Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years
Page 82
In a sense I feel my big creative push has been and gone – and yet I’m writing as fluently as ever and taking on as much work as in those heady days between ‘68 and ‘75 when we did everything. Will the next direction be into more personal, solitary writing, using Python still as a base? Will Python wither and die of natural causes? John will be 50 in ten years’ time. But then Spike Milligan is well past 50 and still being very silly.
This extraordinarily pleasant, settled interlude beside the fire lasts only an hour or less and then I’m walking up to a party at Jack and Liz Cooper’s. Full of Hampstead folk.
Met portly Ian Aitken – Guardian political correspondent – who’s lost his eye. ‘I think the cleaner must have put it somewhere.’ He has a host of wonderful false-eye stories – including the time when he was bathing off Guadeloupe (covering a summit meeting of Callaghan, Giscard and Carter) and his eye fell out whilst diving. Two or three days later an American walks into the press centre and shouts ‘Hey, anyone here lost an eye?’ He had found it whilst swimming.
Monday, December 31st
Last day of the 1970s. Clear, dry, fine, cold. Up in time to read work so far on the Gilliam film before taking Granny to Broad Street on the Gospel Oak line to catch the 11.30 to Suffolk. On the way back to Hampstead Heath a magnificently cheery black ticket-collector waived my offer of the extra 16p for my ticket with great bonhomie.’Happy New Year,’ he shouted. It was like the end of A Christmas Carol!
Friends come round in the evening and we eat Chinese take-away and play games and half watch a poor compilation of the 1970s from BBC TV. As midnight strikes and the first chimes of the 1980s are met by the obligatory cheers of well-oiled Scotsmen on the box, we take photos of ourselves in celebration and agree that whatever happens – barring the work of the Grim Reaper, of course – we will look at these pics together on December 31st 1989!
1 See footnote, page 563.
2 Later to direct the Last of the Summer Wine series.
1 One of Anne’s other clients. Successful commercials director who started Loncraine-Broxton, a novelty toy company. I’d suggested him to the BBC for the yarns. We eventually worked together on The Missionary in 1982.
2 Alison Davies, our PA at Anne’s office.
1 Legendary BBC comedy producer and director (Porridge, Butterflies, Last of the Summer Wine). John and Graham particularly liked the sound of his name, and I seem to remember a sketch on At Last the 1948 Show in which every character was called Sydney Lotterby.
1 Along with John Cleese, he was one of the founders of Video-Arts, who, very successfully, made training films for industry, many of them written by and starring Cleese.
1 Some readers of the diary may find it confusing that I appear to support both Sheffield football teams (a crime punishable by disembowelment in Sheffield itself). Living in London I’m always glad to hear of any Sheffield success. When I lived in Sheffield I was always a United fan, so that’s what I’ve had to settle for.
1 Jane Curtin – original cast member and very funny lady. Later starred in Kate & Allie and Third Rock From the Sun.
1 Production designer on ‘Whinfrey’s Last Case’ and ‘Golden Gordon’, she went onwards and upwards to design some of the BBC’s great period dramas, including Pride and Prejudice, Clarissa and The Way We Live Now.
1 Maria later played John C’s wife in A Fish Called Wanda.
1 He starred in The Army Game and Bootste and Snudge, two of the few television programmes which united my father and myself in helpless laughter.
2 Gordon Ottershaw was the super-fan who smashed up his living-room every time the team lost. Which was most weeks.
1 Owners of the hotel.
1 Basil Pao, then working for Warner Bros in LA, designed the book. Now a writer and stills photographer, he has worked with me on six of my BBC travel shows and books.
1 Scarman upheld the ruling under the Blasphemy Act of 1697 that the Gay News had offended by claiming that Christ was homosexual.
2 Jonathan James, her new partner, whom she later married.
3 Arnold Wesker’s wife.
1 Hungarian-born film producer who founded Shepperton in the 1930s.
2 Lew Grade and his brothers Bernard Delfont (who abandoned Life of Brian) and Leslie Grade pretty much ran popular entertainment at the time.
3 A year later Lew Grade went on to make Raise the Titanic, which was such a flop that he famously said it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic.
1 Jack and Liz Cooper were famous Hampstead figures. Jack, who knew Al before I did, looked like the Laughing Cavalier.
1 Klein later interviewed all the Pythons (bar Graham who was represented by an urn containing his ashes) on stage at the Aspen Comedy Festival in March 1998.
1 Barrister, playwright, novelist, creator of Rumpole.
2 A documentary, made for BBCi to mark the tenth anniversary of Python’s birth.
1 Chris looked after the house while Eric was away.
2 One of my favourite sketches with John. I don’t think once, either on television or on stage, was I ever able to get through it with a straight face.
1 Rob Buckman and Chris Beetles carried on the tradition of doctor/comedians (Jonathan Miller, Graham Chapman, Graeme Garden) with The Pink Medicine Show in 1978. Buckman remains a doctor, Beetles runs an art gallery.
