And Helen enjoyed much of the movie. Very praiseworthy of GC’s central performance.
Wednesday, October 31st
To an Oak Village Residents’Association meeting.
The chairperson took me aside at the start of the meeting, before I went in, to warn me about certain ‘activists’ on the Association and their dangerous work. Armed with these fears, and ever watchful, I approached the hall to find about six people sitting there. None of them really seemed to fit the bill as ‘activists’.
Anyway, I spoke up, rather insistently, about the appalling state of Lismore Circus and have undertaken to gather signatures about it. I was almost voted on the committee at one point, when Bruce Robertson proposed me, amidst uproar, after one lady had questioned the necessity for a committee at all and the chairperson had been accused of’intolerable restriction of debate’.
All excellent entertainment. I made a good friend out of the admirable Bruce Robertson, and I’ve also lumbered myself with the job of organising next summer’s street party.
Thursday, November 1st
A large Jaguar picks me up after lunch and takes me down to a BBC interview at Broadcasting House, this time with Gerald Priestland for the networked Today programme. John C is also on with me.
Priestland is enormous – he’s actually taller than John, but amiable and donnish. They play back his review of the film, which swings from great praise – ‘very funny … Pythons at their best’ – to a note of distinct criticism for our handling of the ‘Crucifixion’ sequences – or for the ‘Crucifixion’ sequence period. He equates it with ‘whistling at Auschwitz’ and to him it appears that we are condoning suffering.
JC answers smoothly, as if he’s rehearsed. I become a little tongue-tied faced with Priestland’s penetrating stare and huge bulk – and the always disconcerting sight of soundless technicians behind the control room glass, gazing impassively at me as if I were a goldfish gasping for breath.
But the interview seems to pass off well. Priestland is not huffy or offended, and we part good friends.’Here’s a sex manual for you, Michael,’ he jokes at one point, handing me a paperback by some theologian, titled The Orthodox Way.
Friday, November 2nd
Am working on the play in the solitude of No. 2 when Mrs B buzzes on the intercom, which she really can’t figure out very well, so I have to leave the brief progress I’ve made on the work anyway and cross over into No. 4. Here I find Mrs B talking to Spike Milligan on the telephone.
Poor Spike, who tried to phone after ‘Roger’, but Jill Foster Ltd would not give him my phone number, is now being given the cold shoulder by Mrs B, who, quite rightly, is trying to respect my privacy – as instructed. I apologise profusely to the great man, who tells me rather pitifully that he had only wanted to say how bloody marvellous ‘Roger of the Raj’ was, whilst his enthusiasm was white-hot. Now, as he says, it’s two weeks later and he thinks it’s bloody awful!
To hear Spike thus praise the show and tell me that there are only two people who make him laugh these days – myself and John Antrobus – is wondrous music to the ear. Only on Monday was I telling the listening millions on Desert Island Discs of how I used to race home from school, running two miles if there was no bus, pushing myself to the limits of physical endurance, just to get back in time to hear The Goons. Now, twenty-four years later, the creator of Eccles, Moriarty and Henry Crun is asking me to dinner.
This was worth interrupting a morning of interruptions for. Already, over breakfast, I was forced to read TG’s latest treatment for a new TG movie – this time just for kids.
I was still reading his synopsis on the lavatory at 9.30 when he called to hear what I thought. As I saw it, there were two courses of action open to me in the face of the Gilliam treatment. One was to agree, and the other was to agree instantly. After a half-hour’s chat I threw in my lot – cautiously – with what I feel is a much stronger movie for TG than Brazil.1
Tuesday, November 6th
Work on the play rewrites. Alternate feelings of elation and despair about its contents. Run on the Heath in light drizzle.
Drove over to JC’s for co-interview with a lady from LBC. JC expressed disillusion with the Labour Party – for whom both he and the lady once used to work. Inability to deliver is, JC feels, their main drawback.
Out in the evening to dinner with Spike, at his request, with Terry and Al as well. Everyone, apart from Helen and myself, seemed to be ill.
