in the letter as a possible fee for this never-to-be-repeated offer, it is jeered raucously and I tear the letter up and scatter it over the Henshaws’ sitting room. In this symbolic gesture, entirely characteristic of the general irresponsibility of the assembled Pythons, the meeting staggers to an end and we all make our several ways.
Saturday, February 22nd
I suppose this could be said to be the day on which Python finally died. Obviously only time will tell whether this is a hopelessly over-dramatic reaction – but at the time of writing it does feel as though the group has breathed its last after nearly six years of increasingly doddery life.
The conditions of its demise were quite unspectacular. We ate lunch in my sunny work-room and afterwards I took Thomas, Holly and Willy to Little Venice, where, on a housing estate bordering the M4 elevated section, I had seen a big galleon-sha
ped climbing frame, which I thought they would like. They clambered on it and Tom rode his bicycle round the paths with arrogant confidence. Back in time for Dr Who.
I noticed Eric’s car outside the house and felt quite pleased. It proved that his mood on Thursday was just a mood, and things must be alright if he could come round to tea.
He’d signed me a copy of his novel Hello Sailor and, though he wasn’t ebullient, we had a cuppa together and chatted vaguely, and I really had no idea that he had any bad news, or even news, for me. (Helen said she had known something was up as soon as he appeared on the doorstep.) Carey was bashing around. He seems to me a very lively, jolly little fellow with a lust for biscuits. Eric asked when we were going to the States and then said he wanted to talk. We went upstairs to my work-room, trying not to make the occasion seem too momentous – both deliberately playing down our behaviour!
Upstairs, in the now cold room – we didn’t bother to put the fire on – Eric told me, again, but finally this time, that he couldn’t go on with Python. He’d thought about it a lot over the last few weeks, the decision hadn’t come lightly – but he felt that he had to get out or he would, as he put it, ‘go mad.’ It wasn’t just Python, there had been other troubles over the last few weeks – he’d tell me about them ‘over a pastis in the summer,’ he smiled. He hadn’t anything he was going to do – he just wanted to enjoy the experience of’waking up in the morning, knowing I don’t have to do anything’.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 29