Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Settle into the seat, armed with unlearnt script and the Sunday papers, and it’s only as we pull out of King’s Cross and are rumbling through Hertfordshire that the pressure of events in the last few days hits me with a wave of depression. Fortunately I only feel such depression very rarely, but it intensifies as the train nears familiar stations like Sandy and familiar views like the fields beyond St Neots. I miss home and family. I feel unutterably sad that I am going away to the grey north having seen so little of them for the last two weeks. I feel, too, the sadness at my father’s death which eluded me yesterday.

  It’s a feeling of loneliness. A feeling that I am speeding away from the familiar world, which for some reason I need at the moment, to an unfamiliar world of new faces, new people, new work. And the skies turn greyer too. Increasing the melancholy.

  Fortunately this despondency does not last even the length of the journey and I’m a little more phlegmatic about things as the train edges round the curving viaduct with the splendid mass of Durham Cathedral looming across the River Wear.

  To the County Hotel – an old, probably Georgian building, which has been expanded, in the process becoming rather airport loungefied. Met by Eddie S, Liz.1 Aware of the slight awkwardness with which they bring up the subject of Father’s death. No mention of death, just ‘Sorry about your news’. They’re kind people, though, very straightforward.

  Decide not to eat that night, still feeling metabolically maladjusted. A few drinks in the hotel bar with a smattering of wardrobe and props boys. Put on as cheerful a face as possible.

  Friday, April 29th, Durham

  Tonight Jim [Franklin, the director] has laid a car on for me to return to London, for tomorrow is Father’s funeral, and we film again on Sunday.2

  Say my goodbyes to all, including Ken Colley, who, I’m pleased to say, has turned out to be a stroke of genius choice for the part of the Robber. He’s not only a very good, no-nonsense actor, he’s also very good company.

  Saturday, April 30th, Southwold

  We troop off to the church, taking Mrs Pratt1 with us, in time for the service at two. Father had been cremated at Gorleston during the week, and so it’s more of a memorial service than a cremation. There is a representative of the Funeral Directors – heavy dark coat matching his eyebrows, despite the warm afternoon. Then there is the vicar, muted, grave and cold.

  Quite a small congregation – thirty or forty at most. Father’s ashes are in a small wooden box at the end of the aisle. I am quite severely nervous for the first part of the service – ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ – as I am to read the lesson, a heavy piece of Revelations. But that goes well, as does the service, and even the vicar’s little address (about my father being a man of patience, bearing with extreme tolerance and fortitude the slings and arrows. I suppose in a sense he was patient – for a man carrying a severe stammer for much of his life. I just remember so many moments of impatience and intolerance).

  At the end we process out behind the box of ashes and into the churchyard. The solemnity and dignity of the occasion is somehow less easy to maintain the further we process from the organ and the hymn singers, and I find that we are wending our way in a direct line towards the Southwold Cottage Hospital where I have an awful feeling that Father’s spirit was finally broken last autumn.

  His ashes are lowered in – ‘Dust to dust’, etc, etc – and the ceremony is over. Shake the vicar’s hand and receive in exchange a bland smile. Still, Father would have loved the church today, filled with sunlight, the mediaeval pews and the fine old screen which has witnessed funeral services for 500 years.

  Back to Croft Cottage for tea. No tears, except from Camilla, a little, and Angela, a sniffle. Mother quite composed about the whole thing. Tea turns into a jolly family reunion in the best tradition of funeral teas, and we leave for London at about five.

  Thursday, May 5th, Tow Law and Durham

  Birthday on location again. Thirty-four, and I feel it.

  Out in the bus to Tow Law. This is an exposed and underprivileged sort of town. A long line of small houses and not much more. No green, no parks, no opulent houses or even well-off areas – just the skeleton of a town custom-built for mining, in the days when there was something to mine. A cold wind whips through the grid-frame streets and all in all it’s a depressing place to spend a birthday.

