That night, back at the hotel, I had a drink with Tommy Raeburn and the other chippies and drivers – hard men of films, who nevertheless reckoned the chances of the film’s success to be very good. Roy Smith, the Art Director, said he wished he had money in it.
Three large gin and tonics and a bottle of red wine floored me early on, however. As the Rosses finished serving up a special five-course meal with a jokey ‘Holy Grail’ menu, complete with ‘Mud Sorbet à la Palin’, I began to feel my legs getting wobbly and my vision beginning to swing out of control and, about 11.30, went up to bed, thirty-two days after we had first clung to the side of the Gorge of Eternal Peril in Glencoe.
Wednesday, June 5th
Today I talked to Gail at Charisma. She says that 70,000 copies of the Live at Drury Lane album are being pressed, tho’ not at EMI – for the lady pressers there, whose unofficial censorship we have come up against before, would not consider dealing with a record containing, as Gail put it, ‘three fucks and a dagger up the clitoris’.
At 4.30 we met at Henshaw’s. We talked about various points, including a fund, from our film proceeds, to give most of the main members of the crew a share in the profits. This was agreed, in principle, to be a good thing.
Wednesday, June 12th, Southwold
Caught 9.30 train and breakfast to Ipswich.
Father and Mother on the platform at Darsham. At first appearance, my father, who three months ago seemed quite seriously ill, looks extremely fit and well. Very sun-tanned and, tho’ a little stooped, certainly not the shuffling wreck he had been in St Audry’s. His mind seems stronger. He can understand more, and his recent memory is no longer so clouded. Also his hallucinations have stopped. All this since he has been taken off the wonder drug L-Dopa.
After lunch – dressed crab and Adnams beer – I took him for a drive, which was quite successful. Again impressed by the improvement in his mental condition (the awful twist being that this improvement makes him more aware of his physical deterioration).
We visited Benacre Church, Henstead Church and then on to Wenhaston – through sunlit Suffolk lanes, with lush green countryside almost overgrowing the road on either side. Ended up at the Harbour Inn about six – the sky was a perfectly clear azure blue above the sea – Southwold looked clean and brilliant, like a newly-unwrapped present.
Monday, June 17th
A damp, musty kind of morning – pools of water on the roofs and roads after the night’s rain, which came down after a series of thunderstorms last night. Have just heard on LBC that the Houses of Parliament are burning – a bomb was placed in the kitchens at Westminster Hall and went off at 8.30. There have been five casualties, one serious. The fireboat is out on the Thames and, according to the news, the fire is still spreading. This must be the biggest propa-ganda coup of all for the IRA (if it is them), but I think it will rebound heavily – echoes of 1940, when P’ment was last burning, etc, etc.
Occasionally, when these rather traumatic things happen, you imagine for just a moment that this is it – there’ll be a national panic, a crisis after which nothing will ever be the same again! But in an instant it all passes. Thomas is at school giving flowers he’s brought back from Abbotsley to Mrs McCann, with a look of great pleasure and achievement on his face, Helen is at the doctor’s, having an examination for our third child, Mrs B1 is being relentlessly importuned by William, who is trying to persuade her to stop cleaning the bathroom and buy some sweets for him, and I am about to sit down, reach for the notebook and try and think of ways to make people laugh. So life goes on, and Parliament-burning quickly assumes a perspective.
Monday, June 24th
This morning we saw a rough cut of the film – the first time I’ve seen the whole lot put together. In its raw state, without dubbing, sound f/x, music and any editing guidance by the two Terrys, it tends to be rather heavy in certain scenes – the Knights of Ni and the opening of Anthrax possibly – but there are set pieces like the Plague Village, the fight with the Rabbit and the Holy Hand Grenade which work very well, even at this stage, and the recently filmed Black Knight fight wasn’t in, which I hear is also a great set piece.
The only scene which I felt was seriously deficient at this stage is the appearance of the Three-Headed Knight. It just doesn’t look imposing enough, and very similar in set-up to the Knights of Ni.