Spike quite subdued, but the kind, gentle and generous side of his nature was well to the fore. Shelagh said he’s very vulnerable and easily hurt and a meal like this boosts his confidence. They recently had dinner with Graham, who didn’t say anything. I rather enjoyed myself and was quite loud and ebullient.
Wednesday, November 7th
Heard from TG that Denis has told him to start work on his kids’ film – the money will be there! So within two weeks TG has written a synopsis from nowhere, sort of persuaded me into co-writing and has finance for an April/May shoot! He says as soon as he heard the news he went home and panicked.
Helen goes out to badminton, I put the children to bed and placate my mother, who is literally counting the hours until Brian is unleashed on the British public. She really does fear public outcry, picketings and general national anger and whatever I say can’t really calm her. I was able to tell her that the Festival of Light are now taking a much saner view of the movie and come to the conclusion that ‘it is extremely unlikely that the film would sustain a successful prosecution in English law’.
Really I feel just very tired. Tired of talking, tired of endlessly having to justify the film – to defend it against a controversy that will probably never happen. At least opening day is now less than twenty-four hours away.
Friday, November 9th
I go for a run across the Heath. Tonight is our confrontation with Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark [on BBC2’s Friday Night, Saturday Morning] and, as I squelch through the now leafless beechwoods and around West Meadow, with Kenwood House a glittering white symbol of order and reason in the background, I sort out my thoughts about Brian, and the points that the movie tried to make seem to be all to do with power – its use and abuse by an establishment.
As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning’s thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In fact I am about to type ‘I do not believe in God’, when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence.
Look for the last time at my notes and drive down through Aldwych and across Waterloo Bridge to the Greenwood Theatre. Over drinks we meet Tim Rice, the presenter – tall, open, unassuming and quite obviously a sensible and sympathetic fellow – then little gnomic Muggeridge – great smile and sparkling eyes – and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark – big, impressive, avuncular, cradling the second of his whiskies and complaining gently that he’d been told the wrong time of the film and had missed ‘some of it’. But his chaplain had told him all about it, he assured me. I found him quite amenable.
JC was, and always is, nervous at first and had asked Tim Rice to direct his early questions at me! As I found Tim so easy to talk with this was quite an easy task and I felt that I was being as fluent and as relaxed as I’d ever been. We must have talked for ten to fifteen minutes, getting a few laughs, making very clearly the point about Brian not being Jesus and the film not being about Jesus, and I think keeping the audience amused.
Then Stockwood and Muggeridge joined us and were asked for their opinion of the film. From the moment that Stockwood, resplendent in his purple bishop’s cassock, handsome grey hair, fingering his spectacles and his cross with great dexterity, began to speak, I realised his tack. He began, with notes carefully hidden in his crotch, tucked down well out of camera range, to give a short sermon, addressed not to John or myself but to the audience.<
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In the first three or four minutes he had brought in Ceauçescu and Mao Tse-tung and not begun to make one point about the film. Then he began to turn to the movie. He accused us of making a mockery of the work of Mother Teresa (a recent Nobel prize-winner), of being undergraduate and mentally unstable. He made these remarks with all the smug and patronising paraphernalia of the gallery-player, who believes that the audience will see he is right, because he is a bishop and we’re not.
‘If there’d been no Jesus, this film would not have been made,’ crowed Stockwood. I wanted to say ‘If there had been no Jesus, we wouldn’t have needed to make the film.’
Muggeridge, in his odd, obsessive way, accused us of denigrating the one man responsible for all the first works of art ever and made other thoroughly irresponsible digs. Vainly did John try and remind him that there were other religions in the world, that there was a civilisation before Jesus, that there have been artists who have not painted the Crucifixion or written about the Incarnation, and the world’s religions have never been above a bit of torture if it suited them.
