John Lennie, the Methuen rep for Scotland, drives me to Edinburgh.
Terry J arrives. He and I go for a nostalgic walk up to the Royal Mile. We nose around the Cranston Street Hall in the traditional manner. TJ remembers the thrill of seeing the feet of a forming queue through a small window down in the toilets … That was fifteen years ago.’
We find ourselves in a wonderful, small, grubby, friendly bar in Young Street – the Oxford Bar. This is the glorious opposite of all the carpeted ‘lounges’ where drinks are now taken. It’s small and gossipy and quite uncompromising with regard to comfort and décor … definitely a new ‘must’ when visiting Edinburgh.
Thursday, November 30th, Caledonian Hotel, Edinburgh
Publication day for Ripping Yarns and St Andrew’s Day for Scottish people. Terry and I are hurrying along Queen Street. It’s a quarter past seven and still dark.
Arrive five minutes late for live interviews.
We’re out by 8.30. Time for an appalling breakfast at the otherwise splendid Caledonian, then we’re running along the gracious streets – this time to Radio Forth, where we record a one-hour chat programme with a man called Clark Tate. The chat is easy and comfortable and the time passes fast.
By grubby train to Glasgow. Through countryside thick with snow.
From Radio Clyde to Grant’s Bookshop. Heads turn as we enter. People look up uncertainly from their books. Bookshops are rather like churches – any incipiently flamboyant behaviour is rather discouraged. We settle down at our table and sign for an hour. Sixty books here, they reckon. Good reactions from people to the book and the series. Many want to know when there will be more …
A group of students attach themselves to us, one of them carrying the frog box2 to the Albany. One of them makes a perceptive remark when he observes ‘You’re just kids really …’
Wednesday, December 6th
At six o’clock I go down to John Goldstone’s office in D’Arblay Street. He has a two-page ad for Variety to announce the completion of filming. John takes all this side of the publicity very seriously. It’s odd, such a quiet man setting such store by making a noise, but I’m assured it’s essential with million dollar epics. Superman, I notice, has a ten-page ad in the latest Variety!
We both walk over to the Sapphire Theatre for the (much discussed and, for TJ, slightly feared) viewing of Julian Doyle’s Life of Brian!1
The film ran two hours and the reaction was very encouraging. The laughter (in scenes like Pilate’s first audience chamber and the Gaolers in the cell) was long and loud. The song at the end worked and there was plenty of quite unequivocal applause.
Julian has done a good job and provided TJ with a well-shaped, well-structured cut on which he can work to tighten up all the details. It was a very good reaction tonight and the film can only get better.
Friday, December 8th
Collected Rachel from school at twelve and she and I walked into Kentish Town to have lunch at a new McDonald’s there. Instead of seats they have perches – sloping plastic padded shelves which give you the feeling that they are trying to tip everyone out of the restaurant. Not entirely untrue, either – they’re obviously designed to discourage quiet sitting and reflection and increase cash-flow.
Schoolkids hiss ‘Who is he?’ amongst themselves after a couple of the staff have asked me to sign autographs. I maintain a stoic display of unconcern and attend to Rachel – who is a lovely companion.
A thought struck me as I left – the bags in which you are given food at McDonald’s are almost identical in texture, shape and size with the vomit bags tucked in the seat pockets of aircraft.
After a couple of hours of profitable writing on ‘Whinfrey’s Last Stand’, drove down to St Pancras and took the 4.16 to Sheffield. Was able to work on the train. Took a taxi up to the Cutlers’ Hall, where the Medical Society of Sheffield University were holding their 150th Annual Ball.
I speak for 20 minutes or so and despite, or perhaps because of, there being five speeches before me, mine is well received.
Afterwards I’m presented with a special brick and sign endless autographs. I have to stay and judge the cabaret acts, which is an impossible task as I can’t hear or see anything. About 12.30 they’re mercifully over and I make my judgement and present the winner with his trophy – a stainless steel bedpan with a plastic turd in it.
To think our life is in their hands.
