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Wednesday, June 8th

Pleasant drive up into Lincolnshire.1 Sun is out when I arrive in Rippingale, a small village between Bourne and Sleaford, lying in unexpectedly attractive country – more wooded and gently hilly than the bleak, flat Fenland just to the east. The villages are full of fine stone houses, like the Cotswolds.

The house itself is a stone-built Georgian rectory, of simple, unadorned design, with additions in red brick. It is in quite a poor state indoors and Uncle Jack’s2 bedroom needs absolutely nothing doing to it – the walls are damp, mildewed and peeling -just perfect.

Drive into Peterborough – about half an hour down the A15. An extraordinary city. A fine and impressive cathedral and all around it lines of insubstantial brick terraces, reaching right into the city centre. There is hardly anyone about – even at 5.30. Then I realise, of course, Peterborough – or Greater Peterborough as it now calls itself – has expanded along the American pattern – from the suburbs outwards. No-one really needs the centre of Peterborough any more.

Saturday, June 11th

After a great deal of heart-searching over the last few weeks, I finally sat down to write to Hamish Maclnnes,1 and excuse myself from his Yeti expedition.

In recent weeks I had received the latest newsletters on the expedition from Hamish, which contained a rather worrying mixture of uncertainty over finance and jolly, harrowing asides like ‘We will have to move fast to get out of this valley, where some years ago a Tibetan expedition were trapped and actually ate their boots before being discovered … dead.’

Despite the obvious pleasures of a trip to unknown lands in the company of top climbing folk like Hamish and Joe Brown, I have been so infrequently at home over the last year, what with Jabberwocky (ten weeks) and Ripping Yarns (seven weeks) and a week and a half in New York, that I feel I can’t commit myself to two months in the Himalayas only a month or so before we plan to shoot Life of Brian in North Africa. But it goes against instincts I’ve had since early childhood to opt out of an expedition to an almost unknown part of the world.

Saturday, June 18th

Playing charity football this afternoon at Wembley Stadium. Cavernous rooms and passageways round the back.

Finally discovered our dressing room. Teddy Warrick2 there, small and beaming, and most of the Radio One side with him – Peel, Gambaccini, Kid Jensen and Paul Burnett. Quiet, rather subdued atmosphere. Ed Stewart arrives and starts to organise everyone in a very loud voice.

On our side only Paul Nicholas here at the moment. Another quiet lad – I like him. Alan Price arrives, then Graham Chapman and John Tomiczek. John will play in goal for us and I suggest Graham, in his strange Trilby hat, should be team psychiatrist. A sort of cheer goes up as Tommy Steele arrives, bubbling, flashing a lovely white Cockney grin of the type usually described as ‘infectious’. He is tacitly assumed to be senior ‘celebrity’, and takes over captaincy of our side.

We are given free bags and kit by some sports company, which is a nice bonus. The CID appear in the dressing room – apparently to offer us some sort of protection – and say they will guard the dressing room until we get back – if we get back. We sign programmes for them.

Gambaccini claims he didn’t sleep at all last night. He can’t cope with it all, he says.’Three times I’ve played football, and already I’m at Wembley!’

Alan Price finishes a last cigarette and stubs it beneath his boot as we move off up the tunnel. The noise grows, heads turn – heads of officials, policemen, commissionaires – the flotsam and jetsam of officialdom who are allowed to hang around at the very cervix of Wembley. Ahead is the pitch, above us a net to protect players from missiles.

And suddenly we’re walking out. I want to freeze the moment, savour it like the finest wine. All I’m aware of is empty terraces.

There are, in fact, 55,000