Terry and I are there as part of a week’s seminar on comedy. Winston told us afterwards, rather glumly, that there wasn’t really anyone there who wanted to, or could, make comedy films. They were all too serious. We talked for almost two hours to about twenty students. They had watched Tomkinson’s Schooldays in the morning and discussed it in terms of social relevance, criticism of authority, etc. I think they were a little disappointed when I told them that the choice of public school for the story was made simply because its absurd rituals and closed formal world were a very good area for jokes. Even Brian Winston, who was trying hard to defuse any pretentiousness, still referred to the nailing-to-the-wall joke as the ‘crucifixion’ sequence.
Friday, January 16th
Anne had had quite a traumatic meeting this afternoon with Arthur Cantor (who is over in England for two weeks) and Jim Beach1 to try and finalise the Live Show deal for New York. The outcome was that Cantor has at last backed out. Cantor is a cautious, kindly theatre producer who likes to get to know the people he’s working with and is temperamentally quite unsuited to the world of big advances, limousines, $75,000-worth of publicity – mostly to be spent on ‘Sold Out’ kind of advertising, and general image-building, which Nancy and Ina’s people have been insisting on. Ina’s office lose yet more popularity points by having apparently on our behalf been thoroughly unpleasant to A Cantor – who may be a little over-cautious and vacillating, but is a decent man.
So now Anne is having to fix up Allen Tinkley [another American producer] and yet another rather shoddy chapter in Python’s American adventure is closed.
Saturday, January 17th
Took the boys out in the morning to a Journey Through Space exhibition at the Geological Museum in South Ken.
Afterwards Tom and Willy pressed buttons in the How the Earth Began exhibition and we watched a film of a volcanic eruption, with a truly fantastic shot of a wall of lava just slowly enveloping a country road. Even better than the Goodies.
Late afternoon, and T Gilliam comes round. He now has a typed script of his Jabberwocky film, which runs at two and a half hours! He has seen Jaws! and was impressed – he’s decided to try and make the threat of the Jabberwocky as frightening as the threat of the shark.
Wednesday, January 21st
I sat and dug deeper into Something Happened after supper. Joseph Heller is another important and original American humorist, but Something Happened doesn’t make you laugh like Catch-22. It’s a bleak account of modern American materialistic man and the extraordinarily bad state of his personal relationships and his ability to communicate. The portrait of Slocum, surrounded by family and friends, is nevertheless of a man as apart from his fellow beings as Meursault in Camus’ L‘Étranger. But Heller has a good, perceptive eye, and the joy of the work comes from catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror – a moment of recognition of yourself – and of yourself in relation to other people.
Finally, watched The Glittering Prizes – a ‘major new drama series’ as the BBC call it. Scripts by Frederic Raphael (who wrote Darling, Nothing But the Best, etc), six 80-minute plays about a group of Cambridge students of the early ’50s. I rather admired this first one – ‘liked’ isn’t quite the word – it was cleverly, neatly written, it bore all the trademarks of the Cambridge urbanity, wit, worldliness, which Oxford never seemed to quite share – certainly I didn’t (perhaps that’s what I’m saying).
Thursday, January 22nd
Tomorrow I must be on the ball, for even more important discussions, this time about the professional future, must be raised with Terry as a result of a couple of calls from Jimmy Gilbert who has once again emphasised that he would like the Tomkinson series to be a Michael Palin series, written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones and starring Michael Palin.
Friday, January 23rd
Today, upstairs in Terry’s work-room, I told him of Jimmy’s attitude. TJ looked hurt – but there was a good, healthy fighting spirit there too. TJ feels that Tomkinson may well have been originally my project, but it worked as a team project and Terry is now very angry that the BBC want to break the team by institutionalising a hierarchy into our working relationship – i.e. The Michael Palin Show.
We talked ourselves round in circles. I couldn’t honestly say that I was prepared for TJ to take an entirely equal part in the acting, because this would involve me in a tussle with Jimmy over something I didn’t feel was in my own best interests. We break off for lunch with Jill Foster at Salami’s in Fulham Road.
