Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [26]
We taxied home at 11.30 feeling very happy and pleased we had done the evening and, who knows, we might have helped someone somewhere to put a rifle … er … bandage on …
Thursday, September 24th
At 6.30 we all trooped up to the sixth floor for our meeting with Paul Fox, Controller of Programmes, BBC1. A slightly comic entrance. We knocked tentatively at his door and went in, nobody was in the ante-office, everything was tidied up and deserted. We had been standing some moments in the outer office feeling a little disorientated when Paul Fox’s door opened and this bulky man with a generous nose and large ears appeared, Paul Fox, no less. He was clearly more nervous than we were – but then he was in a fairly indefensible position, and there were six of us.
Inside he poured us drinks and there was the usual difficulty over seats – offices just aren’t built to accommodate the Monty Python team.
Fox started by explaining why MP went out at 10.10 on a Tuesday night. Two things I felt were wrong here. One was his premise that it wasn’t a pre-nine o’clock show, although I would reckon 8.30 would be its ideal time, judging from the reactions of my ten-year-old nephew Jeremy, his six-year-old brother Marcus,1 and the large teenage section of the audience at the shows.
But Fox was conciliatory throughout. He sugared the pill with promises of a repeat of eight episodes of Series 1 immediately following our present series and, next year, a total repeat of Series 2 at a national time. He clearly realised that he had underestimated Monty Python, but his apologetic manner did encourage us to talk freely with him about some of our other complaints, e.g. lack of any BBC publicity for the new series, the removal of our invaluable researcher, the budget (which he hotly defended as being above average for LE [Light Entertainment]: moot point) and the two-week break in our transmission after the first three shows. Obviously we could not get him to change his mind, but we came away from his office after one and a half hours and several drinks feeling optimistic that we had at least said everything we wanted to say, he had been friendly and one hopes he was also receptive.
Back home in a cab.
Sunday, September 27th
No papers for the last week owing to some strike by the delivery people – but this morning I felt the need for some Sunday reading, so I drove down to Fleet Street and bought an Observer and Times from a man in Ludgate Circus. A lot of people milling about in Fleet Street – looking out for lone newspaper sellers, or calling at the Daily Express building – the only paper which seemed to have a stock of copies at its office.
4.15. Visited National Film Theatre with Simon Albury to see Arthur Penn 1922 – a documentary about the director of Left-Handed Gun, Bonnie and Clyde, The Chase, Little Big Man and a great number of Broadway theatre successes, especially The Miracle Worker.
The first film, about and starring Vladimir Nabokov, was a small gem – mainly because Nabokov himself is such a character. He manages to get away with an opinionated arrogance, partly because he is obviously not taking himself too seriously, but mainly because of his facility with words – which in the film he denies, saying that he failed to inherit his father’s gifts of description and fluency – he has a beautifully dry humour, wonderful pieces of observation, and an overriding good nature which quite make up for his pedantry. I once read many of his books, the film made me want to read more – especially his autobiography Speak, Memory.
Sunday, October 18th, Abbotsley
After breakfast Thomas and I go on a long walk around the village. In the field opposite Manor Farm, the two great carthorses have just been fed. The man who feeds them tells me he has worked the land at Abbotsley since 1926. Then tractors cost £120, now they’re £1,120, but the carthorses’ days are over. What it took a single-farrowed horse-drawn plough to do in a fortnight, a five-