Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [17]
It was all rather nightmarish, grinning faces loomed up, people pushed through, Eric Morecambe looked cheerful, a dinner-jacketed young man with a vacant expression and an autograph book asked me if I was famous. I said no, I wasn’t, but Terry Gilliam was. Gilliam signed Michael Mills’1 name, the twit then gave the book to me saying, ‘Well, could I have yours anyway?’ So I signed ‘Michael Mills’ as well. We all signed ‘Michael Mills’ throughout the evening.
Monday, April 20th
Down at Terry’s to put together the fifth show of the new series. A mid-morning disappointment – the Rome filming trip, which had always seemed to me too good to be true, has almost collapsed. Virna Lisi, the leading lady, is ill and the schedule is now in disarray. A slim chance that I may be needed before my Monty Python deadline, but I am inclined to write it off. Bad scene. Loss of suntan and at least £300, not to mention experience.
The other four of us, or should I say three and the hovering Chapman (no, that’s unkind, and this is a kind diary), the other four of us worked on until 6.45, and completed and read through what I think is one of the best shows to date.
Tuesday, April 21st
An interesting and hard-worked morning giving my voluntary performing services for the Labour Party. Easily the most decisive political act of my life, and almost the only one – though previously I had once voted Labour in the GLC elections. I suppose voting for and supporting Labour is just another painless way of appeasing my social conscience. But it’s not much, I cannot see how anyone with a social conscience could vote Conservative. The film which I was doing today had been written by John Cleese, who is now what you might call a committed Labour celebrity – and I mean that in a good sense – somebody who is prepared to do something to keep the Conservatives out. At present Labour is increasingly successful in the polls. Two opinion polls out this week actually gave Labour a lead over the Tories for the first time for three years and, in the GLC elections last week, Labour won thirteen seats, their biggest electoral success since they came to power.
Friday, April 24th
Down at Terry’s in the morning and for lunch, and from there to the BBC, where we all gathered to watch the playback of two of the last Monty Python series, which were being shown to an American named Dick Senior, who is interested in syndicating them in the States, and an American girl by the name of Pat Casey, who is to be in some way connected with the production of our Playboy-sponsored Python film to be made later in the year.
The first one we were shown was Show 11, and it was painfully slow – the ‘Undertakers’ and the ‘World of History’ were two ideas ground underfoot by heavy-handed shooting and editing and also performance. It made us look very amateur and our face was only partly saved by Show 12 – a much better looking show with ‘Hilter’ and ‘Upper Class Twits’ providing two of the most remembered items of the series.
Dick Senior seemed a little taken aback, but he was a very intelligent man and could obviously see that there was a cumulative attraction in Monty Python, which an isolated showing could not necessarily convey. Nevertheless, Show 11 is not one to use for sales purposes.
At 5.00 Terry and I arrived at Pinewood Studios to talk to Betty Box and Ralph Thomas about our rewriting Percy.1 After walking for many yards along corridors and up stairs, which one was never sure were entirely real, we arrived at the office which they share. Both of them younger than I imagined. Ralph Thomas seemed the more genuine and pleasant of the two, Betty Box being kind, but hinting at a hard edge beneath. For about one and a half hours we talked and I got the feeling that they were impressed by our criticisms of the screenplay of Percy, and anxious for us to rewrite as much as we can in the time. (They start shooting