Monday, December 11th
Visit the Royal Geographical Society, of which, thanks to Peter Luff1, I am now a Fellow. Complete peace and quiet, in a very avant-garde house, built in 1874 by Norman Shaw facing Hyde Park.
To me, the place was like Nirvana – for my earliest ambition, which endured for many years, was to be an explorer. And here I was, Fellow of a society set up in 1830, which has on display Charles Darwin’s application for membership dated 1838.
Tuesday, December 12th
Down to Neal’s Yard. Hive of activity. Val Charlton2 and Terry Gilliam are making Martians upstairs for the interior of the Flying Saucer in Brian, next door Terry J is editing and in the studio André has put together a demo of the new Brian song.
Walk through rainwashed Leicester Square. Pick up tickets for the Superman film on Saturday and Dame Edna’s new show, which opens tomorrow night.
Home to work on the Yarn with TJ.
Then Chris Orr arrives and I’m discussing with him the arrangements for further work on his ‘Arthur’ book (the revised, shorter version of which I like very much), when Roger Wilmut, a BBC sound engineer who’s doing a book on the Oxbridge revue and comedy Mafia, arrives.
Juggle all these people around and cope with a constant barrage of phone calls and am finally left talking to Wilmut about How It All Began. I’ve never felt less like talking about How It All Began – the whole madhouse here is more indicative of How It All Will End.
Sunday, December 17th
Ian and Anthea and Clemency and growing, toddling Grace,3 come round for roast lamb and apple crumble lunch. In the interval of one Barry Humphries show last week, Ian was up in the bar and overheard snippets of conversation between two people. One was accusing the other of’sighing’. ‘I wasn’t sighing.” Yes you were, you were sitting there sighing all through it.’The other then produced the sharp rejoinder ‘Don’t be so combative.’ Ian noted the whole exchange and, when he went back to Barry’s dressing room, told him of it.
He couldn’t believe his ears when, half-way through Edna’s monologue to a packed 1,500-strong house, Edna told of how she couldn’t take Norm to the theatre because he’d just sit there and sigh, and eventually become very ‘combatative’. Afterwards Barry said he’d slipped it in because of his enjoyment of the effect it would have on just two people. As Barry put it, it would make, for them, a truly ‘uncanny’ night in the theatre.
Wednesday, December 20th
Morose, east wind weather. Grey and with drizzle just this side of snow.
A power-cut yesterday blacked out the whole of France (bar Alsace).
London is full of queues at petrol stations because of rumours that there will be a tanker drivers’ go-slow in January. All in all it’s siege conditions again …
As the days get shorter and colder and darker a sort of pessimistic gloom descends. The next three months are low points for everybody, when our technology can’t quite cope and our ‘civilised society’ shows alarming cracks.
I cheer myself up writing copy for J Goldstone’s Variety ads for Brian. Reread the ‘Whinfrey’ script and tighten. It looks good, but I wish the uncertainty over the rest of the Yarns and the director could be sorted out, for I feel like writing now and yet if it’s to be top priority I need to know who’s doing them and when.
Thursday, December 21st
Goldstone rings. He’s very pleased with the Variety ad copy – it’s going into early Jan or mid-Jan issue. His plan is to create as much of a stir as possible inside the US before showing the assembly to distributors in late January. It�
��s essential to arrange a US distribution deal at least six or seven months in advance in order to have any chance of booking up cinemas.
He has a strange snippet of info – the film about Hitler called Hitler – A Career is attracting so many National Front supporters in the West End that they’re thinking of taking it off. First time I’ve ever heard of a film being taken off for being too popular.
By two this afternoon it’s almost dark. The sky is low and leaden grey and there’s rain and sleet and a chill wind. The sort of day which sends wise men to the travel agents.
Tuesday, December 26th
A return to the greyness – and not just outside, where a blanket of slow-spattering rain covered London. At about ten Overseas Telegrams rang – news from New York. ‘Not too good, I’m afraid,’ said the faceless man at the other end. ‘Eve died on Christmas Day,’ he reads.
