As we kick around they announce our names, and cheers rise. Biggest for Ed Stewart (good at projecting his personality), softest for John Peel (the brightest of the lot of them).
The game (the width, not the length of the pitch) is a kick and run affair – with Tommy Steele vainly trying to organise a team of six people, all of whom want only one thing, to score at Wembley. Ed Stewart plays a miraculous blinder in goal for Radio One, and it’s even scores at half-time.
In the second half I hit the crossbar and completely miss another, and John Peel scores the winner for Radio One. As Teddy Warrick put it, the best team lost, which is, along with a car sticker for Wembley Stadium Main Car Park, a free kit-bag and a No. 4 blue shirt, my only consolation.
Friday, July 1st, Berlin
Meet up at London Airport with Sir John Terry of the NFFC1 – big and benign, like Father Christmas – John Goldstone, grinning bearishly through a beard which threatens to overrun his face, and Terry Gilliam.
I find myself sat next to a short-haired, fortyish Englishman, who talks compulsively. It turns out he’s with the British Forces in Berlin, and is scared stiff of flying. He has his air-sickness bag ready, grasps the edge of the seat with hands continually clenching and unclenching. He’s a crack shot and trains people in rifle use.
Meet Michael White in the lobby of the Kempinski Hotel. He’s in a crumpled white suit and has just flown in from Paris after an all-night party given by Yves St Laurent.
The bad news of the day is that Jabberwocky is now out of competition as we have been naughty and broken the rules by opening the film in Paris before the festival. It takes some of the edge off our jaunt to know that, however well received, we can’t win any Golden Bears.’Just as well,’ says Goldstone, not very convincingly.’These sort of awards can put audiences off, you know.’
Saturday, July 2nd, Berlin
In the afternoon, after a typical German lunch, served by a large, perspiring waiter, M White hires a BMW and we all squash in and go across to East Berlin. What a change from 1972.1 The Alexanderplatz looks cleaner, brighter, more colourful than before. The bombed and shot-up churches are being restored. Altogether a much more Western look to the place. But the coffee is terrible and the cakes are hard and it still takes half an hour to cross through the wall.
Find a wonderfully seedy hotel just beside the wall at Brandenburg Gate, Hotel Adlon. It used to be right next to Hitler’s bunker, which Whitey tells me the East Germans are excavating. Tea at the Orangerie in the Charlottenburg.
Alan Brien2 sees me reading Nabokov’s Despair and tells me that he is mentioned in Ada after conducting some correspondence with Nabokov about skin disease. (Nabokov, one of my literary heroes, died last week.)
In the Kempinski, like in some grotesque dream, tarted-up, over-beautified fat ladies and heavily-sweating men gather for the Film Festival Ball, which seems to be remarkable for having nobody recognisable present.
We Brits can’t get in anyway, but stay on the outside, make guerrilla raids on the rather good food and buy ourselves a couple of bottles of sparkling. M White observes that this is why Hollywood stars never leave Hollywood.
Sunday, July 3rd, Berlin
Kill time until three o’clock, and the first showing of Jabberwocky. A half-full house. Perhaps a little more. Good laughs. At the end Gilliam and I have to come through the curtains and make a brief appearance. Applause. It’s not too embarrassing. The worst is yet to come.
We are shown into a back room of the Cinema Am Zoo, where two long tables are pushed together and rigged with chunky, old-fashioned mikes. A few scruffy-looking people with notepads sit around.
Wolf Donner, the organiser of the festival, is a pleasant, open-faced man with a firm, friendly handshake, who says he enjoyed the film. Questions are vague or just downright dull. Someone persistently asked us for details of the jokes we rejected from the film. A Turkish journalist wants to know what the monster represents in British politics today. He seems very happy when I suggest it is the rise of fascism.
John Terry gives a short, obviously well-prepared speech about Jabberwocky being a British film, part-financed by the British government. But there are long silences, probably because the whole electronic system of mikes and simultaneous translation may be OK for the United Nations, but is utterly dampening in a roomful of twenty people. The whole miserable charade lasts about three-quarters of an hour.