It certainly seems that 1976 is all-change year. After almost ten years together, Terry and I are exploring and altering our relationship and Jill Foster and Fraser and Dunlop are doing the same. In short, Jill is leaving. She felt stifled at F & D, so now she wants to set up on her own.
We think we’ll stay with Jill, despite the various problems that have cropped up over our Python activities. She’s a good agent for us in many ways – a good talker, not renowned as vicious or hard in the business, but always seems to deliver an efficient, worthy, if not startling, deal.
After lunch we drive down to Terry’s, talking again about the series. A peripatetic day, in fact, both literally and metaphorically. We decide to meet Jimmy together, but he can’t make it until Monday. So I leave about 5.00 – with Terry still reeling slightly under a blow, which he hadn’t after all expected. It’s a rotten situation and rotten to see someone you like and whose friendship is so valuable being given a hard time. But it’s all got to be said and to be gone through.
Monday, January 26th
Another meeting about the Jones/Palin relationship. This time at the BBC. Meet TJ for a coffee first and he, as I had expected, had taken stock of the situation over the weekend and come to an optimistic conclusion. He would write the series with me and then go off and make a film for children (a project he’s had his thoughts on before) whilst I was filming. He seemed very happy.
However, once in Jimmy’s office, TJ took a rather less accommodating line (quite rightly for, as he said afterwards, there was no point in the meeting if he didn’t try to change JG’s mind with a forceful view of his own).
I didn’t do a lot of talking – I let Terry say all he wanted to say and Jimmy say what he wanted to say. JG was excellent I thought. He held to his position, but was sympathetic to all Terry said so, at the end of one and a half hour’s meeting we were all still friends – and Jimmy adjourned us for a week to think about it. TJ did seem to be less angry than impatient with Jimmy and we went off for a lunch at Tethers.
I’m trying to avoid an utterly basic dissection of our relationship, because I think it’s a relationship that obeys no strict rules, it works without introspection – it’s an extrovert relationship based on writing and often performing jokes together. It’s instinctive and I don’t want to damage it by over-examination. I want (for such is my half-cowardly nature!) to solve this re-adjustment crisis without tears.
Tuesday, January 27th
Spoke to Terry, mid-morning. Rather than pursuing the Children’s Film Foundation, TJ has instead revived that most hardy perennial – the Fegg film. He has rung John Goldstone, who reckons that ‘The Nastiest Film in the World’ has distinct possibilities!
Wednesday, January 28th
Another gorgeous day of clear, crisp, sharp sunshine. Terry comes up to Julia Street to talk about the Fegg film. We have some nice ideas – Fegg is a brooding and malevolent influence who lives in a corrugated iron extension up against a Gothic castle, near to the world’s prettiest village, where everyone is terribly nice to each other. But the presence of Fegg (whom we see in a sinister, opening build-up sequence letting the air out of someone’s tyres) is too much for them. They advertise for a hero. Scene cuts to a Hostel for Heroes, where unemployed heroes sit around in a sort of collegey atmosphere – occasionally getting jobs.
At the end of our day on Fegg – and with a possible commitment to writing on Fegg until we go to the US – I suddenly feel a touch of panic. Helen, with her usua
l down-to-earth perspicacity, provoked it by her reaction to the news of the Fegg film. I know she’s right – I am taking on too much. The Fegg film is going to take time and ideas away from what should really be my primary project of the next two years – the BBC series of thirteen. Helen forces me to confront the fact that I am in danger of losing what I am trying to save.
Thursday, January 29th
Very cold again, but sunny. Reading the papers, hearing the news (imperfect form of information though that is), I get the feeling that there is an air of optimism about, a general air of improvement in the state of the country, which has been so battered over the last few years.