The outcome, which Al feared for a long time, but which he only resigned himself to in a letter to me last September, of Eve’s recent severe depressive bouts (twice hospitalised) has finally come to pass.
At midday in NYC, I rang Al. Spoke to his son, John, who sounded tight and tense, but said it would mean a lot to Al that I rang. An hour later I spoke to Al himself. His voice cracked as soon as he spoke, though he said he’d been trying to keep himself together. Eve had committed suicide – no details – but John was asleep and Al had gone out for a walk. He returned to find an ambulance waiting there.
Now Al wanted to get away for a while. The apartment, which Eve found, Sag Harbor, which she adored, all were now an intolerable sorrow. The only thing that could in any way lighten the pain was that he had seen it coming. It was almost inevitable. As I said to Al, Eve had a terminal illness.
Friday, December 29th
The toyshop in Maiden Road opens for the first time since the holiday, and is visited largely by parents returning malfunctioning goods. Kindly, middle-aged women with headscarves can be heard at the counter asking for advice … ‘I pressed the auto-destruct and the bit came off …’ or ‘Every time it goes round a corner all the missiles fall out.’
I take Willy’s Scalextric controls, which have been such a headache over the last few days. It turns out I’ve got a new model on which the controls have been improved. He gives me some old ones, and the whole thing works perfecdy.
I then drive down to Dulwich, collect Granny for the day and drop in our Christmas presents to the Joneses. (They took Terry’s father and Norah, his new wife, to see TJ editing. They showed Norah some of the film, and according to Alison she was most offended! But then she’s from Welsh Fundamentalist stock and it’s as likely that a Welsh Fundamentalist will laugh at people cracking jokes on the cross as it is that Snowdon’s made of pâté.)
Over lunch at the Barque and Bite I try to allay my mother’s fears about the film – aroused by the indexing of our film on totally specious grounds by the Festival of Light.’ I hope she doesn’t feel she’s in for a rough year. Despite being a regular Telegraph reader, she’s still tough and bright and with a mind of her own, so I’m not too worried.
Sunday, December 31st
Helen and I were watching Top Hat last night before a blazing coal fire and Helen was forever parting the curtains and looking out in glee as the powdery snow, driven by a sharp, south-easterly wind, covered Oak Village.
As we drive down to Dulwich I listen to the car radio and hear tales of horror from all over the UK. Edinburgh is almost cut off from the rest of Scotland (a fact which the weather only confirms!) and Scotland is almost cut off from the rest of the UK. The police are advising only ‘essential’journeys.
The result is a wondrously empty London. Even the streets of the West End are white with caked snow.
More bad Christmas news – this time that Veryan’s mother died in a fire at her home early this morning. But Angela and Veryan want our visit to carry on as normal, and possible gloom is dispelled by pre-lunch cocktails with two neighbours and their three daughters, who bring with them a game called Twister, which involves participants in a grapple on the floor and, in the immortal words of Eric’s joke salesman, ‘Breaks the ice at parties’.
Driving back across Westminster Bridge at a safe and stately pace just before seven, with the Houses of Parliament floodlit and the bridge still uncleared of snow.
Al Levinson rings to wish me a Happy New Year. There was a memorial service for Eve yesterday and 150 people turned up. Which is very heartening, but only seems to emphasise the crippling irrationality of the condition that destroyed her. She was loved and she will be missed.
1978 passes – perhaps the swankiest year yet for me, what with two-week writing sessions in Barbadian luxury and elegance, a Concorde flight to the US, a week in New York with my own personal limousine (which I never used), and nine weeks of star treatment in Tunisia.
I feel that in the last year my work rate has slackened, but the slack has been largely taken up by increasingly complex business arrangements, more meetings and by a slowly, inexorably increasing number of memberships, demands for money, speeches or introductions to rag magazines – all the impedimenta of notoriety.
Next year we will have to live with the impact of the film. I know that, although now it seems that we just had a great deal of fun, both writing and performing, there is going to be something of a sensation when the subject matter is finally revealed.