No, Malcolm was gone, set on a bizarre course, armed with his own navigational guides, and nothing we could do could prevent him going straight for the rocks. But the Bishop was meanwhile throwing himself off the cliffs. Outrageously dismissing any points we made as ‘rubbish’ or ‘unworthy of an educated man’, he posed and preened and pontificated. And he ended the long ‘discussion’ by saying he hoped we would get our thirty pieces of silver.
In the hospitality room we were surrounded like heroes returning from a war. I was introduced to Raymond Johnston of the Festival of Light – always our most arch-enemies.1 Instead I found myself confronted with a thin, rather nervous man, a committed Christian, who had been embarrassed at the display of the Bishop. He (Johnston) had seen the film. He had found it quite clear that Brian and Jesus were separate people. He had many differences of opinion with us, but he thought the film not malicious, not harmful and, furthermore, he saw and appreciated that we were making very valid points about the organised religions which told you what to think, in the same way that Stockwood tonight had used the cheapest and most dishonest methods to tell people what to think.
Later I watched it go out and fortunately the Bishop’s ‘performance’ came over as badly on air as it did in the studio. TG rang as the last words of the interview faded and ranted with anger for a full half-hour. He thought that the programme was Python’s finest hour since the ABC trial.
Saturday, November 10th
I had only just got up this morning when my mother rang – quite incensed by the behaviour of Stockwood last night. At last I feel she realises what Brian is saying and perhaps feels that we do have a point, that religion can be criticised without malice or spite. She saw the Bishop as an Inquisitor – smug, fat and well-fed. Angela was with her, fortunately, and I think they both went to bed quite disturbed.
Sunday, November 11th
The Sunday reviews – the last main batch, thank God – are very favourable. The Observer is a rave, as are most of the popular papers (from whom I expected more disapproval). Once again the Telegraph shrinks from enthusiasm – as if unwilling to endorse us, which I regard as a sign that we may have hit the Establishment quite hard on the nose. But they positively state that the film will not harm anyone, and there should be no ‘shades of the Ayatollah’ over Brian.
Monday, November 12th
Final work through the play. Though I have misgivings about the ending, I deem it typeable – and Monday, November 12th goes down as the finish date of’The Weekend’. (I’ve gone for the simple title – either this or a totally silly one; had toyed with ‘4 Letters Beginning With H’.)
Tuesday, November 13th
Thankfully it’s a good day. Bright, dry and clear. To Heathrow to meet Al and Claudie off the 9.10 Pan Am from New York and Detroit. Then bring them back to Hampstead and the delightful Willow Hotel in Willow Road, which Jack Cooper has found for them. It’s wonderfully decorated with lacquered wood, pot plants, bamboo blinds à la Somerset Maugham, and a big, brass bed for the newly-weds on their ‘lune de miel’.
Wednesday, November 14th
Letter in The Guardian from the Vicar of Hampstead, very critical of Stockwood and Muggeridge, thinks that the church needs its pretensions pricking by such as Cleese and myself.
To Pizza Express in Hampstead for lunch with T Gilliam. TG has expanded his film well and wants to hear my views on the various episodes and once again to confirm my availability to write some material. I hope I will not regret saying yes.
Denis O’B rings to say that the first-week take at the Plaza is £40,000. ‘Forty thousand pounds!’ Denis incredulates in tones of almost religious fervency. It is impressive and has beaten the previous highest-ever take at the Plaza (which was for Jaws) by £8,000, with seven fewer performances. So all the publicity has had maximum effect.
Monday, November 19th
Started work on the new Python movie. A bright, crisp morning. Cycled to the meeting at 2 Park Square West and arrived about tennish.
Then a general chat about the world. The Anthony Blunt spy story1 is top news at the moment. America is about to indulge in its own maudlin fascination with power and privilege now that Ted Kennedy is running officially for President. We in beleaguered England, continually battered by stories of our imminent economic collapse, at least have one of our own scandals to keep us happy.
Have we not become as established as the Establishment we seek to kick? Are we not really licensed satirists? Keepers of the Queen’s Silly Things, enjoying the same privileges as the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures who has been revealed to have been a very naughty boy – but will be given the full protection of a Cambridge man in an English Establishment that is still Oxbridge-controlled?
