We have broken all the rules – especially bringing Gerry, quite manifestly a female, into these hallowed quarters – but there has been no revolution or mass resignations, so he’s happy. I think he quite enjoys the frisson of naughtiness which letting us in involves. When it boils down to it, there are not many places we have visited whose head isn’t turned by the BBC’s name and the BBC’s money.
Monday, February 26th, Southwold
My long-delayed visit to Southwold.
The weather continues fine, clear and sunny – the countryside up in East Anglia emerging from its most severe winter since 1947. Mother has survived the worst that this harsh winter can bring – and on her own as well. She looks a good colour and seems very bright and vigorous.
After lunch, a walk on the front to survey the damage of the gales – breakwaters smashed like matchsticks and the pier, landmark of my courting days with Helen, lies truncated, a mass of bent and twisted metal curving up from the sea.
Watch a marvellously constructed, very funny Fawlty Towers. It’s so good it makes me want to give up!
In bed by eleven.
Tuesday, February 27th, Southwold
After breakfast, I work for a couple of hours, bringing the diary up to date and rewriting (again) D Leland’s speech as the Football Manager. I think it should be a nervous breakdown, Alan Bell doesn’t. Difficult to decide, but I think I must follow my own instinct. Dictate new nervous breakdown speech to the office over the phone.
Ring JC on impulse and congratulate him on last night’s disgustingly funny Fawlty. JC worried that three jokes out of the still to be broadcast Fawltys have appeared in films he’s seen over the last couple of weeks. Particularly worried that a scene of Fawlty talking to a dead body, which he wrote a year ago, has just cropped up in Altman’s A Wedding.
He is very anxious to be in one of the next two Yarns. He says he will do anything silly for expenses only – provided 65% of his body is in shot.
Friday, March 2nd
Woke early – rewriting my words for the day over in my mind. The excitement and peculiar nervous tension involved in the first day of any new acting project does not lessen as the time goes on. Instead one grows to learn to accept it and how to deal with it, but it’s still there. Tight stomach and loose bowels.
Today is the first day on the first of the two remaining Yarns – with a predominantly new crew and with scripts patched and sewn together more rapidly than the others.
Helen dropped me off at Russell Square, after I’d taken Rachel to playschool, and we set to on the single-shot, virtually one-take sequence in which the Orson Welles Introducer is consistently interrupted by everyday life when attempting to introduce a film in the centre of London.
Of course life imitated art. At one point a van drew up exactly where our van was due to draw up – and Alan exactly re-enacted the script when he dashed across the road and shouted at the van driver to move on. At times it seemed quite farcical – a man detailed to stop any traffic impeding the progress of our van ended up stopping our van as well.
Then an hour and a half with an affable, weather-beaten jack-of-all-trades called Reg Potterton, who interviews me for one and a half hours for a Python Playboy interview. I like him, but an accident-prone day continues when he finds that he’s recorded my interview over Terry Jones’s!
Finally back home at six. Plenty of letters and phone calls and words to learn for a more gruelling filming day tomorrow – when we start at 8.30, on interior scenes, with actors I don’t really know. A baptism of fire for all of us.
Saturday, March 3rd
The first problem of the day is to sort the set out – make suggestions about the look of the office without hurting the designer’s feelings too much. There isn’t much to do – a few adjustments – replacements of old maps for the recent ones of Europe which the props buyer has inexplicably provided with a great lack of historical sense.
More formidable a task is to tone down the performance of two of the actors – Jack May and Gerald Sim – who are delivering caricatures.
I watch the scene play through, rather anxiously, and constantly have to step in to adjust the actors’ performances. I’ve given up doing this through the director as it just wastes time, and Alan seems very happy for me to talk to them whenever I want.
We complete the scene in mid-afternoon, but the weather is grey and dull beyond the windows and we shall not get the full value of our priceless, unchanged London skyline in the background.
Sunday, March 4th
Quick Sunday lunch, then on to a packed Penzance-via-Bristol train at Paddington. Work on the script – incorporating adjustments suggested by Terry at our meeting on Friday lunchtime.
