Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Wednesday, June 11th

  The first-time writer, director and all three Men in the Boat get together. The place, the airless, featureless cell of room BO 55 at the TV Centre. Present today, narrow Tom Stoppard, eyes sparkling. ‘How are you today, Michael?’ Rather quiet, frazzled, detached producer – Rosemary Hill. She looks anxious. Two large PAs – one of whom I later discover is Jack Hawkins’2 son. The dog, Montmorency, who is at least affectionate. Stephen M and last, but not least, Tim Curry – smaller than I expected, dark/olive-skinned, curly-haired, with prominent eyes.

  The read-through goes well. At the end Frears says the casting was exactly right, and one gets the feeling that all three of us fit Jerome’s characters near enough to require no great feats of acting. Stoppard is pleased too. Rosemary Hill does not express an opinion, but is more concerned with the fact that it’s going to be too long. Stoppard and Frears are clearly opposed to making major cuts at this point – so the discussion drags on in a rather desultory way. I don’t think anything very worthy will ever be decided in BO 55.

  Up to the bar, where I met Tim B-T and Graeme Garden (surrounded by beautiful women). They are on Top of the Pops, plugging their latest epic ‘Black Pudding Bertha’ tonight and Graeme has just had a son. They are quite envious about the Three Men in a Boat job.

  Thursday, June 12th, Southwold

  The weather continues to be dazzling, perfect, clear hot sunshine. Up to Southwold on the 9.30 train to take my parents to see the Holy Grail film which starts today at Norwich. Some twenty or thirty people at the 1.40 showing. I enjoyed watching the film today more than I’ve ever done. It may partly have been due to the fact that I was carrying one and a half pints of Adnams, but I think it was because I was under no strain, rush or pressure, as at previous showings – premieres, etc. I was also able to crystallise and analyse my disappointments in the film – there is a patch where we really do lose touch with the audience, and that’s at the end of the otherwise excellent ‘Wedding’ scene, through the old lady in the ‘Ni’ village, and the second ‘Knights’ which terminate in easily the most embarrassing piece of the film, when the king meets Sir Robin in the forest. But I think the parents enjoyed it, and Daddy laughed quite spontaneously a few times.

  A quick trip to the cathedral, then home to Croft Cottage, where we sat in the sunshine and had a cup of tea. Daddy’s chair kept tipping over and once, when he’d taken a bite of rock cake, his teeth came out firmly clamped to the rock cake.

  Read Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major as I rattled home on the 6.30 train from Darsham.

  Friday, June 13th

  In the afternoon I had a tetanus jab at the BBC because of the suspicious nature of the Berkshire Thames – it rather deromanticised the whole thing – then Tim, Stephen M, Stephen F and I roared up the M4 in Stephen F’s very shabby Cortina, through Reading and up to Goring, where we found the thirty-foot skiff, which we will get to know rather well over the next three or four weeks. We bought some tea, and went for a trial row up the river. We fell uncannily easily into the roles. I rowed, because I like rowing and generally getting things done (being Harris), Tim, in dark reflecting glasses, languidly took the rudder, while Stephen M just generally helped.

  Monday, June 16th

  The first day’s filming on Three Men in a Boat, Up at 7.00.

  A brilliantly sunny morning as I drove to the BBC. It didn’t stay like that and, by the time of our third or fourth shot at a boathouse at Walton, we were indoors, sheltering from the rain. But there were sufficient breaks in the showers for us to maintain a good rate of filming, despite having to get used to the boat, full of gear and Montmorency the dog. It’s bad enough having to do retakes anyway, but to row yourself back for the retakes often adds insult to injury.

  Stephen F comes to life and directs briskly, but not at all autocratically. We tend to cover sequences from more than one angle, and Brian Tufano, the most prestigious BBC cameraman, is painstaking over light and composition of shots.

  Tom Stoppard is in attendance – very friendly – a rather languid figure in his expensive woollen jacket, loose-fitting camel-coloured slacks and Gucci bag full of scripts. He gives Tim and me a lift to one of the locations in his metallic green BMW automatic. I can’t help noticing high-class jetsam in the car – an invitation from ‘Mr and Mrs Kingsley Amis at home’.

  I find the combination of the long hours – shooting began at 9.30 and ended at a quarter to seven – the concentration of my rusty mind on lines and performance, and the physical effort of rowing and controlling the boat, utterly exhausting.

