Here we have ensconced ourselves comfortably. The BBC has taken over, installing wires and cables and new shutters and blinds on the windows and palm trees and Edwardian lamps and cane tables and chairs. This is India for two weeks.
Today is the Regimental Dinner, for which several actors, including John Le Mesurier, have been imported, and the dark back room in the servants’ quarters which houses Make-up and Wardrobe is overflowing.
John Le Mes, it transpires, is a great friend of Derek Taylor’s, and Derek, who was taking a short break over here from his irksome life in Warner Bros, LA, had reassured John Le Mes that he was a great fan of the Yarns. So maybe Derek was instrumental in securing John.
The scene works marvellously. All the performances are strong and first rehearsal brings the house down. Of course the volume of laughter never greets the scene again, as we plod through it during the day, but the actors work hard to keep the freshness, despite all the technical delays and waits.
John Le Mes wears his slippers for the last shot. He doesn’t drink any more now – after a bout of hepatitis – but chain-smokes instead. He looks physically frail, but his eyes are sharp, bright, lively and humorous.
Monday, July 10th, Bethersden
The last of our day shoots. From tomorrow until the end of the week we work all through the night.
Catch up a little today. But I feel that some of the ensemble work between Roger Brierley, Richard Vernon and Joan’s lacks something – some spark. It’s almost as though they’re finding it too easy. So I’m up and jumping around and giving hints and encouragements whenever I can.
Jim is very good here and lets me work with the actors as much as I like.
But I have the first feelings of irritation that the camera and lighting have once again set the pace, so that the actors tend to be forgotten – expected to just turn on the right performance after waiting an hour for a shot to be lit. The priorities are becoming muddled. The show ultimately stands or falls on how good the actors are – and they need as much work as the lights.
Wednesday, July 12th, The Brecknock Arms, Bells Yew Green, East Sussex
I’m sitting alone in the small back garden of this unassuming little pub. There is no muzak, there are no coloured lights, or chairs and tables crafted crudely to the shape of bent tree bark. Just an iron table and comfortable but inelegant iron chairs, slatted with wood. And a pint of Harvey’s best Sussex bitter, brewed in Lewes and looking very friendly with the sun shining through it. A blackbird or a song thrush, something very melodious, trills in the tree above me. Peace and solitude.
Last night’s filming was hard work. Neighbours complained about rifle fire in the middle of the night and threatened us with an injunction (they know their rights down here) and this was even before Joan Sanderson opened up with her 1914 Lewis machine gun – the crack echoing around the whole of Kent, so it seemed, to such an extent that after the third or fourth round there was an impassioned cry from the black depths of the woodland – ‘Shut up!’ We finished at ten past four this morning.
Friday, July 14th
The final day of shooting on ‘Roger’.
Back to Harbourne Hall for the last time. The Major and his wife appeared every now and then – the Major ruddy-faced, obviously enjoys a drink. I became aware, talking to him, of the pathos of their situation – both married for the second time – the children belong to Mrs F, not him – ‘So we don’t always see eye to eye.’ He was in tanks at Alamein, the kids are on motorbikes in Tenterden. He looks blearily round at the huge, red bulk of the unattractive house behind him – ‘It’s always been a happy home.’ He repeats this sadly, shaking his head. It’s very moving.
At dawn we’re gone, packed up, the cables stowed away and the house returns to normal. On Wednesday this ‘happy home’ is up for sale by auction. Major F talks of a bungalow in Bethersden they’ve got an eye on.
Wednesday, July 19th
Python medical today. More thorough than usual. Begins with a chest X-ray, then a visit to Dr Ronald Wilkinson, who holds my testicles and asks me to leave my urine in his bathroom. A girl takes a sample of my blood and a man sticks electrodes all over me for an electro-cardiograph test. Wilkinson reassures me that this all means I’m a much bigger property than when he last held my testicles.
The ECG man purred happily as he unravelled my reading. ‘A very nice heart,’ he pronounced.
