Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [226]
Friday, March 4th
Python re-assembles. The meeting is at 2 Park Square West, the first time we have met in the Henshaws’ sumptuous and very well-appointed new house [on the opposite side of Regent’s Park from their previous one]. It gleams and glistens and the front door is being painted as I arrive.
Eric is there (as usual) already, John arrives shortly after me, then Terry J, and we have to wait for an hour before Graham joins us. We’ve put a rather hard wooden chair out for him with the words ‘Latecomer’s Chair’ written on it, and ‘Dr Chapman’ written across the back.
But the general tone of the meeting was of optimistic good humour, stretched almost to the point of hysteria. It was almost impossible not to get a laugh. We talked for two to three hours about the script and very silly ideas like a stuffed Pontius Pilate came up. I was in tears on several occasions.
Eric suggests we do our next Python stage show on ice, but don’t learn how to skate.
Towards the end of the meeting, Eric asks me if I would be interested in writing for a George Harrison TV special in the States. I say no on grounds of time. Eric, too, doesn’t think he can do it as he appears to have lined up an £800,000-budget film for NBC on the Rutles (Eric’s and Neil’s pop group parallel of the Beatles). Clearly he commands enormous respect from NBC, who are letting him direct the thing as well.
Sunday, March 6th
Read Hunter Davies’ article on JC over my croissants. Not a bad article, some nice observations, but Python gets short shrift, and Graham even shorter. Connie, on the other hand, is effusively praised, and I get pulled in too – ‘She’s enormously fertile with funny ideas. Only Michael Palin compares with her for funny ideas.’An unexpected acknowledgement which was nice of him and quite makes my Sunday.
I thought his mother came off best out of the article. She had some very humorous quotes, if unintentionally so. ‘I know John goes on about us never allowing him a bike. But he didn’t need one. The school was opposite our house anyway’
Swimming with Tom and Willy at Holiday Inn. Willy to a party. Another girl, another Valentino entrance. William starts being silly/funny before he arrives. He does it, he says, to cheer them all up.
Helen and I and Rachel cap a very Londony weekend by walking up and around the roads of Parliament Hill neighbourhood, with half an eye for houses.
Decide when we get home that we’re very lucky to be in a house with such character. The late-Victorianness of North Mansfield Road, Parliament Hill, even when restored and cleaned, leaves a depressingly claustrophobic feeling. I was very glad to be back in our mid-Victorian shoe box.
To dinner with Peter Luff and Carolyn.1 Peter had been with Tom Stoppard to visit Amnesty cases in Russia. He gave me a lovely box full of about twenty boxes of matches, all with rather nice Pushkin drawings on them. Each box had been thoroughly searched by the Russians before they left the country.
Parts of Moscow and most of Leningrad are very beautiful, he said, but Russian official behaviour sounds pretty wretched. Notebooks confiscated. Tom Stoppard had apparently yelled at them as they took his notebook away ‘If you publish that, I’ll sue!’ It was returned, copied presumably.
Peter doesn’t think the Soviet Union will ever work – there are too many forces of nationalism, etc, within it. At present he says there is a repressive regime, reacting to the liberalisation under Khrushchev with surprising force.
An interesting evening.
Monday, March 7th
Down to 2 Park Square West. We’re all there, TG included, for chats about ‘Life of Christ’. John a little embarrassed when Terry J comes in asking’Who were the two, then?’ – referring to John’s rather bald statement in the Sunday Times article that towards the end of Python there were ‘two people’ he couldn’t get on with. But he skated over all that successfully and avoided