Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [120]
A mournful drink after lunch with Ian, Terry and Graham. Eke has gone back to Germany and Ian has reverted to the spirits, which Eke seemed successfully to divert his mind from. In the afternoon he could hardly stand up and at one point he actually fell backwards over the camera tripod.
Apart from this afternoon, Ian has been a changed man – confident, cooperative and always in control, both of us and the crew.
Saturday, October 5th
At 10.00 down to the Henshaws’ for a meeting about the film with Eric, Terry G, TJ, Gra, Mark and John Hackney, the editor.
The meeting, which Terry J had wanted to make very brief (his point being that there was very little to do to the film apart from losing all the ‘improvements’ made over the last four weeks), lasted solidly from 10.00 until 5.00. Everybody had their say about every part of the film. Eric and Mark won a point over the Three-Headed Knight (which all the rest of us who were actually in England working on the film in the summer thought was disastrous), which is now back in for us to look at. The animation has been cut down (the first time I can remember in all Python history when we have actually chopped any of TG’s stuff). Some of Neil’s music was thought to be not right, so we are putting on a lot of stock music. We have lost more of the ‘Ni’ sequence. There was nearly deadlock over re-shooting the very important opening joke with the coconuts. Mark clams up on any mention of re-shooting and TJ rises accordingly.
Thursday, October 10th
The second election this year. I feel more strongly pro-Labour than I did in February. Then it was a case of voting on the single issue of stopping the country grinding to a halt as a result of E Heath’s appalling misjudgement of the ‘have-nots’ and their strength. Since then the record of the Labour government has been impressive. They actually have held back rising prices, they have kept mortgage rates down, they’ve cut VAT, they’ve introduced fairer legislation on the sharing of North Sea Oil revenues and, on the international front, they have been a strongly heard voice in Washington and in the Common Market, and they have actually produced the ‘social contract’, which seems more than just another economic formula for trying to save the British economy (again) – it is an attempt to use and build on a sense of corporate responsibility among the working classes, which men like Sir Keith Joseph1 would deny they ever had.
So that’s why I once again found myself in the Polling Station at Tom’s school, at 9.15 on a wet October morning, voting for Jock Stallard2 for the second time in a year.
Friday, October 11th
The Labour overall majority is three. Big gains by Scottish Nationalists. The Liberal revival failed again – their share of the vote was down – and the Tories lost about twenty seats.
Monday, November 4th
As soon as we got to rehearsal today and started to read through the ‘Mr Neutron’ script, an almost tangible blanket of gloom fell on everyone. The script was bitty, and rather difficult to read, admittedly – it’s a show where we only need ten minutes’ studio – but this alone couldn’t account for the unprecedentedly dolorous mood around the table. Then I tracked it down – it was emanating from Eric. Eric, who can so often be the life and soul, was very deep into one of his dark, silent moods.
Because Eric was in France for all but two weeks of the entire writing and planning stage of the series, there is very little of his contribution in the series. In a welter of bitterly delivered contradictions, he criticised us for not accepting his half-hour, and at the same time bemoaned the fact that we wrote half-hours at all. He didn’t like writing stories, he liked writing revue.
At lunchtime came a fresh jolt from the BBC. In Graham’s speech as the Icelandic Honey Week rep – very funny and all recorded – they wanted the lines ‘Cold enough