Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Anyway, despite this gloom, life goes on, and Python flourishes. Our third show finally seems to have brought people back to the fold. Both the Sunday Times and The Observer noted this weekend that the show was back on ‘cracking form’ (the Sunday Times). We recorded our last show on Saturday – to a very receptive audience, which was most encouraging. The BBC, or rather J Gilbert on the phone to G Chapman, have confirmed that they want us to do seven more shows in the spring, and Eric was heard on Saturday night to agree to doing them – provided there are plenty of sketches and not so many storylines.

  Friday, November 22nd

  The depressing pattern of grey skies, rain and dark days is matched only by the news. In Tunis Arab guerrillas select an unarmed businessman from a plane they have hijacked and, merely to hurry up the business of forcing the release of six of their murdering compatriots, stand the man in the doorway of the plane and shoot him in the back. This evening there are two explosions in Birmingham pubs. Seventeen people are killed. An Irish voice gave an 11 minute warning, but so far the Provisionals have not claimed responsibility.

  Saturday, November 23rd

  An evening out with Nigel and Jude.1 We met Nigel at his gallery in Sloane Gardens.

  I found his current exhibition quite baffling. Why is it that modern art should make you feel so clumsy for not understanding it? It’s a curious feeling of inadequacy to stand and look at a roomful of carefully-hung, expensively-lit objects, which someone considers paying nearly a thousand pounds for, and to find them as meaningful as a tin of anchovies.

  But Nigel would probably counter this by saying that he has an exhibition of tins of anchovies opening only next week.

  Monday, November 23th

  Saw John C for the first time in many weeks – we did a couple of voice-overs together. The first in Studio G, Wardour Street, was a frightfully banal affair for Nairn Cushionfloors. An attractive lady producer, with the usual helpful and precise instructions – ‘Can you read it slower, but with more pace?’

  ‘Try the high-pitched, deep voice and don’t emphasise the bit about “warm” and “springy”.’

  ‘You don’t want them emphasised?’

  ‘No, not emphasised, but just strongly delivered.’ Etc, etc.

  Whilst John and I were involved in this quite appallingly worthless artefact (‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth, Mikey,’ said John), a pillar box exploded in rush-hour Piccadilly, less than a mile away All part of the IRA war.

  Friday, November 29th

  5.30: Arrive at 22 Park Square East [Michael and Anne Henshaw’s home] for a Python meeting. Nothing of great interest until we start, in the absence of JC, to discuss ‘Next Year’.

  Eric:’Does anyone feel like me that the TV series has been a failure?’

  One can almost feel the ‘Oh, no, here we go again’ ripples spread round the room. So we are into the area which had surfaced briefly at the Old Oak Club at the beginning of this month and which had submerged, I hoped finally, during the last three weeks. The area of Eric’s Doubt. If pushed he will say he regards the series as a near disaster, beneficial to none of us. If one counters with the fact that nearly all the major newspapers have come round to the view that Python without John was worth doing again, Eric retreats into a ‘Well, if you believe the press you’ll believe anything’ attitude.

  TG and I are both keen to do another seven. I am decided in my own mind that the last six have been good enough, and well-received enough, to try and complete a further seven – as a group, using TG and Eric more fully and TJ and MP less.

  Then, after half an hour or so, Eric is suddenly agreeing, not only to the series, but to a rescheduling of dates taking us up to July. He doesn’t look all that happy, but he seems to have agreed. So Python carries on. Then we elect a new Chairman by playing stone and scissors. I win, so Terry G has to be the new Chairman.

  I caught up with Eric as we got outside the front door and asked him whether he was really happy about what had been decided. He feels that he no longer gets satisfaction out of Python because it is restricting. His writing and his ideas come up against the T Jones wall and he has no longer the stomach to keep fighting every inch of the way over every inch of material. Also he feels that, with John no longer there, he hasn’t an ally. Having unloaded himself of this much, we say goodnight.

