Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [113]
Friday, May 31st
The weather seems to have turned at last. Today is cloudy and it’s been raining quite hard in the night.
The long and wordy Constitutional Peasants scene. Feel heavy, dull and uninspired – wanting above all else for it to be the end of the day. Arrive at a bleak location in the hills above Callander. Mud is being prepared.
Terry Bedford is angry because Mark has been trying to economise by buying old film-stock. Some of the film which has arrived today is six years old. Terry will not use it – in fact he threw a can into a nearby moorland stream – so we have 1,000 feet on which to do this entire scene. Very little chance of re-takes. Somehow it takes a supreme effort to get the words and the character together. We do the scene in one long master shot and, thank God, we get through it first time without a hitch. Ideally would have liked another take – just to see if any part of the performance would be better, but there is not enough time or enough film. The day gets greyer as it progresses, blending perfectly with our peasants’ costumes and mirroring the generally downtrodden air.
Willy and Helen arrive midway through the afternoon. Willy is a little apprehensive of me at first, what with sores on the face, a shock of red hair, blackened teeth and rags, but he stays long enough for doughnuts and milk at tea.
I’m almost too tired to enjoy fully the elation at the end of the day, when the filming, or my part of it anyway, is finally completed. Want to leap up and down, but can’t. So I just stand there looking out over the Scottish hills, all grey and dusky and hazy as evening falls, and feel wonderfully free.
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