2 The successor to Graham Ford as manager of Shepperton.
1 Captain of the England cricket team that won the Ashes in 1981. Now a psychoanalyst.
1 Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, had just been acquitted on charges of involvement in the attempted murder of his gay lover, Norman Scott. The judge’s summary was seen by many to be blatantly biased in Thorpe’s favour.
1 Charles Alverson, American thriller writer, and friend of TG, Terry J and myself.
1 David Collett was Helen’s uncle. When I first set eyes on her, in Southwold in 1959, she was last in a column of sisters and cousins being led out behind Uncle David for an early-morning dip in the North Sea. Something about her obvious reluctance appealed to me.
1 After regular running at Sag Harbour I decided to make it part of my regime in London.
1 James E Fixx wrote the influential Complete Book of Running (1977), which used to inspire me whenever I felt like giving up. The author, rather unfortunately, died of a heart attack in 1984, whilst out running.
2 One had been an all pair at the Joneses’ in London. They were on a budget trip to the US so Terry had asked Al if he could put them up.
1 Hoagland Carmichael (1899-1981) was a jazz musician and composer who wrote some all-time classics such as ‘Georgia on My Mind’ and ‘Up a Lazy River’.
1 It was a traditional, bland piece about Venice, made special by John’s commentary – ‘gondolas, everywhere fucking gondolas’.
1 Nicky Boult, Helen’s niece and a newly qualified teacher, who was staying with us.
1 And I was. They lived together very happily until Al’s death in 1989, and had a daughter, Gwenola.
2 Friend and fellow thespian at Oxford.
1 A fortnightly children’s show in the 1950s, probably my first favourite programme. Hank the Cowboy was a ventriloquist’s dummy and Steve Race accompanied his adventures on the piano.
1 Its working title was Time Bandits.
1 They had called for the film to be banned.’Though not in itself blasphemous, it will tend to discredit the New Testament story of Jesus in confused semi-Pagan minds.’
1 Blunt, son of a bishop, Professor of Art History at London University, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, had been found to be spying for the Soviets for many years. Though he had been unmasked in 1963, he had been allowed to retain all his posts to avoid scandal tainting the Royal Family.
1 He and fellow-producer Mark Shivas had produced Secrets by Terry and myself in 1973.
1 A radio phone-in, chaired, as I remember, by Simon Bates.
1 This was eventually commissioned by Geoffrey Strachan at Methuen and came
out as Monty Python: The Case Against in 1981. It is the first, best and last word on the history of Python’s run-ins with the censor.
Index
A
A1 Dairy, Whetstone High Street, 43
Abbotsley, Cambridgeshire
Palin family stay in, 19 and n, 112, 145, 155, 187–8, 214, 279, 290, 365, 373, 385–6, 591
carthorses, 38
Jubilee Day (1977), 389
high winds at, 413
ABC Bloomsbury, 211, 212
ABC Fulham Road, 211, 212
ABC TV
Pythons co-host A.M. America 229
Monty Python court case against, 267 and n, 269–79, 289, 319, 323, 324–5, 355, 465
Home Box Office show, 451–3
Aberlour House, Gordonstoun, 587
Abraxas Squash Club, 64
Academy Awards (Oscars), 454–5, 456, 460
Academy Cinema, London, 314
Achmed (Tunisian production head), 492
Ackland, Joss, 292
‘Across the Andes by Frog’ see Ripping Yarns
ACTT, 75
Adam, Robert, 154
Adams, Douglas, 188 and n, 201, 212, 213, 214, 248, 257, 267
Adams, John, 535
Adams, Richard, Watership Down, 194, 434
Adelphi Theatre, London, 202
Admiral Hardy, Greenwich, 47
Adnams brewery, 233, 241
The African Queen (film), 338
Ain’t Misbehavin’ (play), 563
Air France, 492
Air Iran, 278–9
Aitken, Ian, 608
Aitken, Maria, 537–8 and n
Aladdin (pantomime) 51–2
Albury, Phillida, xiii, 444
Albury, Robert, 96
Albury, Simon, xiii, 38, 96, 139, 154, 327–8, 394, 444, 564
drugs, 66 and n, 67
going to America, 76–7
Man Alive films, 77
watches Secrets, 132
World in Action, 195
