• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Down to Regent’s Park for a Python Annual General Meeting. We have three companies – Python Productions Ltd, Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd and Kay-Gee-Bee Music Ltd. We manage to go through the official convening and closing procedure of all three companies in four minutes!

Terry J models the Python T-shirt, which is approved, with a few design alterations.

Finally we agree to spend £30,000 on acquiring full rights from Bavaria TV to the two German specials.

Taxi back with Dr Chapman, who has had a very tiring week film producing – and finds the whole thing much harder than he expected. Apparently Peter Sellers is very anxious to do The Odd Job – and is muscling in through his agent – whereas Graham wants Peter O’Toole in it, but O’Toole is less bankable’ than Sellers.

Monday, June 21st, Southwold

My father’s 76th birthday. I decide to go up to Southwold for the day, which is a pleasant way of giving him a present and marking the occasion, even though I suppose I should be writing away in London.

He’s watching the Test Match on TV when I arrive at Croft Cottage. I take him cards from us all and a collection of reminiscences from a BBC Radio series about the British in India from 1900 on, which I hope will find an echo amongst his own memories of India, which seem to become more vivid the older he gets.

A bottle of champagne for lunch and a little stroll outside on the lawn, where a year ago we were drinking and eating with quite a crowd as we celebrated his 75th. Today just me and Mother, but he has had a letter from Angela and Aunt K [his sister].

Head down over lunch – he must concentrate all his energies on getting the food into his mouth, and cannot talk. Even after lunch, when there is discussion as to what to do in the afternoon, he cannot manage to make the word, so he writes down ‘Rhododendrons’.

I take him for a drive to see the rhododendrons, which flank the road near Henham in lush profusion at this time of year. Sadly they’ve been heavily trimmed back and there’s little to see, but he’s enjoyed the ride in the car and didn’t seem to want to do anything more ambitious.

Read Pirsig’s Zen and the Art on the train back and found the simplicity and effectiveness of some of his words of wisdom revelatory. A sort of enlightened calm had taken hold of me by the time I got home. I really was reacting to things in a quite different way. Books affect me a little like that anyway, but this more so than any I have read.

Though on this tranquil summer’s evening his theory of quality as reality may induce fine thoughts and comfort, it’s going to be difficult when the radios start playing on the building sites and the ads blare out of my car radio and the phone starts ringing.

Wednesday, June 23rd

Drive into London to watch a two-hour showing of the Amnesty documentary shot by Roger Graef at the end of April. Jonathan Miller and I are about the only participants there.

It’s a fascinating start – all the little glimpses of rehearsals in progress. The Goodies stand out like a sore thumb when rehearsing ‘Funky Gibbon’, but come out as nice, human chaps when they sit around talking, and Alan Bennett’s asides and revelations on his Fringe colleagues are sweetly, disarm-ingly, catty. Talking to TJ about Python, he ends up rather sadly, ‘Well, if you ever want another member for the group …’

Am struck by how relaxed and worldly-wise the Beyond the Fringe team are. Beside them, not that the film makes comparisons, the Pythons seem jolly but sort of more businesslike, less rambling and discursive. Maybe in ten years’ time we’ll have aged and mellowed in the same rather comforting way.

Thursday, June 24th

I enjoy a rare day with no need to go out – not even a game of squash. And I find myself with time on my hands. I read Sylvia Plath’s Letters at lunch and outside in the evening. Rather brittle, full of sudden ups and sudden downs. Plathitudes. Life/Man/Work is one day marvellous, brilliantly handsome, ecstatic, unbearably wonderful, and the next depressing, frightful – a great