Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [11]
Saturday, September 6th
Today was the final of the Gillette Cup between Yorkshire and Derbyshire – so for a Sheffielder and a Yorkshireman it was quite an afternoon. As I hurried along St John’s Wood Road I wondered to myself whether it would be all over and how empty it would be (brainwashed, perhaps, by the Daily Mirror, which had already billed it as an ‘undistinguished’ contest). But Lord’s was actually full. There were, apparently, about 25,000 people there – 3,000 less than at Highbury a couple of hours earlier, but many more than when I went to see the Test Match v the West Indies. Derbyshire were in retreat. 136 for 7 against Yorkshire’s 216, with 15 or 20 overs left. But they lasted for an hour, until, shortly before 7.00, the last Derbyshire batsman was caught and the pitch was immediately invaded by happy, beer-filled Yorkshiremen, young boys, vicars and a very few women. Speeches and presentations were made and the MCC Establishment was heartily jeered, and Colin Cowdrey was happily booed as he came forward to present the Man of the Match award. But it was Yorkshire’s evening at Lord’s, and around the Tavern were gathered those nightmarish faces. Sweaty, splenetic and sour. Not pleasant really.
The diary almost buckles here under the weight of writing, filming and recording as well as learning to be a good father to my son and a good son to my ailing father. My resolve weakens and the 1960s slip away without another entry. How could I miss the creation of the Spanish Inquisition and ‘Silly Walks’? To be honest, because at the time neither I, nor any of us, I think, saw Python as a living legend, pushing back the barriers of comedy. We were lightly-paid writer-performers trying to make a living in a world where Morecambe and Wise, Steptoe and Son and Till Death Do Us Part were the comedy giants. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a fringe show, shouting from the sidelines. It was another job, exhilarating at times, but in the great scheme of things not more or less important than changing nappies or hoping for a lucrative radio voice-over. When I pick up the diary again, we’re into the 1970s and times are beginning to change.
1 The name of a fictional forward line from a John Cleese soccer monologue, and the current name for what was later to become Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Among other titles we tried unsuccessfully to get past the BBC were ‘Whither Canada?’, ‘Ow! It’s Colin Plint’, ‘A Horse, a Spoon and a Bucket’, ‘The Toad Elevating Moment’, ‘The Algy Banging Hour’ and ‘Owl Stretching Time’. Increasingly irritated, the BBC suggested the Flying Circus bit and we eventually compromised by adding the name Monty Python.
1 Sam Costa was a heavily moustachioed TV presenter, actor, singer and DJ.
1 Ian MacNaughton produced and directed all the Python TV shows, apart from the first three studio recordings and a few days of film, which were directed by John Howard Davies.
1 Our son, born in October 1968, so nine months old. The only Python child at the time.
2 David Sherlock, Graham’s partner. They’d met in Ibiza in 1966.
1 Directed by Kevin Billington, executive producer David Frost, it came out in 1970. Surely the only comedy in which Peter Cook and Harold Pinter appear in the acting credits?
2 Diana Quick and Ken Cranham – actors, friends, neighbours of Terry J, and, at the time, an item. Philip John was a work colleague of TJ’s botanist girlfriend Alison Telfer. Gerald was a friend of theirs.
1 Eric Idle.
2 My grandmother, Rachel Ovey, from whom we inherited our first fridge as well as our first car.
1 John C dressed as Rob Roy is seen galloping urgently towards a church where a beautiful girl is about to be married. Cleese arrives in the nick of time – ignores the girl and carries off the bridegroom.
2 A John Bird, John Fortune series, directed by Dennis Main Wilson, on to which Terry and myself had been drafted as script editors.
1 Co-writer of many shows including Round the Home. Father figure of Python. He pushed our series forward, and lent it an air of respectability