  Saturday, November 30th

  Eric comes round about 3.00. He suggests going for a walk. So, Eric and I set off for the Heath, both of us in thick coats, the watery November sun sinking splendidly as we reach the top of Parliament Hill. It’s so like le Carré1 I have to pinch myself.

  Eric goes through his reasons for dissatisfaction. (I learn later from Terry G that Eric is reading Sartre at the moment – he was reading McLuhan a month ago when he was arguing that the content of Python books is quite unimportant compared to the form – and during the filming in Scotland he was reading Machiavelli. TG thinks if we can get at Eric’s library cards, we can get at the man!) He feels Python no longer works as a group. The formula is dull, we no longer surprise and shock, we are predictable. But he clearly misses John a great deal. None of us are as good as John or ever will be, he says.

  Lynsey de Paul2 moved today. I shall miss the slightly sexy, exotic atmosphere she gave the street, but not the drunken groups of local morons who try and sing’No Honestly’ outside her house at 11.30 at night.

  Sunday, December 1st

  Grey, but dry day. Two long phone calls’re Python in the morning to TG and TJ. I have an instinctive warmth towards TJ – and yet TG is the only person whom I can now talk to fully and objectively about Monty P.

  Mary and Edward [Helen’s sister and brother-in-law] come round to supper in the evening. I have a rather good theory that in twenty-five years’ time there will be far more countries (far more national divisions) in the world than now. I would like to see Estonia and Latvia as independent nations and Wales and Scotland for that matter. And I think it is going to happen – as people get less and less satisfaction from being part of a large international wodge. Look at the signs – Palestine’s representative at the UN, Scottish Nationals with eleven seats in Parliament. In it’s nastiest form – the IRA.

  Tuesday, December 3rd, Brace of Pheasant lnn, Plush, Dorset

  I left for Dorset at 12.30 after booking a room in an out-of-the-way sixteenth century thatched inn (thank you, Good Food Guide) at Plush, a village fourteen or so miles north of Dorchester in what looked good Hardy and walking country.

  My much needed spell of’time off’ had acquired a certain significance and I left unhappily. Helen upset because of the baby being due in a month or so and my going away – even tho’ I know she wanted me to go. If I’d just taken off that morning it would have seemed all far less calculated.

  It was a grizzly grey day as the train rattled over Egdon Heath. My first impression of Dorchester was of seeing schoolboys out of the corner of my eye, nudging each other and pointing at me. One followed me back from the station. So much for getting away from Monty Python. But as soon as I left Dorchester in a cab for Plush, I felt very Sherlock Holmes-ish – the night was dark, I could dimly see the outlines of hills on either side, the road wound crazily and suddenly the taxi had stopped. ‘Right, this is it, sir.’ Oh, yes, there was a whitewashed thatched house outside, but that was about all. The cab turned and sped off into the dark.

  A snug little inn – my room is tiny and I share it with a huge chimney-breast. The pub is well unimproved. A low beamed ceiling and a single bar/dining room which makes for a cheerful communal spirit. An open fire, a landlord with a rather jolly, but loud voice, just returned from a holiday in Tenerife, where he had taken his wife to recuperate from a stroke. She was in hospital at the moment having her kneecaps removed (I couldn’t work out whether this was in some way related to the holiday or not).

  A rather frail, but florid-faced chap with a fine check sports coat, cavalry twills and a military moustache, came in from the night.

 
‘Hello, Colonel,’ says the barman.

  ‘I could ring Roy Mason’s bloody neck,’ says the Colonel ruefully, tho’ not violently, as he eases himself onto the bar stool. (Roy Mason had just announced some almost universally applauded and long delayed-cuts in our defence budget.)

  That was rather the tone of the evening. A characteristic I noticed from my vantage point by the fire (where I sat with a large whisky and ice, trying to read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) is that these country chaps talk only of facts – the size of an aeroplane, the hours of sunshine, the number of pigs so and so has – never feelings, nor impressions and certainly not emotions.