Maria Aitken1 and Edward Hardwicke (Otway and Girton) are the only other members of the unit on the train, which reaches Penzance a little after a quarter past nine. The Queen’s Hotel, predictably and with some relish, greet us with the news that we can’t eat there.
Maria is very complimentary about the script and says her husband (Nigel Davenport) laughed aloud whilst reading it, which is, she tells me, a rare thing. All this helps as I feel rather defensive about ‘Whinfrey’.
Monday, March 5th, Penzance
Our luck is in. Awake to fine, almost cloudless skies. The location – around Cape Cornwall – is superb, and can be seen and used today to real advantage. An excellent first day – spent clambering up precipitous cliff sides and in and out of caves wearing dressing gown and pyjamas. Weather remains immaculate, though the wind is so strong I have to have my trilby hat stuck onto my head with double-sided tape.
Wednesday, March 7th, Penzance
The gods are with us. The sea on this side of the peninsula is millpond calm, Penzance quiet and settled once again in its own particular brand of out-of-season silence.
By a combination of eliminating our second cliff location today, good weather, and pushing a reluctant cameraman into an hour’s extra shooting, we catch up all we lost yesterday. The sun is bright again – and the cliffs are well displayed. The wind has shifted to the north and is obligingly whipping up the sea below us and crashing it against the cliffs to spectacular effect.
Sunday, March 11th
Eric writes from the Chateau Marmont, thanking me for the Life of Brian book material and brimming over with facts and figures about the vast numbers of copies we’ll be selling of this book we know nothing about. He’s also floating the idea of an LA stage show in September.
Monday, March 12th
Supposedly a day off before completing ‘Whinfrey’ on the Ealing stages, but the continued strike of riggers and drivers has changed all that. At the moment we can do no more filming until the dispute is settled – and I hear that the last Fawlty Towers episode has been cancelled altogether.
Graham Chapman rings from LA. Mainly to voice anxiety over a page of the book he has seen, which, he says, reads like the story of how Eric Idle put the Life of Brian together. GC is much concerned with this interpretation of Python history – probably because he’s not mentioned at all – but it does increase my own concern that this book is becoming Eric’s fait accompli, and we simply must see what is and isn’t in it.
Wednesday, March 14th
Cold and wet. North-easterly winds roll the clouds across and I’m glad we’re not down in Devon trying to pick up shots. In fact the Yarns remain immobilised. Word is that the terms on which the BBC will climb down over the strike are settled, but the strikers have to meet and are unlikely to start the transport moving again until tomorrow morning. So two more unexpected days of peace lie ahead.
One of the many tests of my resolve to write a book this year – when Frank Dunlop rings and asks me if I would like to play in a new West End production of Rookery Nook. Ben Travers revivals are all the thing now, and Dunlop, who sounds straightforward, friendly and totally without bullshit, reckons Rookery Nook is his best.
I’m so looking forward to writing that it would take something very impor
tant to sway me. Farce in the West End would be delightful, but I don’t think I really want to make my mark as an actor of farce. Still, can’t put the phone down without pangs of regret.
To dinner with the Davidsons. Sheila Pickles is there. Much talk of LA, from which she has just returned. She stayed with Zeffirelli, who is reported to be very cross with the Tunisians for letting Pythons use his sets, and has threatened to decline Bourguiba’s offer to make him Minister of Culture!
Sunday, March 18th, Black Horse Hotel, Skipton
Drive to the hotel in Skipton where I’ll be staying for most of ‘Golden Gordon’. A short back and sides to turn me into Gordon Ottershaw. A drink and a meal at the hotel – cooked by a chef who has seen the Holy Grail five times and who approached me, with trembling hands, clutching one of our LPs and five or six of our cassettes for signing. He and his wife will look after us well, I think …
Then to the elegant, tasteful portals of Kildwick Hall, by whose mighty fireplaces Laurence Olivier stood in the film Wuthering Heights, and on whose frieze mouldings are the letters W and C – C signifying the Currer family, friends of Charlotte Brontë, and from whom she took her pen name Currer Bell.
