Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [240]
As we kick around they announce our names, and cheers rise. Biggest for Ed Stewart (good at projecting his personality), softest for John Peel (the brightest of the lot of them).
The game (the width, not the length of the pitch) is a kick and run affair – with Tommy Steele vainly trying to organise a team of six people, all of whom want only one thing, to score at Wembley. Ed Stewart plays a miraculous blinder in goal for Radio One, and it’s even scores at half-time.
In the second half I hit the crossbar and completely miss another, and John Peel scores the winner for Radio One. As Teddy Warrick put it, the best team lost, which is, along with a car sticker for Wembley Stadium Main Car Park, a free kit-bag and a No. 4 blue shirt, my only consolation.
Friday, July 1st, Berlin
Meet up at London Airport with Sir John Terry of the NFFC1 – big and benign, like Father Christmas – John Goldstone, grinning bearishly through a beard which threatens to overrun his face, and Terry Gilliam.
I find myself sat next to a short-haired, fortyish Englishman, who talks compulsively. It turns out he’s with the British Forces in Berlin, and is scared stiff of flying. He has his air-sickness bag ready, grasps the edge of the seat with hands continually clenching and unclenching. He’s a crack shot and trains people in rifle use.
Meet Michael White in the lobby of the Kempinski Hotel. He’s in a crumpled white suit and has just flown in from Paris after an all-night party given by Yves St Laurent.
The bad news of the day is that Jabberwocky is now out of competition as we have been naughty and broken the rules by opening the film in Paris before the festival. It takes some of the edge off our jaunt to know that, however well received, we can’t win any Golden Bears.’Just as well,’ says Goldstone, not very convincingly.’These sort of awards can put audiences off, you know.’
Saturday, July 2nd, Berlin
In the afternoon, after a typical German lunch, served by a large, perspiring waiter, M White hires a BMW and we all squash in and go across to East Berlin. What a change from 1972.1 The Alexanderplatz looks cleaner, brighter, more colourful than before. The bombed and shot-up churches are being restored. Altogether a much more Western look to the place. But the coffee is terrible and the cakes are hard and it still takes half an hour to cross through the wall.
Find a wonderfully seedy hotel just beside the wall at Brandenburg Gate, Hotel Adlon. It used to be right next to Hitler’s bunker, which Whitey tells me the East Germans are excavating. Tea at the Orangerie in the Charlottenburg.
Alan Brien2 sees me reading Nabokov’s Despair and tells me that he is mentioned in Ada after conducting some correspondence with Nabokov about skin disease. (Nabokov, one of my literary heroes, died last week.)
In the Kempinski, like in some grotesque dream, tarted-up, over-beautified fat ladies and heavily-sweating men gather for the Film Festival Ball, which seems to be remarkable for having nobody recognisable present.
We Brits can’t get in anyway, but stay on the outside, make guerrilla raids on the rather good food and buy ourselves a couple of bottles of sparkling. M White observes that this is why Hollywood stars never leave Hollywood.
Sunday, July 3rd, Berlin
Kill time until three o’clock, and the first showing of Jabberwocky. A half-full house. Perhaps a little more. Good laughs. At the end Gilliam and I have to come through the curtains and make a brief appearance. Applause. It’s not too embarrassing. The worst is yet to come.
We are shown into a back room of the Cinema Am Zoo, where two long tables are pushed together and rigged with chunky, old-fashioned mikes. A few scruffy-looking people with notepads sit around.
Wolf Donner, the organiser of the festival, is a pleasant, open-faced