Thursday, July 27th
Off to Ealing full of anticipation. My first look at the two weeks of pictures from ‘Roger’. Instant disappointment on almost every front, except the look of it – costumes, colour, design, the house, etc. The performances of Lord and Lady B only adequate, the whole tale seems flatly paced and humourlessly edited. My role as Roger is another of those irritating, ingenuous younger sons which are in danger of becoming a real bore.
Even the regimental scene, a sure-fire winner, seems to be misfiring. There’s a great deal of re-editing to do, and the first task is to establish a rapport with Dan Rae, the editor. He’s tall and taciturn and rather likeable, but he begins by appearing to resent my suggestions.
This turns out to be defensiveness on both our parts. As we go systematically through the film (Jim F is away on holiday, so I have a free hand), both of us ease up. I realise that it was a shock to all my carefully-nurtured pre-conceptions of the piece to see it for the first time through [cameraman] Reg Pope’s and Jim Franklin’s eyes, and Dan Rae has realised I am neither an unnaturally lugubrious old bugger, nor a stroppy writer who can’t stand to see any editor touch his work. We carry on after lunch and when I leave at four Dan reckons he has four more days to do on tightens, corrections, re-positioning and finding new shots. Fingers crossed it will work then.
Friday, July 28th
First progress of any sort on the NBC special. Work on outlines for a new Robin Hood tale – the story of an insecure, nightmare-ridden, ex-hero, trying to live with his legendariness. At least there’s a character there I’d like to play.
But writing up in my room today is like resting on an anthill. The children, plus friends, are all at home, there are four builders in No. 2 and, after lunch, Helen trying to grab some of the hot sunshine out on my balcony. I like my house and my family, but today the attractions of a quiet hotel room with just a bed and a typewriter flashed briefly, but poignantly across my mind.
Off to play squash with Terry and try to rid myself of this inability to produce brilliance. The game revives me.
Afterwards we pay a visit to Michael Henshaw.1 Michael is anxious to talk over a tax-avoidance scheme to deal with the estimated £82,000 in foreign-earned money which we should be receiving as our full share of the performance fee on Brian.
An endearingly frank middle-aged man with greying hair and a lisp explains the scheme. It would involve Terry and me becoming a partnership, based on the island of Guernsey, with the aid of a Guernsey partner whom this man would find for us.
He was disarmingly open in acknowledging that there were risks. ‘The worst that can happen is that after six years you may have to pay it all back,’ he told us. ‘What if it’s all been spent on the houses and swimming pools it will enable us to have?’ asked I. His reply was equally cheerful. ‘You can always go bankrupt.’
A hot evening, but two pairs of cold feet as we left Michael’s.
Friday, August 4th
To Dog’s Ear Studio in Wapping, where Chris Orr was having an open day party to celebrate the completion of printing of the Arthur lithographs.2
London Docklands is a weird and wonderful place – a desert of empty warehouses and forlorn cranes frozen for ever in semi-tumescence. Dog’s Ear is on the third floor of one of these warehouses. Dark and solid buildings where your footsteps echo from stout stone floors and ring through empty stairwells. Then the delight of the studio itself – a long thin room of quite unusual scale, almost seventy yards long.
Chris is at the end of the room, setting bottles of wine out on a white-clothed table, and, as
I walk down the room to him, my customary sense of proportion and perspective is quite thrown. I never normally spend this amount of time crossing a room.
At the far end and beyond the table is the wide river access and, three floors below, with no walkway or garden or patio to interrupt access, is the green-brown slosh of the Thames. A stunning location – and a more dramatic London setting for a studio it would be hard to imagine. I feel that the docks are, must surely be, about to undergo a renaissance. Already hotels are creeping down from Tower Bridge, and these strong, spacious warehouse buildings with the immeasurable asset of direct river access, will, in ten or twenty years, be full and busy again.
To add to the pleasure of the place there was also the satisfaction of seeing the fruits of Chris and friends’ careful craftsmanship in the production of the lithographs. The end results were sharper, clearer and had much more impact on me than the original proofs.
