Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Afterwards we met Phil McCall, the Widow Twankey of the pantomime. He regarded us cautiously at first, as though he felt rather guilty about the way the pantomime had been done – but when he realised that we didn’t hate every minute of it, he became quite friendly, and we went next door, to the Close Theatre Club – a student-run club with a bar and home-made food. We ate plates of chilli and drank a bottle of scotch, which Phil McCall produced, surreptitiously, from his coat. We parted on very convivial terms, and walked back across the bridge to our hotel.

  In one of the huge high-ceilinged rooms, we watched the Marx brothers film Duck Soup on TV.

  Sank, happily, into bed at about 1.00.

  Around this time Python morphed into a stage show. Tentatively at first, but it was the start of something that was to snowball from the West End to Broadway and eventually to the Hollywood Bowl.

  Sunday, January 31st, Coventry

  As Terry and I walked through the deserted, rain-soaked streets of Coventry at 11.45 at night, for the first ever Python stage show, it was amazing, exciting and rather frightening to turn the corner and see the Belgrade Theatre seething with people like bees round a honeypot. Here in this silent, sleeping city was a busy, bustling theatreful of people – nearly 1,000 of them. From behind stage one could hear just how enthusiastic they were – there was shouting and cheering before anything had happened. There were ten men dressed as ‘Gumbies’ in the front row of the circle.

  When, at 12.00, the house lights faded, John entered as the Spanish narrator in the ‘Llama sketch’, and there was a mighty cheer and prolonged applause. As soon as Gumby came on for ‘Flower Arrangement’, the show ground to a halt again with almost hysterical cheering greeting each line (a good example of the ‘primitive’ style in comedy). For the first half of the show there was a vocal majority killing lines, laughs and all attempts at timing. After a while they seemed to tire themselves out, and one had the satisfaction of hearing people laugh at jokes and words, rather than cheering each character who came on, at random throughout the sketch.

  We finished at about 1.30 a.m. but the audience refused to leave – even after the auditorium lights had been on for some time. If any of us so much as put a head around the curtain there was wild applause. After two or three minutes of this, John went out and spoke to them like the good headmaster he is – thanking them for being a wonderful audience and adding savagely ‘Now will you please go home.’ This they enjoyed even more – and it must have been over five minutes after the end that they at last stopped applauding.

  It was a strange kind of hysteria for a comedy show to create – one can’t imagine it happening to previous ‘cult’ shows like Beyond the Fringe or TW3 — perhaps it is because Monty Python itself is less controlled and contrived than these shows. We have created characters which we ourselves find hysterical, why should we then be surprised that an audience reacts in the same way?

  We walked back to the hotel at 2.30 a.m. – with half a dozen grown men with knotted handkerchiefs over their heads disappearing down the road in front of us.

  Monday, February 1st, Coventry

  After breakfast at a café across from the hotel – called, believe it or not, ‘The Gay Gannet’, Terry and I drove off in the Simca to revisit my old school at Shrewsbury.

  Terry is such a good companion – his insatiable sense of wonder and discovery added immeasurably to the enjoyment of seeing the school again. I showed Terry the studies, stone passages and stark bedrooms, which had virtually been my life for five so-called ‘formative’ years. They hadn’t changed much, except that the studies seemed to have no restrictions on decoration – every one seemed to be decorated with rich curtains, colours, and huge photos of Mick Jagger. The only really sensuous study in my time was John Ravenscroft’s (now John Peel, the Radio One intellectual). On the notice board was a rule about women in studies – women in studies! An unthinkable sacrilege ten years ago.

