Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [197]
Wednesday, May 26th
Drive down to Terry’s in late morning for a combined session on Ripping Yarns. Don’t really get down to work until after lunch. TJ has made a very funny start on an episode centring round a vicar and an adoring women’s club who all want to marry him. Nicely written nineteenth century polite language. We chat about it and decide it could make a half hour of the Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights, Brontë/Austen/Eliot style. Lots of repression and social restrictions and smouldering passions and breaking hearts.
I read ‘Escape from Stalag Luft 112B’, which I’ve been working on these past seven days. Despite one or two blockages, it wrote itself fairly easily and Terry was very pleased. He thinks it’s nearly half an hour already. Within a few minutes of talking about it Terry came out with a very clear and funny ending, so I don’t think we were over-optimistic in thinking that we have another Ripping Yarn as good as finished and a strong idea for a fifth script. I took the vicar and left TJ with the escape.
Tuesday, June 1st
I find myself at the door of the Hampstead Theatre Club. This highly-respected little theatre still has the air of a gypsy caravan in a bombed site.
Meet David Aukin at the door of the caravan. He looks thinner, otherwise the same as when he and Rudman were carrying off the glittering prizes on the Oxford stage in ’62/’63. Mike Rudman joins us. He has that slight edge of American forthrightness, or aggression, or perhaps directness, which always makes me a little uncomfortable. I reach quickly for my English defence – and make a few jokes.
My task is to deliver the scripts of Finest Hours to him, in the hope that he will be able to go and see the plays and maybe bring them back to the Theatre Club. For some reason I am still a little uneasy as I push them – for I feel that they’re lightweight.
Off about 7.00 to drive down to Whitechapel Galleries, where Chris Orr is having his first complete exhibition and his first exhibition in London.
After a few attempts, find the Whitechapel Galleries – they’re well off the beaten artistic track, in the Jewish East End a few doors down from Blooms Deli, which makes me agreeably nostalgic for New York, and facing out over the bewildering, traffic-filled wilderness of the new, improved, enlarged Aldgate roundabout for cars and not people.
Chris Orr is very helpful and shows me round his stuff. Find a mutual admiration for the work of Pont, the 1930s cartoonist, whose gentle, satirical studies like ‘The British Character’ come to mind when you look at some of Chris’s finely-drawn pictures.
Robert shows me the ‘rushes’ of the first Signford production Chris Orr’s John Ruskin, which is out in a couple of weeks, but later he tells me of a much more interesting proposition involving buying a fifteenth-century barn, owned by New College, Oxford. It could, R thinks, be bought for a song, and both Helen and I liked the adventure of working (Harold and Vita-like!) on an old, historic hulk and literally shaping the interior ourselves.
Wednesday, June 2nd
Have to buy the Mirror today as the first page trails a picture of John and Connie and the heading ‘When Love Turns Sour at Fawlty Towers’. Inside, disappointingly accurate account of J and C’s new living arrangements, whereby they share the house, but not the bed.
The boiled egg is scarcely dry upon my lips, when a man from the Evening News rings asking for JC’s phone number. I decline to give it as politely as possible – but nearly spill the beans about the time John … later, later.
Wednesday, June 9th
Terry