JC thinks war is a limiting subject. El and myself both see it in wider terms. The talk then shifts, or is shifted, by TJ who is lobbying indefatigably for World War III, to a science fiction world of the future. Where very little has changed. Possibly a benevolent and very well-meaning society in which everything is attended to, but it is quite unworkable. Enormous queues to complain everywhere. Everyone born into this society, I suggest, is handed a raffle ticket on birth which gives him or her the chance of being PM eventually.
Some good chat – generally concerned with revealing the idiocy of many of our rules and regulations, hardly a new area, but there is a certain satisfaction in the combined strength of all our input.
We walk in the park, then lunch at our ‘regular’ round table by the window at Odin’s. Over Primeur, Muscadet, walnut and lettuce salads and liver, we become very happy and it’s decided that we shall not shackle ourselves with too much discussion – we shall go away for a couple of days and write anything. We pledge ourselves, like the Three Musketeers, that we will do all in our power to bring about a silly film. JC warns, splendidly, that ‘We’ll show them how silly a film can be.’
Wednesday, November 21st
At 3.30 to the Mornington Foot Clinic to have my corn attended to by Mr Owen. A small, distinguished, elderly man working in a small, undistinguished, elderly room. But he’s quite a character. Prophesying doom and the collapse of the world (at the hands of KGB-inspired anti-American Muslim rioters), as he slices into my corn and cauterises it most expertly.
Actually there does seem some cause for his concern as we approach 1980. Read in the paper today that armed men are holding hostages in Mecca – the most holy mosque in the whole Muslim religion ‘violated’. And the Ayatollah Khomeini still holds American hostages in Iran. All rather worrying. But my foot feels better!
Thursday, November 22nd
Drive down to TJ’s, stopping off at Henry Sotheran in Sackville Street – my favourite London bookshop – to buy a birthday present for T Gilliam, who is 39 today. At Terry’s it’s like old times, writing together up in his top room as darkness falls. TJ has written a classic piece about soldiers presenting their officer with a c
lock under fire. Really funny. We complete that and by 5.45 find ourselves with a large output – maybe 20 or 25 minutes, for the meeting tomorrow.
Up to T Gilliam’s for his ‘surprise’ birthday party, which isn’t really a surprise. Chris Miller is there and Elaine Carew and Richard Broke.1 Richard tells me that at the BBC Programme Review Board after the Friday Night, Saturday Morning epic the Head of Religious Broadcasting, Colin Morris, castigated the BBC for presenting two such ‘serious and brilliant’ performers as JC and myself with such ‘geriatric’ opposition!
Friday, November 23rd
Up at 8.10. Leave the house at 9.15 to drive to JC’s for writing session.
A very angry, abusive letter to The Times from a man called Allott in Finchley, who clearly doesn’t like the Life of Brian, but admits he hasn’t seen it. It is proposed to send a Python reply to The Times saying ‘We haven’t seen Mr Allott, but we don’t like him.’
Finally we start to read the first sketches of the new movie. Eric has a couple of quite tart monologues, then I read the first of our two blockbusters. It’s received with much nodding and the ‘Some good bits’ line. JC reads a long and rambling and not awfully funny piece about Kashmir and sex and male brothels, which doesn’t go down very well. It’s our second effort (mainly TJ’s), including the clock presentation, which is the one big hit of the session.
Sunday, November 25th
This is the day I should be looking forward to but am not. I have to give a party for Al and Claudie – or rather I want to give a party for Al and Claudie – but, as it turns out, I’ve rarely felt more in need of a Day of Rest.
Al is very morose, though tries his best. He has done little on his trip but stay in or on bed at the Willow Hotel and lately make several frustrating trips to the US Embassy, to find that he has serious problems with Claudie’s visa – if she tries to enter the US as Al’s wife. Al really should have checked all this out before he left, but that’s Al – we love him for his romantic enthusiasm, not for his practical knowledge of the immigration system of the US. But he is down in the dumps.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 80