  Wednesday, December 4th, Plush

  Today I have walked nearly twenty miles over the hills and across the muddy fields of Dorset, I feel deliciously tired, I have had a long soak in a hot bath and in half an hour or so I will don my brown velvet jacket and elegantly clump downstairs for a drink, a read perhaps around the open fire, and then a meal which I know will be excellently cooked, and a bottle of rather expensive wine.

  But it’s all such a lovely illusion. I know that the maître d’hôtel will greet me with a booming voice when I get downstairs – and there’ll be absolutely no chance of me slipping unobtrusively into a seat until everyone in the bar knows where I’ve been and what I’m drinking. I shall then try to read and yet find it impossible in the confined space of the bar to avoid hearing the rich country voices of the customers airing their rich country views.

  Though there have been wonderful things down here – the food and the stunning sunny weather today and striding along the chalk ridges with the sun lighting the valleys – I am looking forward to being in that train pulling into Waterloo at 1.20 tomorrow. Pulling into the jostle and the bomb scares – but pulling into the richness of life which can only come when you have many people doing many different things. Down here, in the heart of an agricultural community, I feel the oppressive weight of years of tradition, convention and orderliness on the people around. I could get used to it, I suppose, but I feel this evening that I am too hopelessly and happily corrupted by the richness of London life ever to be right for Dorset, or vice-versa.

  Monday, December 9th

  I lit a fire at lunchtime, tho’ it’s not much less than 50° outside, but Willy wanted to send a letter up the chimney to Father Christmas to ask for a sweet factory.

  William is sitting on the floor of my room, looking through old photos of the first four years of his life – like an old man looking back on his memories.

  Nothing is expected of me for at least a week. This must be the root cause for the blissful sense of relaxed contentment I feel at the moment – though just having written that fills me with a little apprehension! A twinge of guilt.

  Friday, December 20th

  Lunchtime at the Angel in Highgate. The jolly lady who runs it has now given five copies of Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book to people for presents. I had to sign one today. (Later in the afternoon, shopping at W H Smith’s in Kensington High Street, I noticed that there were an awful lot of Bert Fegg books on the counter. Unsold or there owing to popular demand? I counted nearly fifty in a pile before I became embarrassed and moved away!)

  Talked to Douglas Adams about the disappointed reactions he had had to Python series four. He thought the scripts were far better than the shows.

  Saturday, December 21st

  A great party at Robert Hewison’s. Ten or fifteen people in his little room at Fetter Lane. Lunchtime – excellent mulled claret, no-one from Python, so little shop talked. Renewed acquaintance with the Walmsleys1 and enjoyed ourselves enormously.

  Nigel told us that a man actually exists somewhere in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the government, whose sole job it is to scrutinise every new car number to ensure that the combination of letters and numbers do not accidentally spell something rude, misleading or even ambiguous – in any language. Nigel, too, laughed when he first heard this, but it was put to him that maybe the government had a duty to protect spinster schoolteachers from the possibility of their driving through Czechoslovakia with ‘Want a Good Time?’ on their bumpers.

  Wednesday, December 25th

  On Christmas morning, the four of us had the house to ourselves. The boys played happily, Helen and I sat around and I read some of A Christmas Carol. Great stuff. After Hardy I feel myself being drawn, unprotesting, into the nineteenth century world, whose books and authors used to be forced at you from an early age, so I developed an image of Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, as being heavy, worthy and boring. But now I’m acquiring an enormous taste for these same authors, and rediscovered Dickens’ Christmas Carol (my old Birkdale school copy) with sheer joy.

  1 Played by Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi.

  1 Sean Duncan, now a judge in Liverpool. We’d been at Shrewsbury and Oxford together.

  1 This became Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls (Methuen, 1974), later revised and improved as Dr Fegg’s Encyclopaedia of All World Knowledge (Methuen, 1984).

  1 Michael Henshaw had been my accountant since 1966. His wife Anne was helping sort out Python’s affairs.

  2 Nancy’s lawyer in New York.

  1 In the 1920s, soon after qualifying as an engineer, my father spent five years in India on various public works projects including the Sukkur Barrage across the River Indus in what is now Pakistan. He was always very proud of that.