The Balcombe Street siege has, touch wood, marked the end of a couple of years of IRA terror, but it was the way in which the siege ended – peacefully, almost sensibly – and the way in which Jenkins1 and the government refused to restore hanging in response to the primitive blood lust emotions of probably the majority of the country – that was the most hopeful outcome of the whole affair.
I rang Terry towards the end of the morning. He, too, had been worried when faced with actually writing the Fegg film, together with all our other commitments. But, later in the call, as we meandered around the area of commitments and involvements, Terry asked again the very basic question – ‘Sod Jimmy Gilbert, Mike … what do you actually want the series to be?’
The almost continuous reflections on this subject over the last couple of weeks, the gut feeling that anything less than the independence I felt on Tomkinson, made me feel somehow, somewhere, dissatisfied, really gave me only one possible answer … ‘Yes … I think I do want it to be the Michael Palin Show’
Once I said this – and I had never said it with quite such conviction before – the debate and discussion was as good as ended. Terry accepted that – reluctantly, obviously, but quite generously and with relief that we were being honest with each other. God knows how it will turn out from here on, but the crucial question has been answered. Yes, I do want my independence, yes I do want the responsibility to be ultimately mine.
Fegg, we decide to shelve for a while. A well-intentioned attempt to please everybody, a project which I am genuinely enthusiastic about, but, thank goodness, this morning realism has prevailed all round.
Friday, January 30th
January draws to a close in bitter cold. Last weekend there was some snow – which was preferable to the bitter, ear-aching, sub-zero winds which blow around London today. But it’s sunny again this morning. I have a meeting at the BBC with Jimmy G and Terry Hughes. Bill Cotton flits through, shakes my hand and says how pleased he was with the reaction to Tomkinson. The official warmth of the BBC’s approval wafts around. I fear and mistrust it. Self-doubt and official disapproval are better for you.
We talk about money. Jimmy would like £4,000 per show guaranteed front money from the US. Tomkinson, according to computer forecasts (the BBC have a computer!), will cost £34,000 per episode in 1977, about double the average LE sit-com episode.
Thursday, February 5th
A Grammy Award Nomination arrives in the post from LA. Matching Tie and Handkerchief has been nominated for Best Comedy Album of the Year. The Americans are very good at the Awards business – the Grammy nomination is impressively announced all over the envelope (postmen and friends please note). The awarding body is the extraordinarily impressive National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the letter, when opened, brings tears of joy and emotion. ‘We extend our sincere congratulations to you for this honor bestowed upon you by the Recording Academy’s voting members who are your fellow creators and craftsmen.’ I could almost hear soaring strings and stirring brass play as I read these words. its exactly the sort of pomposity that Python’s LPs attempt to deflate, but it was still a Truly Wonderful Letter to Receive.
By February 13 th we have to decide how we are going ahead on the ABC case. Osterberg is keen to fight on; feels that Lasker’s summing-up was ‘transparent’, and that his decision would be reversed by the Court of Appeals. However, O has given us no indication as to how this would be achieved and on what grounds Lasker was ‘transparent’. In view of the costs involved, and the fact that no-one really has the time to single-mindedly pursue the case, I reluctantly tell Anne that I feel we should pay Osterberg’s $15,000 and forget it.
Wednesday, February 11th, Southwold
Arrived at Darsham at 11.30 – from the train I could see Father hunched up in the car – it’s not so easy for him to come on to the platform, especially on a wet, cold morning like this.
His speech is a little better, but he has great difficulty eating. The latest refinement is for him to use his teeth as and when required. He has them beside him in a plastic container and puts them in if there is some particularly tough piece of food to cope with.
The wind increases during the day, until by night-time it’s nearly gale-force. It’s the kind of weather which emphasises the bleak aspect of the east coast. But it’s cosy enough inside Croft Cottage – with the fire and my appearance on Just a Minute to listen to on a crackly radio.
This morning an IRA man, Frank Stagg, starved to death at the end of a hunger strike in Wakefield. The IRA have sworn to ‘avenge’ his death and made various threats about England ‘paying for it’ … which everyone knows they can carry out. An atrocity isn’t far off, I feel.