  In the school buildings there was even more exciting evidence that sacrilege had been, and was being committed throughout the school. On every landing, and on seemingly every spare piece of wall, in what had been dull passages and dark corridors, there were paintings done by the boys. One of them, on the same dour landing I must have passed thousands of times, on my way to the History Library, breathlessly late, on this same landing was a large canvas depicting a clothed youth on a bed, with three ladies around him, wearing only black stockings, suspenders and pants, revealing their crutches provocatively. Presumably it was intended to represent the schoolboy’s dream – but to hang this dream in the school buildings seemed to be the best thing that had happened to Shrewsbury since Philip Sidney.1

  Wednesday, February 3rd, Southwold

  Father is now on L-Dopa, a new breakthrough in the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. It is still very expensive (each pill costs about 18/-), but his shaking seems very much better. His movements, and especially his grasp, are becoming more impaired, Mummy now has to help with things like tying shoelaces and buttoning awkward buttons. He takes about three-quarters of an hour to get up, shave and dress.

  We went for a walk along Southwold front, in the gathering dusk. There was an exceptionally beautiful sunset – so many shades, from rich deep red to delicate pale pink. We drove on to the Common for a while and watched it.

  Wednesday, February 10th

  We lunched today at the BBC, Kensington House, and talked with the producers of The Car versus the People, a documentary in which we have sadly become involved in. The lunch was quite pleasant – little was decided, though much was said, but we did meet Bill Tidy, one of the funniest cartoonists in the country. In fact, it is very, very rarely that a Tidy cartoon doesn’t raise at least a titter in me. He’s a Yorkshireman, beer-drinking and unaffectedly open and straightforward. He carries around with him the convivial atmosphere of a local pub on a Friday night – evident in the way he leans back in his chair and the way he tells stories. He seems to be getting enormous pleasure out of life. He has, it turns out, a child who is either ill or handicapped, and one is enormously glad for the child’s sake that it has him as a father.

  After our lunch grinds to an inconclusive halt at 3.00, we make our way over to TV Centre to appear on Ask Aspel – a show, compered by clean-shaven, charming, man for all seasons Michael Aspel. The idea is to play clips from BBC programmes which children have requested. Apparently they have a request for some Monty Python clip almost every week – giving the lie perhaps to Paul Fox’s confident assertion that Monty Python would never work in a pre-nine o’clock slot.

  Monday, February 15th

  Decimal Day. Today, not only our old currency, but a small portion of our everyday language dies for ever and is replaced. In looking back, this day will perhaps appear as just another step away from the archaic obstinacies that set Britain apart from other countries of the world, and a step which should have been taken much earlier.

  Funnily enough, I find myself resenting the new decimal coinage far less than the postal codes (which I fear will one day replace towns with numbers – and after towns streets, and after streets …?), or the all-figure telephone numbers which dealt one mighty blow to local feeling in London and, in the process, made it practically impossible to remember phone numbers.1

  But the decimal coinage system seems to clarify, rather than confuse. I have no sentimental regrets at the passing of the threepenny bit, or the half-crown, only slight irritation that the sixpence – an old coin – should be incorporated into this new system, even temporarily, and also that for some inexplicable reason a number of smaller shops are still working in pounds, shillings and pence.

  Wednesday, February 17th

  At 3.00 I arrive at the studios of Advision to do a voice-over for a Chesswood creamed mushroom commercial. It is the first of about half a dozen voice-over offers which has come to anything – which is pleasing because, of all the pride-swallowing things one does for money, voice-overs are the least painful. They generally take up on
ly an hour or so of one’s time, your face does not appear to link you with any product and the money is useful but modest enough to allay any guilt feelings about selling out.

  There was the usual gaggle of advertising men present and, judging by the subtlety and intellectual complexity of the advert, six reasonably intelligent wombats could have done the job just as well.

  Sunday, February 28th

  I had been feeling guilty for some weeks that I had made no effort to follow up my decision to have William christened at St Martin’s, the local church standing amongst the rubble of the Gospel Oak rebuilding scheme. And today I took the snap decision to go. I was literally summoned by bells. It was a strange feeling going into a church I did not know for a service that I did not really believe in, but once inside I couldn’t help a feeling of warmth and security. Outside there were wars and road accidents and murders, striptease clubs and battered babies and frayed tempers and unhappy marriages and people contemplating suicide and bad jokes and The Golden Shot, but once in St Martin’s there was peace. Surely people go to church not to involve themselves in the world’s problems but to escape from them. And surprisingly also, here in the middle of devastated Kentish Town, was a large, unusually designed stone building, with polished pews and shining brass and a vicar and faithful people gathered. Though rationally I would find it difficult to justify my participation, I nevertheless was glad I went. In a funny way, I was really moved by the faith of the fifteen old ladies, four men, a choir (black and white) who were there with me. But seeing the vicar afterwards I felt a fraud.