Monday, July 4th
In keeping with our way of meeting all the interesting film people on the last day of the festival, we find ourselves in a car with Barbara Stone, an American who now lives in London and with her husband runs a small film distribution network and a cinema – the Gate at Notting Hill. They are one of several new distributors who are doing very well in London, feeding quality (mainly foreign) films to the eager London sophisticates (or just, let’s face it, people who enjoy a good intelligent movie). They’re making money now, and are directly able to help directors (such as Derek Jarman, who made Sebastiane). A good sign – nice to meet someone who is optimistic about the cinema in Britain. A Londonophile too – she says they couldn’t start and run a similar cinema in the States.
In the evening, despite terminal drowsiness, I have to read the Python film script, which I haven’t touched for three months, and have intelligent comments on it ready for our meeting tomorrow.
Tuesday, July 3th
Eric is the first person I see. He was in hospital a week ago, being fed intravenously and with pipes through the nose to drain his stomach. Apparently there was a complication after his appendix removal, and he was back in the highly expensive Wellington Hospital for Arabs (as Graham said, when he visited him, Eric appeared to be ‘the only Caucasian in the place’). So Eric is thin as a stick, long-haired and bearded. He thanks me for the pile of books I sent him. I apologised for not having had time to visit him, but I sent him an Intellectuals Get-U-Well Reading Pack, which included a potted biography of Debbie Reynolds.
According to Terry’s report (he and TG went location-hunting in mid-June), Tunisia sounds the easiest of the Mediterranean countries to film in. They are well organised, there are good sites and comfortable hotels and the film entrepreneur is the nephew of the President – so no problems stopping the traffic!
But Terry J is not entirely happy with Tunisia – he is worried that we will merely be duplicating all the locations Zeffirelli used, and that it doesn’t really look like the Holy Land. John Cleese had had a letter from Israeli Films, trying to persuade us to film there. Terry J wants to look at Jordan. Gilliam says the best hilly city streets are not in Tunisia but in Fez in Morocco, so no solutions are obvious.
A lunch break. John, Terry G and I go and lie in Regent’s Park in the sunshine, whilst Terry J has to organise one of his many philanthropic projects (Vole, Kington Brewery, etc1) with Anne. John gets on to a well-worn theme – money. He makes no bones about it, says he, this film must make him a great deal of money. Apparently nothing else does apart from commercials. Coming from a man whom I saw having difficulty parking his Rolls-Royce this morning, that does sound a little un-sad, but it’s a jolly chat and indicative of a generally more relaxed, easy feeling amongst us.
This evening, a civilised and funny and enjoyable evening with Simon Albury and Derek Taylor2 and wife. We go to Langan’s Brasserie, passing on our way the Berkeley Square Jubilee Party – £25 entrance tickets, of course. Packed densely inside the railings, men with no chins mingled with ladies with large teeth. Protruding jaws spread wide into baying laughs and huge noses assailed with the bouquet of champagne. All in all it looked like a gigantic zoo exhibit – ‘The Upper Classes – British – circa 1970s’.
But Langan’s is, of course, posh and moneyed and quite obviously aimed at those with enough money to pay for style rather than essentials. Derek is the ideal company to enjoy such a place with. He’s sensible and sensitive and articulate and enjoys laughing a lot. They have legions of children – one of whom is into punk rock at
the moment.
Sadly, Derek is away to Los Angeles to live for a few years – accepting promotion to Vice-President of Warner Brothers Records. I hope he doesn’t stay away for long – England needs people like him. His wife Joan is jolly and down to earth and they both know a lot of famous people (via the Beatles) and yet can enjoy jokes about people knowing famous people. They know what’s bullshit and what isn’t. A rare quality in the frenetic music biz.
Sunday, July 10th
Al and Eve Levinson are in London at the moment. I saw them last week, when Al proudly thrust his latest Fish novel/autobiography upon me. It’s longer than Millwork (my favourite) or Shipping Out (naval larks) and has an awful pun for a title – Rue Britannia.