  To bed at 11.15, but woke at 3.00, and tossed and turned for an hour or so, full of depressing thoughts as to my stamina and ability to go through three weeks of this. Got up at 8.00, still feeling heavy and gloomy.

  Wednesday, June 18th

  Filming began at Datchet – in sunshine. Police were on hand to clear a stretch of riverside road so we could film with the houses behind. After one take they told us that one of the cars held up by the filming was the royal party on its way to Ascot!

  Windsor Castle, like a huge and over-drawn backcloth for a fairy tale, lay in the sun on the left bank. We worked our way up the river, ending in a sort of surreal evening sequence in the majestic, silent serenity of Cliveden Reach. Tim, Stephen and I in our little sculling skiff, the crew on Tufano’s specially designed camera boat – a simple flat-bottomed 15 feet x 6 feet rectangle with a scaffolding frame all around from which the camera hangs on a specially balanced spring (called a pantograph). It looks like a floating four-poster.

  We finish filming today at about ten past eight. I drive Tim, Stephen and myself to the Swan Hotel, Streatley – our base for the rest of the film. We arrive at about 9.15. We’re all rather tired and hungry after a long day.

  Our first contact with the staff of this pleasantly situated riverside hotel goes something like this:

  Us: ‘Can we … eat here, please?’

  She (small, bespectacled, young): ‘Ooh no!’

  Us: ‘Why … er … why not?’

  She: ‘It’s after quarter to nine.’

  Myself (seasoned to this, so valiantly co-operative): ‘Oh, I see … and there’s no chance of squeezing a meal in for us?’ (We do see people eating in the dining-room.)

  She: ‘No.’

  Us: ‘A sandwich … or just a piece of cheese?’

  She: ‘No.’

  Us: ‘Is there anywhere round here … ?’

  She (oh how Jerome K Jerome would have laughed): ‘There’s a Chinese in Pangbourne.’

  Us: ‘Well … we might try that.’

  She: ‘Oh, we do have a problem. We close the hotel at 11.30 and there are only two keys.’

  Stephen and I – Tim adapting to the situation and choosing to sit out beside the river and sip white wine – make our way to a charming thatched-roof little pub up the road called the Bull. It’s 10.15 – they close at 10.30. Here the conversation goes (after ordering a drink):

  Us: ‘Can we … get anything to eat?’

  She (small, fat, middle-aged – what the girl at the Swan will probably turn into):’No.’

  Us: ‘Is there … ?’

  She (triumphantly indicating empty food cabinet on bar): ‘Oh, no. There’s nothing left now.’

  We manage to order some nuts and crisps, though we are given these with heavy reluctance and much raising of eyes to heaven.

  Us: ‘Oh, and some pickled onions, please.’

  The order arrives without pickled onions.

  Us: ‘Pickled onions?’

  She (after brief conversation with friend): ‘No, I can’t give you any.’

  Us (jaws going slack rather than tempers rising):’What … ?’

  She: ‘I can’t give you any. I’m not allowed to.’

  The combination of the Swan and the Bull was fairly deadly. This is Southern England with a vengeance. We feel like lepers, as we walk down the pretty, the fucking pretty little main street, clutching some of the c
risps she was good enough to let us have.

  Saturday, June 21st, Southwold

  The longest day and my father’s three-quarter century.

  Present at the party were all our family, including Rachel, just five months. There was champagne on the lawn and then various pies, patés, cold meats, salads, strawberries and coffee, etc, inside. The house coped well with the numbers and the sunshine helped to bring the whole thing to life.

  Father was not in bad form – he finds it difficult to get his words out, but he was aware of who everyone was and what was going on, and smiled and drank rather a lot of champagne and didn’t get cross at all. It was really as successful as I ever dared hope.

  Wednesday, June 25th, Streatley

  Danny La Rue1 has been in residence, or in evidence, at the Swan this week; he is Chairman of the hotel, a fact which must account for the occasional groups of middle-aged ladies who are to be found standing on the bridge and gaping down at it. Danny gravitated rather surely towards Tim, but, in the bar after the meal, he was clearly anxious to talk to any of us. He talked mainly about the wonderful tour he’d just finished and how he’d broken all box-office records at Scarborough, only two or three nights ago. He really exudes star and showbiz. His talk is self-boosting, he has a small entourage, including one very beautiful young man, who hover about him. I have occasionally seen his eyes flick around the bar with a sort of panic, when he has no-one to talk to.