  Friday, March 5th

  In the evening, a sneak preview of And Now For Something Completely Different. It is on at the Granada, Harrow, with [Gore Vidal’s] Myra Breckinridge. The manager is there to meet us when we arrive at the cinema. We are led upstairs and seated on the left-hand side of the circle, about six rows from the front. The whole idea of showing us ceremoniously to these seats is rather ludicrous, as the place is virtually empty.

  Then the curtains draw back and there is our film. I found it dragged heavily and parts of it were downright dull. But my judgement is probably coloured by seeing most of it before – several times. I still feel sad that we didn’t write more original material.

  Sunday, March 14th

  Python’s success has resulted in a number of offers – e.g. a Python Christmas book (Methuen), three separate record contracts (Decca,Tony Stratton-Smith1 and good old BBC Enterprises, who despite themselves appear to have sold over 10,000 of our first LP), merchandising T-shirts, West End shows for Bernard Delfont, etc, etc.

  Terry and I and T Gilliam feel very much that we are in danger of losing sight of the wood for the trees. Python is a half-hour TV show and cannot easily be anything else. Any transformation of this show onto record, or onto the stage, will inevitably lose something from the original. The alternatives are therefore to put out these weaker substitute Pythons and make money from very little work, or else to work hard to make everything Python is involved in new, original, critical and silly. This requires a great deal of effort and, as all of us are at the moment employed on other pressing projects, no-one seems willing to expend it. So we stumble on, with no great sense of direction. Like the record and the film, we have already stumbled into unsatisfactory compromises. I think there are a great many ahead.

  We now have John Gledhill – of the Roger Hancock office – acting as the organiser and agent for Python Productions. It is going to be a hell of a job. Today we talked about notepaper!!

  Some kind of sanity has prevailed, in that John C, after being reluctant to do any more TV Pythons, is gradually becoming one of the staunchest advocates of a new series, to be made in the autumn.

  Monday, March 29th

  Today, more filming for the May Day show,1 including one gag involving John and myself – in the Grimsby Fish-Slapping dance – which ends up with my being knocked about eight feet into the cold, green, insalubrious waters of the Thames. However, once the waiting is over, this kind of stunt is quite pleasurable – it should almost certainly look funny and you are immediately fished out, undressed and given brandy, which is better treatment than most people who fall in the river. Also you experience this pleasant feeling that, just by jumping into the river, you have justified your existence for that day, and can relax into a state of quiet euphoria.

  Friday, April 23rd, St Andrews

  The rain poured down all day. Terry rang and said that he and Alison had decided to go up to St Andrews (for our cabaret with John)2 at lunchtime. As I had to wait until six o’clock for a dubbing session, I booked myself on to the flight to Edinburgh.

  I was met by a cab driver who was to take me to St Andrews. We drove north, over the Forth Road Bridge and up to Kinross on the motorway. This then petered out, and the roads were narrower, more silent, with occasional holes, filled with deep puddles. What with the driving rain, the wind and the increasing remoteness of the area, it was, as the cab driver remarked, ‘real Dracula weather’.

  We arrived at St Andrews at 2.30. The hotel was beside the sea and, although I couldn’t see the waves, their noise was quite deafening. I paid the cab driver £10, and he set off back to Edinburgh.

  In the hotel I had the following conversation with an obliging night porter:

  Night Porter: ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  Traveller: ‘Well, that would be nice – but have you anything stronger?’

  Porter: ‘No, no, can’t do that, sorry, not now.’

  Traveller: ‘Oh, dear.’

  Porter: ‘Would you like a glass of beer?’

  Traveller: ‘Yes, that would be fine.’