1 Written by Graham Chapman, it was to be made later in the year. He wanted Moon to star in it.
1 Who looks after the house with Brown.
2 Sheffield-born comedienne (1945–95) with her own show on BBC. She had plastic surgery to make her nose smaller. ‘The old one kept knocking people off bicycles,’ Mark Lewisohn’s Guide to TV Comedy quotes her as saying.
1 I think I was battling with Daniel Martin by John Fowles.
1 Tania Kosevich became Mrs Idle in 1981.
1 Insider’s account of the Watergate scandal, by Nixon’s White House lawyer.
1 A friend from Oxford who was working at the time at Georgetown University in Guyana.
2 Gerry, an Australian, had been recommended to me by Eric Idles mother-in-law, Madge Ryan. Apart from installing false teeth, he also wrote the B-side of Eartha Kitt’s ‘An Englishman Needs Time’.
3 Bob Rafelson film starring Jeff Bridges and Sally Field.
1 Cartoonist and good friend. Never have I laughed so much with someone so morose. He died in 1994.
1 Film producer, specialising in Hammer horror films, and at the time working for EMI.
1 By now separated from her husband Michael.
1 She was an assistant stage manager at the Sheffield Playhouse for a time.
1 Catch phrase, ‘I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not,’ he originally joined as a writer, became the star and left after one year to be replaced by Bill Murray.
1 Herb Sargent, the head writer, brother of Alvin, the screenwriter (Ordinary People, Spider-Man, etc).
1 Actress girlfriend of Paul Simon. Favourite of Robert Altman’s. About to start filming on Kubrick’s The Shining with Jack Nicholson.
2 Agent, record producer, co-founder of Dreamworks in 1994.
3 She was known as New York’s Fashion Queen.
1 Bill Murray had joined the cast three months earlier.
1 Laraine Newman was one of the regular cast, who called themselves The Not Ready For Prime Time Players.
2 Al was also in All You Need is Cash, and now he has since made a lucrative career out of protest. He has his own show on TV and wrote the bestseller Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
3 Writer and cast member, brother of Bill Murray.
1 American merchant banker introduced to us by George Harrison. He’d been Peter Sellers’ financial adviser.
1 Much-sought-after entertainment lawyer. Known for ringing up his opponent and saying ‘I’m Oscar, what’s your best point?’
1 This was re-christened ‘Curse of the Claw’.
1 After a few more auditions Sue Jones-Davis
was confirmed in the role, and was brilliant.
1 Despite his separation from Anne, he was still, officially, the accountant for Terry and myself.
2 I’d decided, despite my earlier reservations, to publish Arthur through Signford Ltd.
1 Head of BBC Enterprises – sales arm of the BBC.
1 A versatile actor and writer who I’d met through David Leland. He appeared regularly in Ripping Yarns, as well as in a variety of roles in Life of Brian.
1 Gung-ho US war film of 1967, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson. It was marketed with the tag-line, ‘Train Them! Excite Them! Arm Them! … Then Turn Them Loose on the Nazis.’
1 Mr Praline was the name John gave to his man in the plastic mac.
1 Director of Photography – also for, among others, Bugsy Malone, Mississippi Burning and The Truman Show.
2 Friend of Terry J’s from Oxford and another of our rep. company.
1 At this time, church incense smoke was regularly used by directors to create a diffused light. Later it was proved to be dangerous to health.
1 Chris Langham, another of our rep. company and partner of Sue Jones-Davis who played Judith..
2 Python super-fan from Chicago, who had been given various parts in the movie. He later wrote one of the first histories of Python.
1 In Mandy’s kitchen, in which Judith tells the revolutionaries to stop talking and do something about it.
1Robin’s Nest, starring Richard O’Sullivan, was a big ITV comedy hit.
1 My new accountant.
1 Crisp (1843–1919) bought Friar Park in 1895. He, like George, was a keen horticulturalist. Unlike George, he was a fully paid up member of the Royal Microscopical Society.
2 My mother was born and brought up on Hernes Estate, which borders Friar Park.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 70