  None of us have, of course, been anything less than charming to him, however. No-one has so much as hinted that his hotel must be one of the most beautiful and worst-run in England.

  Friday, June 27th, Streatley

  The weather looked like breaking this morning; grey clouds piled up, but no rain. Spent most of the morning reading James Cameron’s An Indian Summer, basking in the near perfect balance of his intelligence, humour and sensitivity.

  I read in the Mini parked by the side of a lane at Bushey Lock, on the Upper Reaches beyond Abingdon, where Stephen M and Harry Markham were doing a scene. Harry Markham was in Stephen F’s highly praised Sunset Across the Bay and he’s one of Stephen’s favourite actors. He’s only on the film one day, but he comes down with his wife, Edna – they’re a very dear, down-to-earth Northern couple, a great antidote to Hampstead. I asked them about their hobby, which turns out to be walking along canals. They recently walked the Liverpool—Leeds canal.

  ‘Oh, how lovely,’ I gushed.

  ‘Oh, bits of it are very dangerous, you know,’ replies Harry very seriously.

  Edna is equally serious.’There was a gang of youths came up to us just outside Liverpool … they started fingering his windcheater …’

  A pleasant lunchtime drink at the Trout at Bushey Lock – an out-of-the-way pub, with very friendly clientele. I learn a little more about Tim, who used to be rather quiet for the first few days, but has gradually opened up and become more garrulous and at times quite ebullient. He told me today that his father was a naval chaplain, who died when he was 12, and from then on he was brought up by women. There’s a soft, very English quality about Tim which is quite at odds with the Rocky Horror/Lou Adler LP side.1

  Tuesday, July 1st, Streatley

  Stephen F doesn’t really like days when there are a lot of extras. The awful depression he affects on such days, when shots take a long time to set up and then someone hasn’t understood and walks slap across shot at the vital moment, is, I think, quite deep-seated.

  Annie Z2 says that Stephen totally lives the film while he’s working. He’s one of life’s restless pacers, she says. Some mornings he starts pacing about six o’clock.

  Anyway, the first of July has a richly comic ending. ‘Tucker’ Leach, one of the Props boys, a cheerful stammerer, who is no intellectual giant, plays his second role of the day – as a passenger on board a steamship that nearly runs us down (again!). After complicated positions have been worked out, the shot finally gets under way. It’s a good take – which actually ends on my line as the steamboat swishes past:’I say, any chance of a tow?’ No sooner have I said the line, than Tucker yells back, loud and clear and deliciously in shot, ‘No way!’

  Wednesday, July 2nd, Streatley

  The morning’s hot again, and I’m settling down to a cup of coffee and a read of the Palin Show script, before sending it off to Terry Hughes. But Stephen F finds me and, motioning vaguely to the terrace in front of the hotel, invites me to bring my coffee along and join everyone. Everyone turns out to be me and Stephen.

  He tells me that, in addition to the already crowded schedule, he wants to re-shoot the dead dog floating down the river sequence. It was shot in an end-of-the-week afternoon of careless abandon last Friday, and both Stephen and Brian are aware they’ve shot it in a dull way. An example of the difference between LE and Drama shooting. I’ve never, in all my experience of Python filming, both on TV and in two movies, ever been involved in a retake of a scene for purely artistic reasons.

  I scribble a note off to Terry Hughes, enclosing the script.

  Retake the dead dog sequence. This time it worked well – the Woolworths toy dog, which had looked rather ineffective last time, was replaced by a newly killed sheep, which gave an Oscar-winning performance.

  Sunday, July 6th, Streatley

  Talked to Tom Stoppard on a sunny lawn between takes. He seems to be a little preoccupied with rehearsals for Travesties for the US tour. Stephen M tells me that sometimes Tom’s rather forthright notes to the actors have caused some of them to walk out on him. On this film he has been discreetly available – present for a few hours most days – but sometimes marooned on the wrong side of the river, as we are often rather difficult to find. He liaises with Stephen mainly and doesn’t talk a great deal to us about the way things should be played. He brings his kids – his younger set of kids – out with him, and on occasions his wife, the buoyantly chatty Dr Miriam Stoppard, and at Radcote Lock the other day, he even appeared with his mother. It was rather sweet really – she sat in the limited shade of a lifebelt holder watching us sweat in the lock, with a copy of a magazine article about Tom laid open beside her.