Through Eve I have made the acquaintance of Arnold Wesker.1 I took Eve up to Wesker’s in Highgate (within spitting distance of G Chapman’s). Eve persuaded me to go in and say hello, and Arnold’s wife got very excited and said that their daughters had been dying to meet me. In the sitting room were gathered lots of young teenage kids – mostly Weskers – and a brace of Americans, including a professor from the University of Wisconsin who is doing a paper on Arnold. Arnold stands, stockily built, but in good trim, shirt open three or four buttons revealing hirsute chest, an easy manner, but on his toes like a boxer.
Then the boyfriend of the daughter, who is an enormous fan, arrived and she introduced him to the professors, playwrights and unpublished novelists’ wives, but missed me out. She made up for it by saying she was leaving me to last – which she did – and with a flourish said – ‘and this … is Terry Gilliam!’
Wednesday, July 13th
Wake heavy-headed after late night with the author of Rue Britannia and his wife. They dropped in last night from the theatre and much vodka (Eve) and brandy (Al) was drunk and Helen and I struggled to stay awake and reconcile our gentle domestic mood of approaching somnolence with Al and Eve’s holidaymakers’ energy.
I seem to remember a lot of laughter – and Eve looking very sour as I played Elgar. ‘What is this … ?’ she demanded in tones which only a true Brooklyner could affect. I changed it for reggae and Al and Eve danced to Bob Marley.
Some last-minute script work on Brian, then drive down to Park Square West for a group meeting. The changes and rewrites to the script are amicably accepted, but we have to agree today on some casting for Friday’s read-through. This casting, whilst it need not be binding for the film, could, as Eric put it, ‘stick’, so we have to make fairly far-reaching decisions between 12.45 and 1.30, when John has to leave.
Eric tells John (Graham being out of the room) that he, the two Terrys and myself, are of the opinion that John would be wasted as Brian and that Graham might be the best for it – he’s Roman-looking, which helps, and was quite good as the central figure in Grail – Graham looks good and is watchable.
John erupted at this – far more vehemently than I would have expected. Casting a quick eye at the door in case GC should reappear, he hissed agitatedly that it would be a disaster – take it from John, he’d been working with him recently and he (GC) couldn’t even find his place in the script.
Then Graham reappeared and, despite John’s outburst, it was suggested to him that he play Brian. Graham mumbled woollily and we went on to cast the rest – as John had to go. I was given Pilate, Ben, the Ex-Leper and the follower Francis, as well as Nisus Wettus – the centurion in charge of the crucifixion. Feel liberated from Dennis/Ripping Yarn juve leads at last, and into some genuinely absurd parts.
Dash off to Willys school concert at two. Willy, looking rather bewildered, is third child along in the Monster – the Marvellous Monster from Mars. He was very proud to be chosen for the Monster – they took six children from the whole of the infants – noted for their ‘patience’, Willy said. Patience was also a necessity for the audience.
In the evening to Anne and Michael Henshaw – socialising this time. In the same room where eight hours before we had been casting Life of Brian were now assembled myself and Helen, Anne and Michael, Al and Eve and a very bouncy director called Richard Loncraine (who is, apart from Python, Anne H’s only other client). Immediately friendly and jokey, he’s the sort of person you feel after ten minutes you’ve known for years. Or else, I suppose, he drives you mad.
Friday, July 15th
Drive over to Primrose Hill for Life of Brian recorded script read-through at Sound Developments. A pleasantly warm July morning. Tuck the Mini into a parking space as Cleese’s Rolls glides by.
Talk to John on the way in. I had misjudged exactly how much he wanted to play the rather dull central role of Brian. John wants to do a lead, he told me. He wants to have a go at being a Dennis, because he says it gives him more chance to work closely with the director, to be bound up in the making of the film much more intimately than he was on the Holy Grail.
The recording starts well – the studio is spacious and cool and the engineer unfussy. Al Levinson is there to read the voice of Christ! We make Al religious adviser to the film. When asked what advice he’s given, Al will say he told us not to do it.
But as the day wears on it’s clear that Graham is once again being his own worst enemy. He arrived at ten quite ‘relaxed’, and has drunk gin throughout the morning. Everyone else is on the ball, but Graham can never find where we are in the script, and we keep constantly having to stop, re-take and wait for him. Occasional glimpses of how well he could do Brian, but on the whole his performance bears out every point John ever made.