  I organise free drinks at lunchtime for the crew and all at the Tow Law Hotel. A blind pianist plays ‘Happy Birthday’, with lush holiday camp trills thrown in, on an organ. I am presented with a shovel, signed by all the crew, which is very touching. I’m also given a birthday cake with one candle. But it’s a celebration only just on this side of tragic. The place, the town, the hotel are all grim.

  Friday, May 6th, Durham

  We were supposed to return home yesterday, but the bad weather on Tuesday put us a day behind.

  Somewhere away to our north-east, ten or fifteen miles, President Carter is pressing the flesh in Newcastle. The Tories have swept Labour under the carpet in the local government elections – Wearside and Durham County are amongst a tiny handful of councils where Labour has held on. I fear for Helen’s Ma, so vociferous is the reaction against the government, Labour and their sympathisers.

  At the very moment that Peter has set up a skyline shot with a colliery wheel in the background, Eddie Stuart appears over the hill with a man in a suit and helmet who looks very unhappy. This turns out to be the colliery manager, who is concerned, as it turns out, about the image of the National Coal Board.

  With much palaver and banging of helmets and raising of spectacles, the manager pronounces that we can film on, provided we go easy on shots of the slag heaps.

  We then move on to a windswept line of stone-built houses with a rather dark and moody back alley running alongside them. A lady berates us for filming the alley, calling it a disgrace, and bemoaning the fact that her husband’s wheelchair gets stuck along it in bad weather. At another house, a family who’ve just returned from two weeks’ holiday in Spain. It seems the days when you could point to a street and sum up its character straightaway are gone.

  Saturday, May 14th, Abbotsley

  Drove up to Abbotsley for two-day break from city and work. Long bicycle ride with Tom and Willy – the older they get the more we can do together. We cycled all the way to Waresley, where we met a dog which followed us all the way back. In the end Helen and I had to drive it back in the car. Tom collected a hoard of spent cartridges from roadside shoots along the Tetworth Hall Estate. Very happy day and fine May sunset.

  Sunday, May 13th, Abbotsley

  Worked hard in the morning, mowing and clearing the grass and weeds which have grown in lush profusion this year after the wettest winter for 100 years.

  Roast beef lunch. Helen’s Ma, who lost her seat in the council elections of May 5th, is just beginning to feel the effects. She will no longer be on the Education Committee – the Conservatives are going to run it under their own tight political control, and her work will be cut down enormously. For someone who worked so hard and so thoroughly for the local people it’s a tragedy that national politics should retire her prematurely. But the Tories were returned up and down the land regardless of their quality. At Eynesbury, near St Neots, a man got in who couldn’t even pronounce the name of the town.

  She has a mound of letters from all sorts of people, from Lord Hemingford to the Headmaster of Kimbolton and the Cambridge Borough Architect, to say how much she will be missed.

  To London this evening – I must prepare for another Ripping Yarn tomorrow. Long learning session.

  Friday, May 20th

  1A mixed week of filming [on ‘Escape from Stalag 112B’] draws to a close in perfect sunny weather. We are on schedule and generally all has gone well. But mid-week I had some worries about performances. Roy Kinnear,1 on his first day, seemed a little too stock – relying too much on the well-loved Kinnearish fat-man grimaces, than on his natural skill as an actor. But he began to improve and enjoy
the part in a more original way as the week went on.

  Marvellous props, such as the glider made out of toilet rolls.

  The First World War cricket match created a totally believable atmosphere out there with the German watchtowers and the barbed wire surrounding the pitch. The more or less continuous thudding of guns in the distance (for we are in the middle of a tank-training area) helps too and puts me in mind of Sassoon’s descriptions of being behind the lines in France during the First War.

  Monday, May 23rd

  Helen rang me in Salisbury. We are going ahead with plans to purchase No. 2, the house next door but one. Helen got frightened by the sound of prospective buyers just the other side of our wall, and she, Edward1 and others, seem to feel it’s a good thing to buy the property and enlarge our garden – give the kids a plentiful playroom, a permanent spare room etc.

  Friday, May 27th

  I have been filming, I suppose, daily for the past five weeks and maybe a cumulative tiredness is creeping up on me, but Wednesday and Thursday this week were days I had to drag myself through, force myself, like a runner at the end of a long race, to keep up the enthusiasm, the involvement and the energy that these films must have, when my body and mind are about to stage a mutiny.