Ended up at the Linguaphone Institute in Oxford Street, where I enrolled for a course of Italian lessons. Rather dog-eared surroundings, but the people there are pleasant and smile a lot and Mr C, my Italian coach, looks convincingly Italian and makes little jokes about his language – ‘When you hear an Italian couple having a row, it sounds as if they are singing in an opera’ – and little jokes about his own incompetence with the tape recorder – ‘I am the only man to have fused a candle’ and ‘I pressed so many knobs, I eventually got Vatican Radio’. Anyway, he’s jolly. But the course he started me on looked so unutterably dull – it was all about being a businessman and leaving briefcases at the airport and meeting secretaries and – oh! – it was so awful I told them I didn’t think I could manage to summon up any enthusiasm for it. So he went away and came back with a slightly more difficult course, still heavily business-orientated, but with more general conversational words and phrases.
So I got into my little booth and played with the tape recorder. I hope I can keep this course going. It was a big psychological step to come in off hot and dusty Oxford Street and commit myself to it, but I feel that I must start now if I’m ever going to learn a new language – or at least attempt to become anything less than helpless when I travel.
Wednesday, July 3rd
A grim, grey morning with gusting winds and bursts of rain and general drizzle. Suddenly the sunny days of May and early June seem light-years away. But it’s good for application. Started work at 9.15 [on new Python TV series] and by lunchtime had ‘The Golden Age of Ballooning’ typed and organised into a twenty-nine-page script, which could do as a half-hour on its own. Feel rather pleased, as it is almost entirely my own work.
With this satisfactory morning behind me and even a little sunshine peering through to cheer the day up, I drove over and looked through Drew Smiths1 black and white stills from the film, and selected a batch. Then up to the Angel at Highgate to meet Graham. As at the Monarch, Graham has developed an almost familial relationship with the people who run the pub, which makes for a very pleasant atmosphere and nearly always a free drink. I looked through the work on the ‘Michael Ellis’ script which G and I had worked on together. Some good ideas there – and it made me laugh. Also made me aware of the usefulness of co-writing, after my euphoria of the morning! There are just jokes and ideas in the Michael Ellis script which I would never have made as funny if I had been writing it on my own.
Came back to find Thomas not well and asleep under a rug on the sofa. Willy, quite disconcerted by this, was trying hard to feel ill himself, and lay, rather unconvincingly, on the other sofa, under a blanket.
I took W swimming in the end. We spent an hour there. W is a real joy to take around. He talks to everybody, especially men in showers, and gives complete strangers a running commentary on the progress of his latest wee, and how Daddy is wearing trunks, etc.
Thursday, July 11th
Writing with Graham. Started about 11.00, worked until 12.45 then off to the Angel; drank a v. good pint of ale, played a couple of games of bar billiards with Graham, talked, and tried to avoid eating until 2.30. Started work at 3.00 – Graham took a little time to get upstairs and, when he eventually joined me, he muttered happily that ‘These French cleaners are so passionate’.
Graham is a very good person to write dialogue with, and has very good silly ideas, but there is a rather uncomfortably undisciplined feeling to the day’s work. We manage about two hours in the morning, before he starts getting really fidgety, then two more hours in the afternoon. Whereas Terry and myself, when we have a full day’s writing, put in about six and a half solid hours.
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Anyway, at 5.35 I remember I have a tutorial with Mr Cammillieri and, going against the rush-hour traffic, make Highgate to Soho Square in 15 minutes. An interesting tutorial. He just spoke Italian to me, but we at least got on to interesting topics. He said he was surprised I was an actor, but not surprised I was a writer. Perché? Well, all the actors he has met are self-centred, constantly play-acting and not genuine. Feel flattered, I suppose.
Sunday, July 14th
My mother rang to say that Father has started to see visions again – this time mice, hamsters and Welsh choirs. She sounded worried enough to suggest that I should try and go up there for a day this week.
But it’s a busy week ahead, as Eric is back from France today for two weeks and, by some sort of Herculean effort, we should have most of the six new TV shows mapped out by the time he goes back.