Saturday, July 16th
Launch day for Penrhos Brewery. At Hereford Station by one. A minibus drives us to Penrhos Court, where a wonderfully laid out array of cold pies, tarts, a cooked ham and salads various is prepared in the restaurant.
The beer is tasted and found to be good. Jones’ First Ale it’s called – and at a specific gravity of 1050 it’s about as devastating as Abbot Ale. But the weather has decided to be kind to us and the collection of buildings that is Penrhos Court – basically a fine, but rundown sixteenth- century manor house with outbuildings housing the brewery, restaurant and Martin Griffiths’ office and living accommodation – look well in the sunshine and provide a very amenable background to the serious beer-drinking.
After lunch and beer we are organised into a game of rounders in a nearby field, which affords a most beautiful view of rolling Border country – gentle hills, wooded and cultivated, with the town of Kington nestling amongst them and providing that ideal blend of nature and man which makes poets cream their notebooks.
A jolly game – or games – of rounders. Most people play, but Richard Boston reclines on bales of straw and watches and Mike Oldfield, who lives nearby, spends the afternoon taking photographs of his girlfriend. She has dark hair in ringlets and both his behaviour and his preoccupation with her seem a little narcissistic to a jolly rounders-playing fellow like me. I suffer heavy flatulence as a result of Terry’s ale.
In the evening a gorgeous sunset completes the idyllic picture of hills, fields and woods in this Rupert Land.
Monday, July 18th
To Sound Developments at nine to listen, with the rest of the Pythons (bar Eric), to the tape.
We decide to simplify the central section with the raid on Pilate’s palace, and cut down on the number of characters – amalgamating a lot of them -and also to shorten the end sequences. General feeling that the first third of the picture is fine.
We split up – Graham and I to write together on the middle section, because John wants to work on the end with either Terry or myself. Given GC’s behaviour on Friday at the reading, I don’t particularly relish a day’s writing with him. I would really rather work on my own.
By chance Barry Cryer rings during supper this evening. He is disenchanted with the Chapman situation, and says he doesn’t feel at home or comfortable in the house at Southwood Lane any more. Sad, for Barry was a very loyal and sensible friend of Graham’s.
Tuesday, July 19th
To Graham’s at eleven. A ver
y good day’s work. We complete the re-think of the whole central section and work well together on new scenes and new dialogue during our five hours writing together. The Doctor has about six gin and tonics, and when I leave at four he seems on the verge of incapability – evenings can’t be much fun.
But until four we find a very easy-going, productive way of working – mainly because we have something to work on, and I am quite disciplined about what we have to do. Occasionally the phone rings and Graham becomes a producer. He seems to find this a nerve-wracking business. He puts the phone down, tells me they’ve got another £750,000, and then has to have a large gin and tonic to calm himself down.
Friday, July 22nd
Meet Geoffrey Strachan and the marketing man at Methuen to discuss ideas for promoting the new book of the Holy Grail.
We meet at Odin’s. I suggest we should publish our own top ten list of bestsellers in every ad, and make up specious names like ‘The Shell Guide to Dead Animals on the Motorway’, or else we should do a series of direct appeals to the buying public, of an abject and grovelling tone, mentioning wives, families to support … ‘living in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed’, etc, etc.
Geoffrey seems highly pleased and we part and walk over to Park Square West for a final Python meeting. Because we only have a little over an hour to make decisions, we work well and extraordinarily productively. No writing again until January – when we shall spend two or three weeks writing and rehearsing. The West Indies is mentioned, Eric favours Barbados.
Tuesday, July 26th
On a hot afternoon go all the way to Sun Alliance in Chancery Lane, only to be told that they wouldn’t insure my new house because of my profession. ‘Actors … and writers … well, you know.’
I didn’t know, nor did I try to find out, but I couldn’t help feeling something of a reject from society as I walked out again into Chancery Lane. But my solicitor cheerfully informs me that several big companies, including Eagle Star, won’t touch actors. The happy and slightly absurd ending to this story is that I finally find a willing insurer in the National Farmers’ Union at Huntingdon.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 54