  Saturday, May 28th

  The hot weather continues. After breakfast, go round to see Mr and Mrs Pym, whose house we are hoping to buy. (Helen has been working hard on it all week and yesterday we made our offer, but I wanted to check with them.) ‘Oh, yes,’ says Mrs Pym, dismissing the subject as though it had all been settled and bustling me out into the back garden to ask how much we would give her for her rotary clothes drier. ‘It cost £8, and he made a stand for it,’ she reassures me, pointing at a concrete lump into which it has been sunk. Anyway, she seems far more interested in getting rid of the rotary drier, so I agree to buy it for £18,754 – with the house thrown in.

  The Pyms have been there twenty-five years. They’re a quiet, self-contained, working class couple. He’s a dustman. She has that Welsh darting quickness and busyness.

  Good news, or nice news – Jabberwocky has been selected as the British entry for the Berlin Film Festival, so it’s brush up on the German and off to Berlin for TG and me at the beginning of July. It’s still being held in at Cinema One in New York. Don Rugoff is forever devising new campaigns, hoping that kids will flock in during the long school holidays and save the picture.

  Monday, May 30th

  To the BBC at ten o’clock for a sort of review of the situation so far with Jim F. I think they are running into heavy production problems with ‘The Curse of the Claw’, one of which is casting the very difficult Chief Petty Officer part.

  Gwen Taylor, whom Eric recommended to me as being ‘a female Michael Palin’, now can’t do it (because of the new dates), nor can Penny Wilton, our second choice.

  Tuesday, May 31st

  We talk to and read through with four girls from four until about half past five. Eventually select Judy Loe.1 She’s a straightforward, jolly, easy-going lady and straightaway understood and appreciated the part.

  Up to Terry Hughes’ office for a glass of wine —Jimmy Gilbert, now Head of Light Entertainment, and Bill Cotton, new Controller of BBC 1, there. Very matey and jolly and we talk about my house-buying as if we were old friends at the pub. Continually amazed at the change in their attitude (or is it the change in mine?) since Python!

  But they have shown great confidence in the Ripping Yarns. I hope they will be as good as everyone thinks they’re going to be.

  Friday, June 3rd

  A hot day. Into Soho to see what Ray [Millichope, the editor] has done to the still unsatisfactory ‘Moorstones’ and ‘Andes’.

  Difficult to work up in Wardour Street as groups of chanting, singing, shouting Scottish football fans are roaming the West End, waiting for the pubs to open. As I drive from Soho down through St Martin’s Lane and Trafalgar Square (where one of them is later killed jumping into a fountain), I see the Scots everywhere. In high spirits – the weather, the booze and the anticipation of rubbing England’s nose in the turf – they have taken over Trafalgar Square from the American tourists and they have easily upstaged the colourless pink and washed-out turquoise of the Jubilee decorations.

  Lunch with Jill Foster in the King’s Road. The subject of Graham C comes up. I mention how cowardly I am about confronting him with direct criticism of his wasteful lifestyle. Jill says she took him out to lunch the other day and told him he was a boozy old wastrel who was destroying himself and his chances of work. GC took a gin and tonic off her and agreed.

  In the early evening, swimming with the kids at the Holiday Inn, where there are three or four men of ruddy body and glazed eye hurling themselves at the water with vicious smacks. It turns out – yes – they’re Scottish football supporters. I sign an autograph for them. They can’t believe that at the hotel in one day they’ve seen Kevin Keegan, John Conteh and now a real live Monty Python.

  Tuesday, June 7th, Jubilee Day, Abbotsley

  Rather grey to start with, but the rain held off. Church Farm decked out with streams of coloured flags. In the afternoon went to Abbotsley Village Sports in the field at the back of the Eight Bells pub. Helen and I came second in the wheelbarrow race and I entered for the obstacle race – two heats – and though I came third overall, I was nearly dead after crawling under nets, etc.