Monday, July 15th
St Swithin’s Day, apparently. The weather today should hold for forty days according to the horny adage (as I’m reading Return of the Native by T Hardy, I’m full of horny adages). Well, this St Swithin’s Day was one of the coldest, wettest and most depressing days of the summer, so things don’t look too good.
Graham, looking ravaged and with a hangover you could almost touch, arrived outside Julia St at about 10.30 for a lift down to the 10.00 writing meeting at TJ’s. Yesterday had been the eighth anniversary of him and David, and G had had too much. He was fragile for most of the morning and only a large amount of gin revived him at lunchtime!
The ‘Ballooning’ story, Mr Neutron and, read last, but appreciated most, the Michael Ellis ‘Harrods Ant Counter’, which I’d put together with GC, and typed up rather uncertainly on Friday, very well received, which was most encouraging.
Thursday, July 18th, Southwold
To Southwold on morning train. Father shuffles more than even a month ago, and walks all the time with shoulders bent and sagging.
I took him out to the Queen’s Head at Blyford in the early evening. He grimly hung on to a half-pint of bitter, grasping the handle of the glass doggedly, refusing to let it go. He clearly has few enjoyments left, but the chiefest of them is being at home, and here lies the difficulty. How long can Mother lift him out of the bath, support his dead weight as he gets out of the car? How long can she endure five or six interruptions to her sleep each night, putting his legs back into bed, cleaning up the carpet? How much longer can she dress him and undress him? How long will her mental stamina last in the constant presence of someone who never talks to her?
At least Angela and I are now visiting her more regularly, which cheers her up, and she has extraordinary reserves somewhere which keep her going.
Tuesday, July 23rd
Dreamt that John Cleese had been offered a series of thirty shows by Jimmy Gilbert!
Worked up at Graham’s. A poor day. Graham’s house, expansive as it is, is unaccountably shabby. There is hardly a working-surface in the place. G in a state of high nervous tension because John [Tomiczek] is out all day, and so is David at the moment (he’s working at Covent Garden dressing the Stuttgart Ballet). Meanwhile Towser the pedigree dog is playing havoc ripping the innards out of soft furnishings and has to be kept in the kitchen. Graham keeps on disappearing upstairs. A callow choral-singer from California, called Walter, who is staying at the house, wanders about.
I find myself a cup of coffee and eventually a bit of table space in the ‘dining’ room, which is a pleasant-sized room, with a fine wooden table, but the whole place is littered with bottles of every conceivable beverage from Kum-Kwat to strange Italian liqueurs. On the floor there are boxfuls of Foster’s lager and tonics and ginger ales.
Graham eventually appeared, shaking with nervous effort, poured himself a gin and tonic and gradually subsided. But the rest of the morning was taken up with incessant calls from our publicists, to try and fix up an interview about our new LP. A good half-hour wasted. What happens when publicity takes over the thing you’re trying to publicise.
Wednesday, July 24th
At 6.30 a Python business meeting at Henshaws’.
What was the meeting about? Oh, I think, what should we do with the Python fortunes when they really start coming in? A pension fund? An office in Tuscany? How to avoid paying ourselves and the taxman all the money that is going to come in. Is it? I suppose so. After all, Python Live at Drury Lane does sound to be the bestseller of all our albums – No. 19 next week, according to Gail at Charisma.
Then Mark talked over publicity for the film. Eric refused to become involved in most of it. A few heated words, but he would insist on this silly point of principle that no interviews ever do anyone any good, and are hateful, degrading, etc, etc.
Thursday, August 1st
Up to Graham’s for our script meeting with Ian. G had prepared, or was preparing, in his usual chaotic style, a barbecue lunch to mark the occasion.
After lamb kebabs, tandooried chicken, a Fosters lager and several glasses of red wine, in a hazy August sunshine, we retired indoors to read the scripts.
Ian was drinking scotch with dedicated frequency, inveighing against Terry Gilliam for wanting assistants for his animation, against Jill Foster (his, and our, agent) for some unspecified, but clearly deeply felt reason, us for trying to get shows in that were too long, and so on and so on. We tried to discuss Neil’s position with Python, but Ian leapt at Neil with an almost paranoid intensity and the last two hours of the meeting were a pointless waste of time, with Ian at his worst. No longer jolly and charming and ebullient, but confused, aggressive and quite unconstructive.