Friday, February 13th, Southwold
Woken by Father drawing the curtains at 8.30.
Glad to stay in, as the gales roared out of grey skies all day long. Managed an hour or so’s work on a whodunnit – for the Ripping Yarns.1
Train back to London at 6.30. Leaving them both with a certain amount of optimism for once. Clearly, Father is at his happiest at home and the fact that a nurse now baths him once a week and he goes to Blythburgh Hospital for therapy, etc, twice a week, has lightened the load on my mother a little.
In the station buffet at Ipswich the newspaper seller has a rumour for us – a bomb at Piccadilly Circus. When I finally get back to an eerily quiet London, I hear that the bomb was at Oxford Circus and didn’t go off. But it was twenty pounds-worth of TNT in the main concourse on the Underground. It could have been the bloodiest explosion yet.
Saturday, February 14th
A sunny morning. We pack the car for a weekend at Abbotsley. The sun brings people out as if it’s a holiday. Thomas gets a Valentine from Holly – which he can’t stop talking about – and Holly, of course, doesn’t want him to know it’s from her. All I get is a bill from the dentist.
Vivid impressions of South East Asia in Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar— a book which has stirred up so many of my travelling impulses.
Monday, February 16th
Worked all day adapting the Fegg book’s ‘Across the Andes by Frog’ for one of the Ripping Yarns. Terry rang in the morning. He sounded very down – he was getting yearnings to make films, programmes, to make something – and saw the year ahead passing without achieving this.
However, he had cheered up considerably by the late afternoon and we played squash – quite hard games – and afterwards drank beer and chatted about life, art and other Hampsteadisms up at the Flask. It was nearly eight o’clock when he dropped me back home. Out to dinner with Robert H.
Bomb-scare talk with the cab driver. So far no deaths or dangerous explosions since Stagg’s death, but the cabman tells me that Warren Street Underground has been cleared and that there’s a road block at Notting Hill Gate. Pick up Robert and on to Odin’s – which has been boarded up outside like a wartime restaurant. There is a man standing outside who checks your name on the reservation list and only one small rectangle of glass on the door has been left uncovered. I suppose the more expensive the restaurant the heavier the bomb-proofing – there was nothing at all over the extensive glass frontage of the Italian caff on the corner opposite.
Home about 12.15, feeling a bit swivel-headed – and remembering that we drank a whole bottle of champagne as well. What swells we’ve become
in the thirteen years we’ve known each other. The potential was always there, I suppose – but the money never was!
Thursday, February 17th
Afternoon visit to a showbiz, sorry, the showbiz throat specialist. Jill F had suggested I go and see him before taking any voice projection lessons, just to check that there was no damage to my vocal cords, etc, since previous screamings.
His surgery is in Wimpole Street, where illness and privilege combine to create a pleasantly elegant part of the world. The ceilings were high, the hallway opened out into a sort of circular covered atrium with heavily impressive, brass-handled doors leading off on all sides – like a dream where you have to choose between six identical doors. They apologised for their heating having gone off.
Mr Musgrove was at his desk in the far corner of a huge room. I noticed a leather armchair, but that’s about all. He wore a reflector plate on his head, talked beautifully and, from where I was sitting, he could have been Kenneth More playing the role. He sat me down on a swivel chair beside a table full of instruments, which looked like a still life from a book of Edwardian medical studies.
Holding my tongue and nearly bringing me to the point of vomiting, he investigated my vocal cords, occasionally sterilising his mirror in a small gas flame.
But he was efficient, convincing and reassuring. No sinus problems and, he was glad to say, my vocal cords were in good shape – no trace of damage. Prescribed some nose drops for me to take only if things got really bad. He told me he’d treated Julie Andrews every day for six months when she was shooting Sound of Music. ‘Oh, yes … we got her through,’ he said. Suddenly I felt my problem was really quite insignificant – which I’m sure is the best way I should feel about it. I paid him £10 thankfully.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 40