  Porter: ‘Righto.’

  Traveller: ‘There’s not the slightest chance of a drop of scotch?’

  Porter: ‘A beer and a scotch?’

  Traveller: ‘Yes, please.’

  Porter: ‘Righto.’

  Saturday, April 24th, St Andrews

  My eight o’clock alarm call with newspapers arrived at 7.30, without newspapers. I drank a cup of tea and read a little, then lounged in the bath and pondered rather gloomily on the amount of work that lay ahead today.

  At 2.30 we turned up at the Younger Hall, whose interior was as cold and inhospitable as the exterior. The most obvious problem we were going to have to face was the acoustics. One’s voice simply died about half-way into the auditorium, unless we spoke at full blast. With long sketches such as ‘World Forum’, ‘Lumberjack Song’, ‘I Don’t Go Out Much Nowadays’ monologue,1 ‘Gambolputty’, ‘Pet Shop’ and gross and noisy ones like ‘Shabby’ and ‘Gumby Flower Arranging’ to do, this didn’t bode well for two performances.

  There was no time to eat, and hardly any to drink, before the first show. As usual the house was packed and the audience consistently appreciative. But it isn’t a performance I shall remember with much pride. In the back of my mind throughout was the spectre of a second performance, and the gradual deterioration of my voice as I strained and shouted my way through. The ‘Lumberjack Song’ was a disaster. John, as the Colonel, came on and stopped it once, and we all trailed off and then had another bash – only slightly less distinguished than the first. My long monologue,’I Don’t Go Out Much’, was delivered badly and without much confidence.

  From the very start of the second performance it was obvious that they were a noisier, more appreciative audience – many of them little short of ecstatic. I know I used them disgracefully, with shouting, grins, nods, ad-libs, etc. But it was amazing how much more impact every item had. For about 80 minutes it was almost five laughs a minute – ‘I Don’t Go Out Much’ went down as successfully as it used to in Edinburgh – thus justifying Terry’s faith in it (I don’t think I would have put it in the show). All in all, this was one of the great performances. I especially enjoyed corpsingjohn (he maintains I got him five times).

  Wednesday, May 12th

  Terry and I have been working fairly solidly together – firstly finishing our eight-sketch commitm
ent for The Two Ronnies – which has turned out to be the most unrewarding task financially and artistically. The sketches are drawn from us with lavish praise and unrestrained enthusiasm – and yet when we see them on TV they have been changed and coarsened and we are not happy.

  But secondly we have been writing our Munich show,1 which has been like old times, with lots of wild ideas developing.

  On May 5th I was 28, and on May 6th at lunchtime we heard that we had come second at the Montreux Festival – winning The Silver Rose. The winner was an Austrian show, which everyone said was exactly like Python and I must say the title – ‘Peter Lodynski’s Flea-Market Company’ – is not entirely dissimilar. But the lesson of Montreux is why did a Python copy defeat a Python original? The answer I fear is that their production and presentation was slick, whereas ours was unforgivably sloppy.

  Saturday, May 15th

  This morning we were woken by William at 7.15, then, for a short while, peace, until Thomas gets out of his cot about eight o’clock and is to be heard banging around the house in a very busy way.

  Eventually he arrives outside our door, and there is some prolonged heavy breathing. He does not, for some reason of his own rather than ours, like to come in before we ask him, and so it depends on how tired we are as to how much we take advantage of this uncharacteristic docility. But as soon as he is in the bedroom he rapidly starts to organise a book to be read, despite our half-hearted attempts to persuade him that an extra half-hour’s sleep would do him the world of good.

  Once we have all got up – now seldom later than 8.45 – and had breakfast, I normally take Thomas for a walk, or on Sundays for a more ambitious outing – last week we went on the North London Line to Kew Gardens. This morning Thomas wanted above all else to try the paddling pool in Parliament Hill playground. He was blissfully happy there for about an hour – and we then went on to feed the ducks on Highgate Ponds, returning home via the café for an ice-cream. Thomas is good company now and chats quite fluently. William sleeps the whole way.