Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [271]
We eat at a rather tasteful little restaurant – a bit elaborately frilly and soft-furnished – called Pomme D’Amour in Bayswater Road. Pleasant, easy chat with just the three of us – about books, Alexander Technique (JC’s been at it for three years) and JC’s desire to do a That Was The Week That Was-style show – mainly I think because he feels that the people who need the boot in now are not the old hags of the Macmillan right-wing establishment, but the new and humourless tyrants of the left.
Wednesday, March 1st
Am finishing typing a Telegraph ‘Opinion’ piece, when a grave’s Albury enters the writing sanctum. He’s been talking to Barry Spikings, who’s been talking to Lord Delfont, who has stopped the EMI/Python deal because he was so outraged by the script.
My immediate reaction is a surge of relief, spreading to all parts of the body. Breathing space to write the Yarns, confirmation of fears that I had pushed back into my subconscious that EMI would ‘find us out’ at some stage and get cold feet. But I’ll believe it when I hear it and am not going to race to the telephone.
Instead I pour myself a glass of wine and go off with Simon and [his wife] Phillida to see Smile Orange – a sort of black Fawlty Towers with a hint of MASH and with as much humour and far more endearing characters than either of them.
Thursday, March 2nd
It’s pouring solidly at 9.30 and Helen and I are eating rather cosily and discursively in the kitchen, when John Goldstone calls. The facts are correct. Michael Carreras1 showed the script to Delfont, who vetoed it. Spikings, however, has undertaken to provide us with £50,000 to keep our production team together whilst we find new backing.
Friday, March 3rd
Evidently none of the Pythons is distraught over the collapse of the EMI offer. Terry J greatly relieved that Python still has its powers of aggravation. EMI are the black-tie gala luncheon, awards dinners establishment – the Grades and the Delfonts of this world – and no territory is less familiar or acceptable to us than this chummy world of showbiz conformists.
This morning’s newspapers, by coincidence, show that EMI’s half-yearly profits have slumped and yesterday £19 million were wiped off the value of their shares.
Just before lunch my ragged morning is brightened by a phone call from Terry Hughes, who informs me, joyfully, that Ripping Yarns has not been forgotten. It’s won the Press Guild Critics’ Award for Best Comedy Series of the Year. This boost, coming together with the news of the dates of repeats and with the extension of writing caused by the postponement of Python, revives the Yarns, which a week ago I felt were in danger of foundering under my lack of enthusiasm. Now, with such a confirmation of appreciation, shall begin an assault on them with renewed spirit.
Monday, March 6th
In to work-room by 7.20. After breakfast JC rings with comments on the rewritten Brian ending. Generally he finds it an acceptable and much improved replacement, but there are one or two points – like the stammering Gaoler – which he has always disliked, and when he turns the full beam of his intellectual logical judgement upon what strikes us as spontaneously funny, it does wither the material. I predict a stubborn confrontation on that scene. But all else constructive.
I now favour a clear decision to avoid the summer and begin Brian in autumn, but there are difficulties – costumes are hired, sets in Tunisia are apparently not available in the autumn, etc, etc. Meanwhile, wigs are measured, scripts are rewritten and costumes continue being sewn.
Wednesday, March 8th
Gilliam rings for half an hour, proposing a new course of action on the movie – i.e. to cut our budget to a reasonable size by abandoning plans to film in Tunisia, using Britain and finding unusual locations and using a stylised design treatment. The talk turns to castles and salt mines in Wales. ‘Jesus of Shepperton’, I call