• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Saturday, August 23rd

Mr Powell looked at my teeth and was very pleased with their progress. In the afternoon I went over to the TV Centre for a dubbing session. Everyone was there, including Terry Gilliam, who has animated some great titles – really encouraging and just right – and Ian MacNaughton, short-haired and violent. He seems now to have dropped all diplomatic approval of John H-D, and is privately cursing him to the skies for not shooting all the film he was supposed to. I think this sounds a little harsh, as the weather was twice as bad with John as with Ian.

Thursday, August 28th

This morning rehearsed in front of the technical boys. Not an encouraging experience. I particularly felt rather too tense whilst going through it.

Watched the final edited film for the first show. A most depressing viewing. The Queen Victoria music was completely wrong, and the Lochinvar film1 was wrong in almost every respect – editing and shooting most of all.

Terry and I both felt extremely low, but John Howard Davies, relishing, I think, the role of saviour, promised to do all he could to change the music on ‘Victoria’. We went off to the bar and who better to meet there than John Bird, in an unusually expansive mood. He greeted us as warmly as when we were doing A Series of Birds2 two years ago. He is somehow so untarnished by clique or cliché or any conditioned reaction, that talking to him can only be entertaining. But one doesn’t say much as his knowledge is infinite.

Saturday, August 30th

The first recording day. Fortunately Friday’s fears did not show themselves, so acutely. From the start of the first run the crew were laughing heartily – the first really good reaction we’ve had all week. The sets were good, John kept us moving through at a brisk pace and our fears of Thursday night proved unfounded when ‘Lochinvar’ got a very loud laugh from the crew. In the afternoon we had two full dress run-throughs, and still had half an hour left of studio time.

As the time got nearer for the show, I had a pint up in the bar and by the time the ‘guests’ began arriving at 7.30, I felt as relaxed as I have done for days. Tim Brooke-Taylor noted that we seemed very unruffled.

Barry Took1 won the audience over with his warm-up and, at 8.10, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was first launched on a small slice of the British public in Studio 6 at the Television Centre. The reception from the start was very good indeed, and everybody rose to it – the performances being the best ever. The stream-of-consciousness links worked well and when, at the end, John and I had to re-do a small section of two Frenchmen talking rubbish, it went even better.

Afterwards there was the usual stifling crush in the bar, the genuine congratulations and the polite congratulations and the significant silences. Our agent, Kenneth Ewing, did not appear to like it – but then he’s probably waiting to see what other people think.

About sixteen of us finished the evening at the Palio de Siena in Earl’s Court Road, in festive mood. Full of relief.

Sunday, August 31st

The end of August, it feels like the end of the summer, with the weather cool and changeable, the garden looking waterlogged again.

On the Isle of Wight, 150,000 people gathered to hear Bob Dylan – the gutter press are having their work cut out to track down smut in a gathering which seems to be happy and peaceful. 150,000 people and all the violence that the Mirror could rake-up was a man getting his head cut on a bottle. It shows how evil papers like the News of the World and, I’m afraid, the Daily Mirror are. They have chosen to pick out isolated incidents – a couple making love in a bath of foam, a girl dancing naked – and make them seem like crimes. They are trying their best to indict a young generation, who seem to be setting a triumphant example to the older generation – an example of how to enjoy oneself, something which most Englishmen don’t seem really capable of, especially the cynical pressmen of the News of the World. It’s all