I left at 7.00 with a deep feeling of frustration that remained with me throughout the evening, despite Neil and Yvonne’s excellent company at supper. I began to feel what was the point? Here was a series that only Graham was really keen to do, and yet only Terry and I were writing. Here was a series which we had, for better or worse, fought for from the BBC and, with not a few misgivings, we had asked for Ian only to direct it, and yet Ian comes back at us with a totally unrealistic ‘this is my show, you do what I say’ attitude. We didn’t need to do it for the money – why the hell were we doing it?
With these gloomy thoughts I went to my bed at half past twelve.
Tuesday, August 6th
One of the most satisfying copies of The Guardian that has ever come through my letterbox swished onto the mat at 8.00 this morning, bearing front-page news of Nixon’s admission that he knew about the Watergate cover-up and personally directed it within five days of the incident. As I drive down to Terry’s to write, I remember the day, five and a half years ago, when TJ and I drove out along the A40 on our way to film The Complete and Utter Histories and despondently listened to the unbelievable news of Tricky Dicky’s elevation to the Presidency. Now I listened to the equally unbelievable news that he had lied blatantly and repeatedly to his supporters, his lawyers, his ‘friends’, his country and the world, for two years!
Father went into hospital at St Audry’s again for a two-week period. He is seeing hamsters everywhere now – they squelch under his feet as he walks in the sitting room. My mother has to carry a bag to put them in. When the doctor arrived the hamsters got up Grandfather’s trousers and began to attack his privates. My father, so staid and unimaginative over most of his life, is now becoming quite Pythonic. The hamsters seem to bother more than frighten him, as do the two men who have evidently been in the garage since 1966!
Fraser and Dunlop rang with an offer of £4,000 to do a Stone’s Ginger Wine commercial. One day’s work. My hands went clammy, and I told Jill I’d think about it. £4,000 for a day’s work is the kind of proposition that gives greed a good name.
Thursday, August 8th
For the last two days little but writing (we now have four scripts completed) and Nixon. Only this evening, two days after his self-confessed lying, does it seem that the man has finally got the message, and is probably about to become the first American President to resign in office.
A wonderful galaxy
of early Nixon film – the suffocatingly schmaltzy Checkers speech, the effusive endorsements from Frank Sinatra, Gerry Ford and Eisenhower speaking of Nixon as ‘a man of integrity’ in 1968. But there can have been no TV spectacle as chilling as the replays of Nixon’s last three Watergate addresses to the nation – where Nixon looks the world in the eye and lies.
Monday, August 12th
Stop Press: writing my diary at 11.15 when the phone rings. It’s Nancy from New York, almost speechless with good news. As from October, the entire Python first series is being screened on American TV by PBS.1 I told Nancy it must be Gerry Ford’s doing. Python, which has been going for almost as long as Richard Nixon was President, has finally broken in the States within four days of his resignation.
Sunday, September 1st, Abbotsley
In many ways these last two days have been an extension of last week’s summer holiday in the Lot – totally relaxing days spent with the family, away from work and away from too many other people. Worked in the garden, had the best night’s sleep for a week, and ended up today astride a tree, half-submerged in the stagnant pond, wearing only my underpants! I was trying to salvage my appalling attempt at tree-felling, which had propelled the tree straight into the stagnant water.
My Tarzan-like activities were greeted with much mirth by Helen. Willy leant up against the wire and made up songs to sing to himself, and Thomas fussed around like an old hen worrying about me —’Oh, do be careful, Daddy.’ ‘Oh, isn’t Daddy strong?’ ‘Oh, Daddy, you’re so nice,’ and other slightly unhelpful observations.
Sunday, September 8th, Exeter
From today we start filming on the fourth Python series. Packed during the morning – took Helen and the boys out for a very pleasant goodbye lunch at Maxwells, and left with the Mini and Terry Jones, about 2.00.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 26