Sitting amidst this unretouched history, knocking back scotches in fairly rapid succession, is Bill Fraser, with whom I play the Foggen (scrap merchant) scene tomorrow, and a rather narrow-faced ex-tax inspector, who appears to be the hotel’s only other resident.
Bill F looks older, rounder and a little smaller than I remember him.1 But he is 71 and he has this day completed recording of the Trevor Griffiths’ play Comedians for the BBC. He finished at 5.30 and was driven straight up here. So no wonder he’s winding down.
A joke for bedtime – clamber into my pyjamas, only to find they’re Thomas’s. I laugh out loud and feel very silly with the little jacket half on before I realise.
Monday, March 19th, Skipton
Today the last of the Ripping Yarns gets underway. I’ve no regrets that it is the last one, and yet I’m looking forward to putting it together almost more than any of them.
Bill is quieter this morning – and a little crustier – but he’s good on his lines and turns in an effective performance, though not quite as dominating as I’d hoped. But by half past six we have four and a half to five minutes in the can.
Dickie Betts, the lighting gaffer, specially made a point of coming up to me and saying what a good piece of writing the scene was. This I take as a very high compliment, and I hope it will bode well for the rest of the filming.
For myself I found the day hard work and I was very happy to have cleared my own private hurdle – the rattling-off of two complete football teams, both with slightly different players’ names. In a strange way the last week’s enforced lay-off made it harder to start again. Still, now the wheels are turning once more and Gordon Ottershaw is beginning to come to life.2
Bad news at the end of the day – Richard Beckinsale has died: a heart attack at 31. Salutary perhaps. He had been working incredibly hard over the last two or three years, and especially recently. Didn’t know him really, but Judy Loe, his missus, was in ‘Claw’ and a lovely person to work with.
Meal at Kildwick with a relaxing Bill. He’s been very professional all day, not touching a drop, but he’s now downing scotches with indecent haste and being charming and cantankerous.
Talks wryly of working at the RSC with Trevor Nunn. ‘Well, we didn’t really see eye to eye … you know, we’d all be in rehearsal and asked to think ourselves into being someone else, and they’d all crouch down on the stage and I’d go off in a corner and if anyone came along and asked what I was I’d say “A piece of shit” and they’d leave me alone.’
Tuesday, March 20th
In the evening we shoot some 24 carat gold exteriors at Kildwick Hall. The fine Jacobean facade illuminated by one single 250 amp arc light on a 120 foot hoist. Dickie Betts is in his element, strutting squat and small, with his Alaskan trapper’s fur hat on and talking into his radio – ‘Bring the moon round, Ron,’ and other classics.
Friday, March 23rd
A real bonus – a heaven-sent reward for our dogged perseverance. Sun shone all day and we moved to the football pitch at Saltaire to shoot arrivals of Bill Fraser (who’d patiently waited in solitary splendour at Kildwick for two or three days, waiting for the weather to clear) and Teddy Turner (a marvellous piece of casting by Syd Lotterby).
Then it was over to David Leland and his group of footballers – all cast at David’s suggestion, and mostly from ‘Talent’. David was excellent – efficient and very funny. The whole scene played beautifully and David did his long speech in one take. The crew and onlookers applauded as he raced off into the distance with his trousers down. Four and a half minutes in the can in a couple of hours. A reviving and morale-boosting day.
Sunday, March 25th, Skipton
Today the rain comes – and today is our only day off. Breakfast, buy The Observer, read hardly any of it, and retire to my low-ceilinged room looking out over the High Street to read through page proofs of the Brian book, which Eric has sent over.
Vaguely unsettled by the balance/bias of the book. Tendency to hagiolatry of Python – as well as an overbalance into the more specific, less subtle, Biblical parodies. Not a book I feel warm to so far.
No chance of working above the noisy bar of the Black Horse, so I drove on to a pub called the Cross Keys at West Marton, which sells Theakston’s beer on draught. Bought a pint, found a table and settled to write some material for the Python book. But trying to be as anonymous as possible doesn’t really work. People kept coming up with lines like ‘Excuse me, but we’ve got a bet on – are you Eric Idle?’. One kind lady bought me a beer – she had watched and enjoyed all the Yarns, especially ‘Eric Olthwaite’.