at premiere of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 226
likes Tomkinson’s Schooldays, 262–3
and Shepperton Studios, 332
Clive Hollick’s wedding, 400
advises MP on writing, 437
and MP’s birthday, 551
Aldershot, IRA bomb, 74
Aldrich, Robert, 485n
Aldwych Theatre, London, 235, 294, 295
Ali, Muhammad, 267
Ali (Tunisian waiter), 504
Ali, Tariq, 400
Alien (film), 447, 555
All Hallows, Gospel Oak, 586, 603
All You Need is Cash (film), 400–1, 423
Allanwater, Stirling, 513
Allen, Charles, Plain Tales from the Raj, 365
Allen, Paul, 315
Allen, Rita, 105
Allen, Woody, 68, 231, 455
Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, 316
Allott, Mr, criticizes The Life of Brian in The Times, 599
Alpert, Herb, 432
ALS (Associated London Scripts), 403
Alter Wirt Gasthaus, Grunwald, 90
Altman, Robert, 456n, 536
Alvarez, Al, 136 and n, 404
Alverson, Charles, 282 and n, 572 and n
A.M. America (television programme), 229
Les Ambassadeurs, London, 44–5
American Friends (film), 97
Amin (Pakistani botanist), 67
Amis, Kingsley, 242, 520
The Alteration, 442
Ending Up, 404
The Green Man, 486
Amnesty International
1976 charity show, 296–7, 298n, 300–1, 322, 368 and n
The Secret Policeman’s Ball, 561, 562, 563
Amsterdam, 366, 422
Amtrak, 219–20, 527–8
And Now For Something Completely Different (Pythons’ first film), 14, 40–1, 42–4, 47, 56, 65, 75, 84
Anderson, Lindsay, 101–2, 103, 425, 470–1
Anderson, Michael, 406n
Andrews, Julie, 291, 413
The Angel, Highgate, 183, 201
Animal House (film), 528
Ann (neighbour), 92, 132
Annie Hail (film), 455, 456
Another Monty Python Record (LP), 61–2, 82
Anstey’s Cove, Torquay, 24–5
Antrobus, John, 593
Any Questions (radio programme), 72
Apollo missions to moon, 3, 4–5, 20–2, 427
Apollo restaurant, Torquay, 26
Apollo Theatre, London, 317
Apple Corp, 112, 203
Apple Studios, 95–6
Aquarius Club, Lincoln, 70
Arabs
Arab-Israeli War (1973), 139
oil crisis (1973), 145 and n, 147–8
guerrillas hijack plane, 196
Arafat, Yasser, 460
Ardeonaig, Perthshire, 171
Arista Records, 208, 218, 232, 306, 552
Arlecchino, Notting Hill Gate, 299, 474
Armstrong, Neil, 5
Arnaud, Yvonne, 607
Arnold, Malcolm, 605
Arnott, Edward, 46 and n
Arnott, Jayne, 46 and n
‘Arrochense Los Cinturones’ (article), 437
Arsenal Football Club, 522, 524
Arts Council, 470
Ashley, Lyn, xiii, 24 and n, 179, 210, 258
Ashmore, Joyce, 408–9
Ask Aspel (television programme), 54
Aspel, Michael, 54
Aspen Comedy Festival, 552n
Aspinall, Neil, 203 and n, 204
At the Earth’s Core (film), 366
At Last The 1948 Show (television series), 87–8, 522n
Atkinson, Rowan, 561
Attenborough, David, 49 and n, 101, 190–1
Atticus (Sunday Times columnist), 100
ATV, 534
Au Bois St Jean, London, 332, 334
Aukin, David, 318
Auntie’s restaurant, London, 348
Austen, Jane, 201, 317
Australia, buys Monty Python, 65
Avedon, Richard, 229–30, 237, 429
Ayckbourn, Alan, 139n
Aykroyd, Dan, 456, 458–9, 462, 466, 528, 530
B
B&C Records, 111
Bacton Tower, Lismore Circus, 154
BAFTA, 425, 426, 442, 542, 585 and n, 586
Bagherzade, Iradj, 347 and n
Bailey, Alan, 103–4 and n
Baker, Howard, 120
Baker, Richard, 512
Baker, Stanley, 80 and n, 81
Bake well, Joan, 13n
Balcombe Street siege (1975), 260 and n, 287–8
Baldwin, James, 414
Balfour, Jimmy, 3 and n
Ballachulish, filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail in, 166–9
Bananas (film), 68
Bangladesh, 67
Bannister Promotions, 105
Banqueting House, Whitehall, 133
Bantry Bay, 521
Barabbas (film), 352
Barbados, The Life of Brian rewrites in, 398, 421, 428–35, 519
Barber, Anthony, 148
Barclay, Humphrey, 20 and n, 523, 534
Barclay Hotel, Philadelphia, 219–20
Barclays Bank, 520–1
Bardney, Open-air Pop Festival, 80–1
Barker, Ronnie, 50, 282, 542
Bark worth, Peter, 450
Barnes, Clive, 306
Barnes, filming Monty Python in, 3
Barque and Bite, Regent’s Canal, 130, 518, 604
Barrington Court, Gospel Oak, 92–3
Bart, Lionel, 330n
Barth, John, The Sot-Weed Factor, 98
Bart’s Hospital, London, 13
Bart’s Hospital sports ground, Chislehurst, 74
Bassey, Shirley, 440, 443
Bates, Alan, 441