Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [184]
In late afternoon, down to Covent Garden with TG to look at premises. It’s exciting down there – a lot of well-designed shop-fronts, and well-renovated, sturdy old buildings. Art designers, film and recording studios, craft shops and ballet centres are moving into old banana warehouses and there’s a good healthy feeling of an area coming to life again. Neal’s Yard premises look perfect for us. I hope we don’t lose them.
Monday, March 22nd
Arrived at Anne’s about 10.00 for the first read-through of material for an ambitious charity show in aid of Amnesty International. As I’m parking outside Park Square East, I nearly run over Jonathan Miller – who is to produce the Amnesty show – loping towards Anne’s door. His curly hair is unbrushed, his clothes are an unremarkable heap of brown, and his eyes look a little red. He greets me very cheerfully.
As we go upstairs, I catch sight of a gun mike pointing in our direction and a blinding early morning sun shining directly at us suffuses the scene with a Gala Premiere-like quality. The mike and the camera belong to the Roger Graef team, a ‘specialist’ documentary group, whose typical product is the long, minutely-observed documentary of people at work. Evidently they are going to trace the whole process of putting on the Amnesty show. They try to work as unobtrusively as possible. They don’t use any artificial light and Chas Stewart, the cameraman, usually crushes himself discreetly, if uncomfortably, into a corner of the room. Only the flick of the gun mike is impossible to ignore.
Jonathan Miller is disarming and jokey, and not at all daunting, as I think I had expected. He certainly has a very encouraging attitude to the Amnesty show. Organise it, direct it, by all means, but let’s keep the feeling of a spontaneous, anything-might-happen evening.
After a half hour’s discussion and coffee – when it was agreed that Peter Cook should take over Eric’s role as the condemned man in the ‘Court Sketch’ and that Terry J should be transferred to a Cook, Bennett, Miller sketch, in lieu of Dudley Moore who is in the US – Miller left, but with a very good parting shot. He gazed out of the windows into Regent’s Park and murmured nostalgically, ‘I used to play in those gardens when I was three. I remember a girl of eight asked me to show her my cock … It’s never happened since,’ he concluded, rather sadly.
R Graef is a very bright, approachable and likeable man. He shares the view of the Weekend World team that news presentation is, generally speaking, dead and flat and goes on to say he feels TV as a whole fails to involve its audience. His prolonged documentaries are an attempt to involve the TV viewer, without the smooth, glossy aids of well-worked storylines, and rather by presenting real people ‘warts and all’. His technique begs a lot of questions, but it’s refreshing to talk to someone who feels that something can be achieved on TV and is not for ever shaking his head sadly and saying ‘Well of course, it would be lovely to do this, but …’
After lunch Terry and I play squash. Not a bad game, considering we both had curry behind us. Terry has a theory this is why Pakistanis make such formidable squash opponents.
Tuesday, March 23rd
At 12.00, via the bank to Anne’s to drop off visa forms plus ghastly photo of Helen for States. Then to Fetter Lane for an extremely civilised hour of culture with Robert. We had lunch (white wine, smoked ham, Camembert and granary bread and salad) and I looked over Chris Orr’s Ruskin etchings,1 which will be the basis of the book I’m funding. I like them very much. Quite different from what I had expected, they are full of references to Ruskin’s (Chris Orr’s) sexual repression and fantasies. This theme gives the etchings a clear unity, but within that there is a wealth of detail and some very successful theatrical effects in the etchings themselves.
To Liverpool Street to