To bed unusually early – about 11.15 – after watching heroes of mine, the Joint Stock Theatre Co, made to look pompous and very pretentious in a TV documentary. God save us from TV arts documentaries. Oh, and help Ripping Yarns with the weather next week …
Tuesday, March 27th, Skipton
Our second attempt at the football match is rained off after two shots. Two to three thousand pounds in cancelled fees, etc. Gwen Taylor summoned from her day off, etc, to go back to shoot interiors at Brontë Street.
This evening eat at Oats with Gwen and Syd Lotterby – Syd’s status enhanced by his collection of a BAFTA award for Best Comedy Series last week – Going Straight – Barker, Clement/La Frenais. We will need to use all this status too, as the ‘Gordon’ costs look like escalating almost to ‘Whinfrey’-ish heights.
Leave at ten to collect John Cleese from the 10.20 train at Skipton. Arrive at my car to find fans clustering around. ‘Oh, sign this.’ ‘I can’t, I have to meet a train.’Visions of Cleese standing on a cheerless station whilst I sign autographs causes me to be uncharacteristically abrupt with the fans. ‘Well, give us a kiss then,’ they say, as I slam the car door and search frantically for keys. Then I hear one say ‘John Cleese is in there, you know’ and point to the hotel I’ve just come out of.
Out of the car, across to the Black Horse – the downstairs bar, full of young and younger folk, is buzzing with excitement. I push through people looking for the normally unmissable Cleese. Everyone grins – they think it’s a Python sketch. I’m directed upstairs, where more excited fans are clustered. It’s like a scene out of the Life of Brian.
Finally track him down in Ron, the manager’s, sitting room. He had reached Leeds by train, then been given a lift to Ilkley, and had taxied on from there to Skipton. Ron, the manager, a rather overweight, round-shouldered fellow with a thick head of red hair that I’m told is not his own, became conspiratorial and told me which button to press on the telephone in order to summon him, and at a moment’s notice he would smuggle us out via a special back route.
So a few minutes later buttons were pressed, back stairways descended, back doors opened and John and I walked out into Skipton High Street, feeling like newl
y-released prisoners.
Drove JC over to Kildwick Hall, where the Davises1 greeted us and Hassan, the Moroccan waiter, hovered, mouth half-open, waiting to be introduced – a perfect echo of Manuel. After a few minutes the temporary excitement subsided and John and I talked for an hour or so.
At one in the morning, I drive back into Skipton, only to find the door of the Black Horse firmly bolted. Knocking won’t raise anyone, no windows are open and they don’t answer the phone.
Drive back to Kildwick and put up for the night there in conditions of extreme comfort – yet I have to sleep in my shirt and they don’t supply toothbrushes.
Wednesday, March 28th, Skipton
Wake early as usual. So many thoughts streaming through my head. Filming a Yarn requires not just enthusiasm but stamina. Feel like a coachman controlling fiercely energetic horses, straining to go forward – a crew of fifty or sixty, extras, actors like Bill F, John C, David Leland and Gwen – lots of egos to be harnessed then turned in the right direction. And the weight of it all ultimately devolves on me – I’m the one holding all the pieces together. Only three or four more days to hang on.
It’s very jolly working with John at Brontë Street. He looks fine in 1930s gear and wide felt hat. A good-humoured, happy atmosphere. Smash up Brontë Street and by six we are finished there.
Sunday, April 1st
Back home for a while now. Work out that I’ve been away four of the last nine months.
Today we meet with Denis O’Brien. Eric brings the mock-up of the book, which looks wonderful and allays most of my fears. Everybody approves. Denis O’Brien then fills us in on distribution information. Paramount, MGM, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal have all turned the film down. Paramount after being incredibly keen, until one powerful man on the board said no. Paramount and Universal both took offence at the unsympathetic Jews in the film (e.g. Otto, etc).
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 73