  2 The Sheffield steelmaker for whom he spent many years as Export Manager.

  1 Monty Python and the Holy Grail was directed by both Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam.

  2 Ethel de Keyser (1926-2004), South African anti-apartheid campaigner.

  3 Betty Marsden (1919-98). Actress on Round the Home and in Carry On films. Why Graham chose her name I don’t know. She had once expressed a wish to die with a glass of gin in her hand, so maybe that was it.

  1 A Victorian pile in Edinburgh where officers were sent for treatment of shell-shock during the First World War.

  1 Hadrian’s Wall was dropped later as being too far away. The Scottish National Trust had vetoed most of our castle locations, deeming the script ‘not consistent with the dignity of the fabric of the buildings’. Doune was a privately-owned castle.

  2 Director of Photography.

  1 Lilian Blacknell, neighbour, cleaning lady, baby-sitter and general good sort.

  1 Drew Smith was stills photographer on the Holy Grail.

  1 The Public Broadcasting Service (Channel 13). The only non-commercial channel on US television. It is supported by public subscription.

  1 Douglas Adams, who later wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, had recently been asked by Graham to help him on his solo project Son of Dracula.

  1 Madeline Bell, African-American soul singer who had many hit’s in the UK with the group Blue Mink after making a mark as a backing singer for Dusty Springfield.

  1 Secretary of State for Social Services in the Heath government. Architect of free-market Conservatism.

  2 MP for St Pancras North.

  1 Sam Jarvis, our house-painter.

  2 Anne had taken over as our manager from John Gledhill.

  1 Nigel and Judy Greenwood. Together with elder sister Sarah, they were the three children of my father’s sister. Nigel was a couple of years older than me.

  1 I was deep into John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and for quite a while tended to see everything through his eyes. And November is a very le-Carré-like month.

  2 Lynsey de Paul. Singer, songwriter, glam rocker and, for a few years, our neighbour. She sang the British Eurovision entry in 1977.

  1 Nigel Walmsley and wife Jane. Nigel was at Brasenose with me and went on to run the Post Office for a while. Jane was a journalist and TV presenter.

  1975

  Wednesday, January 1st

  No newspapers, no letters. A bank holiday and all that that entails. All my working urges suddenly evaporate. Everything is still and quiet outside. Decide to treat it
in the spirit which Heath intended this holiday when he decided on it for the first time last year. Rang Ian and Anthea [Davidson] and invited them for drinks, rang Robert for his mulled wine recipe and settled down to not working until this afternoon. But, well, one thing led to another. I should have started a play, Ian should have been writing for The Two Ronnies, Anthea should have been designing her summer clothes for the shop and Helen should have been having a baby, but somehow twelve and a half hours, four bottles of wine, three or four beers, several games of Scrabble and cribbage and one Indian take-away meal later, we were all still in the sitting room.

  As Anthea said, this could be the year we learnt not to work too hard!

  Monday, January 6th

  A dull, overcast day. A gusting moderate wind sends icy draughts into my eyrie.1 It takes most of the morning to warm the place up. My brain doesn’t seem to warm up at all, and I struggle with an uninteresting idea for a play.

  After lunch I take Thomas and Anthony Tackerberry to see Dr Who and the Daleks at the Adelphi. The kids are good company – the seriousness and lack of self-consciousness of six-year-olds makes their conversation a delight to listen to. Anthony, having told me his father was a barrister, said to me, ‘I know what you are … you’re a filmer.’ Or the time he’d hit his head on a radiator – ‘My God it hurt,’ he said, with such feeling you almost had to wince.’ It came down my head and down my neck and onto my shirt …’ adding, almost as an afterthought, ‘the blood.’

  Anyway, we arrived early. Parked in the now almost deserted streets of Covent Garden. The main market buildings are fenced off. I don’t know what they’re doing in there, but the whole area could be allowed to become a most amenable shopping, eating, walking, living area. At the moment, in the first shock of losing the market that gave it its character and shaped its life, it is eerily quiet – only just breathing.