Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [274]
Apparently the two Terrys and John will hardly consider the idea at all.
Monday, March 27th
Watch the tape of the Rutles film, which went out earlier in the evening. A smoothly made piece. Elaborate, ingenious, fun. It’s interesting to compare what two Pythons have done with half a million and three-quarters of a million pounds respectively – Gilliam created Jabberwocky and Eric imitated the Beatles.
Wednesday, March 29th
Ring Neil I and congratulate him on Rutles – his music and performance both eminent. Then I ring Eric and get Tania, who is cheerful, but suggests that Eric is not in an expansive or chatty mood – and it’s his birthday.
Decide to forsake my evening of work at home and go round to cheer him up. Take a couple of bottles of champagne and an old book on cricket (complete with the tantalising chapter – ‘Making a Young Wicket-Keeper’).
We all ended up having a good drink, chat and so on. Eric was rather low earlier, I think because he felt he had tried to do something with the German film and been sat on by the rest of us without even a chance to explain it at a meeting. But I didn’t really need to tell him how jealous the Pythons are of each other’s material. How ruthlessly and subjectively biased they are against anything which any individual in the group tries to do – and that’s probably at the root of their/our unwillingness to throw 40 minutes of Python in with the Rutles. I personally think Eric was a little slow not to anticipate this reaction, but then he’s not really living in the real world at the moment.
Phone calls from the States pour in for him.
Thursday, March 30th
The next two days I must pack in nine hundred and one things before leaving for the US Saturday morning. Nancy has booked me on Concorde – so I will arrive in NYC two hours earlier than I left London. I don’t really approve – but it’s got to be worth the experience. Once.
Drive down through sunny London to collect our Broadcasting Press Guild Award. The new Press Centre in Shoe Lane is depressingly smart – and several of the journalists there complain about this shiny-smooth monster which has replaced the smoky dens where journalists used to meet.
A rather small and touchingly simple ceremony. Present are Tom Stoppard and Peter Barkworth – collecting awards for Professional Foul.
Talked to Peter Barkworth. He remembered my sister Angela from the days they worked together in Sheffield.1 ‘Trim girl …’ He’s also a diarist and writes for an hour every morning. Of Professional Foul, in which he was first-rate, he said ‘I was so depressed – I woke up one morning and said “It’s not me … I can’t do it … I’ll never be a Stoppard actor”.’ He talks in a clipped, but unselfconsciously theatrical style. Like Noel Coward without the ‘my dears’. A very likeable man.
Derek Jacobi was there to collect an award for I Claudius. He left early for Henry IV rehearsals. ‘I must dash off and be deposed,’ quipped he.
Saturday, April 1st, New York
Concorde check-in smooth, no waiting, your very own special escalator and colour scheme, whilst the boarding room – normally that featureless little box where passengers gather and gaze silently past each other, very often in a state of delay – is, for Concorde, a well-equipped lounge, with phones. Glasses of champagne have to be warded off, so liberal are they with the freebies on this hugely expensive flight. (Concorde return to NYC – £920. Freddie Laker Skytrain return to NYC – around £90.)
Word comes through that Concorde will leave late as the automatically extending jetty has stuck, four feet from the aeroplane. They apologise for the delay, but when we do board we will board up a mobile ramp, which will be drawn up