Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [172]
The ABC version contained long gaps of blank screen where the commercials would go. Three such major breaks in the course of half an hour. The effect on the audience was obvious. It was the end of a very good morning for us.
After lunch Fried began to call his witnesses. A Mr Burns of ABC’s Contracts Department spoke laboriously and with infinite, finely tuned dullness about the possible loss of money caused if the show was cancelled.
Shanks was next. He turned on a bravura display of ingratiating smugness. Oh, he’d been a writer in his time, he grinned. He knew the problems … god-dammit, he wouldn’t like to lose a line of his own material … but … (Could this be the same man who was quite prepared to authorise the excision of 22 minutes out of 90 minutes of Python material? Talk of not wanting to lose a line – we were losing one line in every four!)
Fried bored the pants off everyone with heavy-jowled witnesses from Time-Life who all looked as if they were concealing mass-murders. But a jarring note was struck at the end of the day when a lady at ABC testified that Ina Lee Meibach had rung her on December 10th and had told her that we were not only going to sue ABC, but we were going to drag their names through the mud and squeeze every last ounce of publicity from their predicament. For the first time in the entire proceedings we suddenly felt bad. We were found to be using distasteful, though doubtless common, tactics, and I think it reflects a serious weakness on Ina’s part. She is sometimes too tough – she takes firmness to the point of vindictiveness.
At 5.00, as it darkened out in Foley Square, the judge finally withdrew. He re-appeared a half-hour or so later and delivered an impressively fluent summing-up which began by raising our hopes at the plaintiffs’ table.
He found that ABC’s cuts were very major and destroyed an important element of Python’s appeal. He found our material was irreparably damaged. My heart leapt. ‘But,’ he went on to say that he could not grant the injunction for two reasons. One was that the BBC owned the copyright of the tapes sold to ABC, so the BBC should really have been in court too. He was disturbed by the delay in our proceeding against ABC, and had to take into account the amount of damage to ABC by our proceeding against them less than one week from the transmission date. So … ABC were off the hook. We’d tilted at windmills and lost.
‘But …’ Lasker, with a fine sense of timing, had one more twist for us … because of the nature of the damage to us, he would look very favourably on any disclaimer the Pythons would like to put in front of the show when it went out on December 26th. There he finished – and our hopes were raised again. A disclaimer could be as strong and effective as a total ban on the show. Everyone would see us blame ABC openly.
Typical of ABC’s extraordinary lack of understanding was that, following this verdict, they approached Terry G and suggested we work out a jokey little disclaimer together!
Out in Foley Square about 6.15. The cold, sub-zero wind whipping around us as we search for a subway entrance. A dark-coated, pipe-smoking figure, head bent down against the wind, crosses the square towards us. It’s none other than Judge Lasker. He shows we three frozen plaintiffs the subway and walks down there with us. Alas we have no tokens for the barrier. The judge scrabbles around in his pockets, but can only find two to give us. Give me the money, he suggests, and he’ll go through the barrier, buy us some tokens from the kiosk on the other side and hand them through to us.
We travelled, strap-hanging, with the judge, up to Grand Central Station. The nearest he got to talking about the case was when Terry G voiced his worries that the existence and the modus vivendi of the Standards and Practices Department of ABC was never questioned, and surely should have been. Yes, said Lasker, he too was worried about the Standards and Practices Department.
He merged into the crowds at Grand Central and we made our way back to the Navarro, packed our bags and, leaving