Drove to the Savoy and there met Lome (discreetly behind shades).
Lome, en passant, muses on what it would be like if J Cleese and I were to do a show together … Now that would be a world-beater, he says, ever so gently.
Tuesday, August 8th
Out to dinner this evening with Anne Beatts – a Saturday Night Live writer who is over here – and Shelley Duvall, with whom she’s staying. Helen came along too, reluctantly at first, for this was to be a rare evening at home. Shelley is good company, though, tells a good tale and has an effortlessly appealing warmth which wins over one’s confidence easily. She’s very sharp and intelligent – except for buying a very small and cross dog, which leaves little pools all over the carpet.
She’s just had sixteen days off from The Shining, whilst Jack Nicholson’s back recovered, but is now back on the 8.15 to 8 routine at Elstree. She very much wants to borrow my tape of ‘Eric Olthwaite’, which she raves about, to show Jack and Stanley. Now there’s a thought.
Wednesday, August 9th
What a silly business I’m in. In what other walk of life would a 35-year-old company director be signing his tax return for the year whilst dressed as a Jewish shepherd? This was my first full fitting of the costumes for Brian – the project which will affect my tax bill more than anything else in the next couple of years.
Friday, August 18th
At the TV Centre for the dub of’Roger of the Raj’.
A depressing day. The show still lacks the humour of ‘Tomkinson’ or the impact of ‘Olthwaite’, or the good old reassuringly familiar territory of ‘Murder at Moorstones’.’Roger’ is quite an ambitious little script and needs to be very tight to work. It still is loose and lazy in vital areas – the acting, some of the lighting and the serious dearth of close-ups, which could have been used to great effect.
So today needed patience, time and tolerance. None of these seemed to be forthcoming from the dubbing editor. He was brisk, rather curt, and gave the whole session an unenjoyable and uncreative tension.
But the faster and less patient he became, the more I dug my heels in, voicing every suggestion and every tiny idea. Then at eight in the evening – after nearly ten hours’ solid dubbing – it became obvious we’d need more time and, as the show wasn’t due to go out until probably 1980, it seemed that such a thing wouldn’t be out of the question! The editor suddenly brightened, admitted he was tired, and made various constructive suggestions that we should all have talked over at ten this morning when we started.
As had now become an almost annual event, we escaped for a few days to Mary and Edward’s rural retreat in the Lot Valley.
Wednesday, August 30th, France
Woke at a quarter to eight and creaked my way downstairs as noiselessly as possible and pulled open the big, old, well-weathered wooden front door of the house.
The grass and the surrounding fields were in shade, as the sun does not mount the trees on the hill behind until nearly ten o’clock at this time of year. But it was dry, as it has been every day, and crisply cool. Not a breath of wind stirs the trees. The only sound is a distant dog barking and a very cod cock crowing. Everything feels fresh, clean and renewed.
Monsieur Crapaud, as we have christened the warty-backed toad who lives down in the bathroom, is easing his way around the shower floor – and we gaze at each other for a moment as I sit on the lavatory. Then he makes his stretched, rubbery way towards the door, where he hangs a sharp right turn and crawls under the washing machine.
Then into my white shorts, socks, gym shoes and ‘Central Park’ T-shirt from Macy’s and begin my last pre-breakfast run. Up through the woods – an uphill start and very vicious – through gorse bushes on the path with freshly spun spiders’ webs catching at my face. But the nearer I get to the top of the hill, the nearer I get to the sun and to the open ground.
Finally out of the gloom of oak and sweet chestnut saplings, beneath tall pines and into a sun-filled field of maize in hard red earth. Three times round this uneven rustic race-track (with three sprints), then down the far side of the hill and across a ridge covered in blue anemones, with copses and small, irregularly shaped, irregularly stocked fields of maize and vines and weeds and pasture, where sheep with bells graze on either side. And hillsides empty of buildings stretch away to the north-east and south-west, their colours softened by the subtle haze of morning sunshine.