  Wednesday, July 9th, Streatley

  The final day of filming. We ended, rather fittingly, with a long journey down the river in bright sunshine, from Shepperton Lock to Hampton Court. Brian T, who was in good form, kept stopping to take shots of swans, ducks, willow trees waving and other artistic items that caught his eye. As we passed Hampton Church he began murmuring about needing a shot of it, etc, and for the first time in the entire film, I thought I was aware of Stephen F curbing Brian’s enthusiasm, because of lack of time. In the last two or three days word has clearly filtered through from the BBC that Three Men in a Boat is costing too much. Then, after we passed an island, the church reappeared with the sun behind it and framed by tall trees and Brian could control himself no longer. Stephen responded and the boats turned and stopped and the shot was taken. Back to Hampton Court Pier and a last drink with the crew at the Mitre hotel. The last I see of Tim and Stephen Moore is on the corner of Hammersmith Broadway.

  Thursday, July 10th

  Wrote letters, played squash with Terry, and tried to put off the inevitable moment when I would have to re-immerse myself in the affairs of Python. I have tasted self-sufficiency for four weeks and a most agreeable taste it is.

  Friday, July 11th

  Our nude photo, which makes us all look rather blatantly and unsexily bare, appears as a full page spread in Vogue. The photo is fun, but accompanying it is the most dreadful piece of blurb about ‘Monty Python … that six-manic, smash-them, trash-them comedy commune from Britain.’

  Monday, July 14th

  To the BBC by 12.00 to meet Terry Hughes and so really begin the Palin Show project. Both Terry and Jimmy G have apparently liked the script. It’s clearly too long, but I’m heartened and encouraged by Terry H’s attitude, which is to try and do it as a 45-minute special. Jimmy G is adamant at the moment about 30 minutes.

  We discuss the
thorny subject of casting briefly. Terry J wants to play Tomkinson’s mother, but I’m afraid that TJ in drag does have an instant link with Python and may disturb the reality which the character needs in this particular script. But major decisions are put into abeyance until we have done our rewriting.

  Sunday, July 20th

  Wrote to Al Levinson, the wise, likeable American I met at the Henshaws’ last year. His letters still outnumber mine three to one, but I enjoy writing to him. It’s being required to step back and look at yourself and your life in relation to someone 3,000 miles away, whom you have hardly met, but with whom you feel an unexplainable empathy. Ours is purely a literary relationship, a written relationship. It’s different from all my other relationships. That’s what makes it interesting and stimulating too, I suppose.

  Tuesday, July 22nd

  Terry and I worked together today on Fegg. It’s the third successive day I’ve spent on new material for the book [for the upcoming American edition].

  Then up to Dr Chapman’s house at Southwood Lane, Highgate, for an interview with a Yugoslav journalist – for the Yugoslavs have apparently bought the Holy Grail film. A squat, rather scrubby-bearded man with a tape recorder was sitting on his own in what passes for Graham’s sitting room. I said hello, then heard a shout of ‘Get your trousers off, then’, in a bad Scottish accent, from the next room. McKenna, Bernard was there, surrounded by sheaves of paper, covered in his squiggles, looking harassed, while Dr Chapman sat in his usual writing attitude – glass of gin and tonic in one hand, legs stretched out, gazing into space.

  Graham looked grey – as if he had spent the last five years un-dead. Which really was nearer the truth than it seemed. Graham, having lately fallen in with Ringo Starr – for whom he and Douglas have written a TV spectacular (American) – has also drifted into the Keith Moon/Harry Nilsson orbit.1 Now Moon is a genuine loony and drives Rolls Royces into swimming pools and leaves them there, but Nilsson, as I heard from Tim Curry, and heard again tonight from a slurred and shattered Chapman, is a man bent on self-destruction. Graham, sounding like a Sunday school child on an outing to Sodom, told me how Nilsson had had to be helped from GC’s house last night utterly and totally smashed. Graham had bruises today to show for it. Nilsson drinks neat gin – a bottle in one evening -pops every pill possible, but most of the time prefers cocaine. Graham was really shocked.