Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [202]
Off up to G Chapman’s party. Sangria, champagne and good nosh. The house was cleaner and tidier than I’d ever seen it. The gathering was smallish and quite organised – the garden floodlit by Strand Electrics. Graham, on very good behaviour, wandered through in white suit looking like a benevolent tropical planter at a festivity for his employees. Peter Cook was soberish too.
Alison (still great with child) and Terry, Neil and Yvonne, Barry Cryer, Jo Kendall,1 David Yallop are all there. But we’re all getting older and staider, I thought, until Graham, Bernard McK and Dave Yallop gave their rendition of ‘Without You’ to a bemused audience. They stand in Gumby-like rigidity and yell the chorus to this lovely song at a hideous, horrendously loud pitch – and with trousers down for the second chorus.
Back home around 1.15.
Friday, July 16th
After lunch walked round balmy, humid London – to the studio, to the Jabberwocky office. To Great Titchfield Street to meet Warren Mitchell and read through my part with him. A tough little guy – close cropped hair, a tight, intense way of talking … but busy and extrovert in his command of a conversation.
Talk for a while about how bad actors are at dealing with praise. Warren said he approached Paul Scofield once and told him how marvellous he’d been in something, and, as Warren described it, ‘the poor guy didn’t know where to put himself’.
A bit of a read through. Warren tries his funny teeth he’s brought along. Eventually fall to chortling over Till Death, Warren says he was third choice for Alf Garnett. First choice was Leo McKern! Problems of success of Till Death – who created Alf Garnett? Was it [writer] Johnny Speight or Warren? Clearly they both think they own more of Alf than the other thinks they deserve. God, if Python split over who created what, it could be the court case of the century!
‘Silly old moo’ – the famous phrase, Warren says, wasn’t scripted. It came out during a rehearsal when he forgot the line ‘Silly old mare’.
Monday, July 19th
To Southwold for last visit before Jabberwocky/Ripping Yarns filming begins. Notice today how frail Ma is becoming, at the same time as Dad’s muscular mobility is worsening.
There are no solutions to the problem which can give anyone any pleasure. The wretched twin attacks of Parkinson’s and hardening of the arteries are destroying Father physically and the permanent hospitalisation which looms, now I would think, within the year, will destroy him mentally.
It rains hard as the train pulls into Liverpool Street at nine. Clatter home on the Broad Street Line. Comforting melancholy.
Wednesday, July 21st
Rehearsals with Harry H Corbett (a good actor, but oddly unsure of himself – he wears a suit and he mumbles rather self-deprecatingly that he feels its important to look smart on the first day of a job! And I think he meant it.). But we get on well, and the scenes together will be funny. The same with Paul Curran, who plays my father. A Scot, friend of Jimmy Gilbert and Ian MacNaughton, from the seemingly inexhaustible supply of actors spewed out by Glasgow Citizens’Theatre.
Take Tom swimming after game of squash with Richard. In the evening Simon A rings and asks me to go and see Hester Street (written and directed by Joan Micklin Silver) with him. A delightful film – unpretentious and wholly successful. 10/10.
Back from this sensitive, sensible look at early Jewish immigrants struggling to settle in New York in 1896 to a phone call from Michael Henshaw to tell me that a meeting of lawyers and accountants representing all the Pythons have decided (not even recommended) that the next Python film should be written abroad. Oh … and that they had projected its profit at £1 million.