I drank it all in today – my last run through this Elysian countryside for a year or more.
We’ve been in France for eight and a half days. The weather so warm, dry and settled that I estimate we spent 16 hours every day in the open air. They were commonplace and unremarkable holiday days. I wrote nothing and revelled in the complete lack of any vital tasks apart from those involved with day-to-day living.
Back home, it’s very cold and there’s a letter awaiting from Bryon Parkin1 – the carbon of a letter to Lome confirming that there is no way two of the Ripping Yarns can be sold to NBC for a special, as the contract with PBS has gone ahead.
Thursday, August 31st
Down to 2 PSW for all-day session of rehearsal. Feel drained physically by five, when we break.
In the evening I try to rally my flagging resources to write letters, etc, and to think sensibly about the consequences of Bryon Parkin’s letter about the Yarns. Lome rings – he’s equally depressed at the news, will call again in a week’s time … We confirm once again the ‘intent to work together’. Though when I stop and think about it, I’ve altered my perspective slightly after the stay in France. My scheme to retire at 40 and write and travel (write travel books – but decent, original, bright, funny ones) has been thrust well to the fore, the BBC has gone right to the bottom of the list and Python and Lome float somewhere in between.
Saturday, September 2nd
I take William down to Covent Garden, where they’re holding a two-day street festival. A genial, scruffy bunch of folk selling a lot of wholemeal bread and entertaining noisily and a little desperately in the shadow of the two big new office blocks that are rising up around them – showing that money, not good intentions, is still boss in Covent Garden, as in any other part of London.
But for the moment what’s left of the Alternative Society is all here today, and I even catch a nostalgic whiff of grass – a smell of ten years ago, when people like this had never really been seen on the streets of London before. The middle classes letting their hair down and coping, in one way, with all the guilt their parents left them.
Thursday, September 7th
To Redwood by eleven to record a radio commercial – the first I’ve done for a couple of years. It was an anti-smoking radio commercial made (on a pittance, of course) for the Scottish Health Council. I had asked Charles McKeown’ to come along and do it with me. Tony Herz of Radio Operators had written and was producing it. It’s one of several in the campaign, part of an impossibly uphill struggle to try and make non-smoking as glamorous as smoking appears to be.
From Redwood down through Covent Garden and along Fleet Street to the offices of Methuen.
&n
bsp; I talked myself rather rapidly into a one week book-signing, radio and TV promo-tour at the end of November. Suggested that we had a theme for the tour that was pertinent to the book – something like an expedition. This was eagerly taken up by Jan Hopcraft [the publicity manager], and hardened into Round Britain By Frog – the Palin/Jones expedition to British bookshops 1978. I hope this won’t sound too wet by November. But I made them promise to avoid extreme efforts at wackiness.
Saw some proofs of the book (artwork included) – enough to give me encouragement that at least we will be publicising and signing a well-made article. Will anybody come along, though? Nightmare vision of sitting in bookshops waiting for someone, having to resort to low methods of accosting passers-by.
To Robin Simmons for a quick Alexander reminder. Already feel myself tending to stiffen up in anticipation of the excitement of Tunisia, so must remember what I’ve learnt.
Sunday, September 10th
As a result of having time last week to plan for Le Grand Depart, this morning’s leave-taking is easier, emotionally and physically, than some I can remember.
It’s almost a psychic phenomenon, my departures, for some sixth sense seems to inform the ‘villagers’ that something is about to happen and, as I try discreetly to slip away, doors open and cars drive up and the place is soon like a stadium. Today they weren’t let down. An enormous American limousine, of the low, interminably long, black New York variety, swung into the village, and out stepped Dr Chapman in immaculate light grey suit, and matching it, and creating the final and complete effect of flamboyant elegance – nay, even stardom – was a light grey fedora. Never, outside of a sketch, have I seen the Doctor looking quite as dashing.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 65