  Later in the evening, as it got dark, we returned to the sports field for the village firework display, having just watched the royal bonfire being lit at Windsor Castle – a dramatic sight – huge flames and great surging crowds of people. Abbotsley firework display upstaged by more expensive pyrotechnics which burst in the air above St Neots, a few miles away.

  Wednesday, June 8th

  Pleasant drive up into Lincolnshire.1 Sun is out when I arrive in Rippingale, a small village between Bourne and Sleaford, lying in unexpectedly attractive country – more wooded and gently hilly than the bleak, flat Fenland just to the east. The villages are full of fine stone houses, like the Cotswolds.

  The house itself is a stone-built Georgian rectory, of simple, unadorned design, with additions in red brick. It is in quite a poor state indoors and Uncle Jack’s2 bedroom needs absolutely nothing doing to it – the walls are damp, mildewed and peeling -just perfect.

  Drive into Peterborough – about half an hour down the A15. An extraordinary city. A fine and impressive cathedral and all around it lines of insubstantial brick terraces, reaching right into the city centre. There is hardly anyone about – even at 5.30. Then I realise, of course, Peterborough – or Greater Peterborough as it now calls itself – has expanded along the American pattern – from the suburbs outwards. No-one really needs the centre of Peterborough any more.

  Saturday, June 11th

  After a great deal of heart-searching over the last few weeks, I finally sat down to write to Hamish Maclnnes,1 and excuse myself from his Yeti expedition.

  In recent weeks I had received the latest newsletters on the expedition from Hamish, which contained a rather worrying mixture of uncertainty over finance and jolly, harrowing asides like ‘We will have to move fast to get out of this valley, where some years ago a Tibetan expedition were trapped and actually ate their boots before being discovered … dead.’

  Despite the obvious pleasures of a trip to unknown lands in the company of top climbing folk like Hamish and Joe Brown, I have been so infrequently at home over the last year, what with Jabberwocky (ten weeks) and Ripping Yarns (seven weeks) and a week and a half in New York, that I feel I can’t commit myself to two months in the Himalayas only a month or so before we plan to shoot Life of Brian in North Africa. But it goes against instincts I’ve had since early childhood to opt out of an expedition to an almost unknown part of the world.

  Saturday, June 18th

  Playing charity football this afternoon at Wembley Stadium. Cavernous rooms and passageways round the back.

  Finally discovered our dressing room. Teddy Wa
rrick2 there, small and beaming, and most of the Radio One side with him – Peel, Gambaccini, Kid Jensen and Paul Burnett. Quiet, rather subdued atmosphere. Ed Stewart arrives and starts to organise everyone in a very loud voice.

  On our side only Paul Nicholas here at the moment. Another quiet lad – I like him. Alan Price arrives, then Graham Chapman and John Tomiczek. John will play in goal for us and I suggest Graham, in his strange Trilby hat, should be team psychiatrist. A sort of cheer goes up as Tommy Steele arrives, bubbling, flashing a lovely white Cockney grin of the type usually described as ‘infectious’. He is tacitly assumed to be senior ‘celebrity’, and takes over captaincy of our side.

  We are given free bags and kit by some sports company, which is a nice bonus. The CID appear in the dressing room – apparently to offer us some sort of protection – and say they will guard the dressing room until we get back – if we get back. We sign programmes for them.

  Gambaccini claims he didn’t sleep at all last night. He can’t cope with it all, he says.’Three times I’ve played football, and already I’m at Wembley!’

  Alan Price finishes a last cigarette and stubs it beneath his boot as we move off up the tunnel. The noise grows, heads turn – heads of officials, policemen, commissionaires – the flotsam and jetsam of officialdom who are allowed to hang around at the very cervix of Wembley. Ahead is the pitch, above us a net to protect players from missiles.

  And suddenly we’re walking out. I want to freeze the moment, savour it like the finest wine. All I’m aware of is empty terraces.

  There are, in fact, 55,000 people here for the Schoolboy International which follows our game – but at Wembley that still leaves bald patches – bald patches mirrored in the sacred turf itself, ripped up by the Scottish fans a couple of weeks ago and still not all replaced.