Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [291]
Friday, July 28th
First progress of any sort on the NBC special. Work on outlines for a new Robin Hood tale – the story of an insecure, nightmare-ridden, ex-hero, trying to live with his legendariness. At least there’s a character there I’d like to play.
But writing up in my room today is like resting on an anthill. The children, plus friends, are all at home, there are four builders in No. 2 and, after lunch, Helen trying to grab some of the hot sunshine out on my balcony. I like my house and my family, but today the attractions of a quiet hotel room with just a bed and a typewriter flashed briefly, but poignantly across my mind.
Off to play squash with Terry and try to rid myself of this inability to produce brilliance. The game revives me.
Afterwards we pay a visit to Michael Henshaw.1 Michael is anxious to talk over a tax-avoidance scheme to deal with the estimated £82,000 in foreign-earned money which we should be receiving as our full share of the performance fee on Brian.
An endearingly frank middle-aged man with greying hair and a lisp explains the scheme. It would involve Terry and me becoming a partnership, based on the island of Guernsey, with the aid of a Guernsey partner whom this man would find for us.
He was disarmingly open in acknowledging that there were risks. ‘The worst that can happen is that after six years you may have to pay it all back,’ he told us. ‘What if it’s all been spent on the houses and swimming pools it will enable us to have?’ asked I. His reply was equally cheerful. ‘You can always go bankrupt.’
A hot evening, but two pairs of cold feet as we left Michael’s.
Friday, August 4th
To Dog’s Ear Studio in Wapping, where Chris Orr was having an open day party to celebrate the completion of printing of the Arthur lithographs.2
London Docklands is a weird and wonderful place – a desert of empty warehouses and forlorn cranes frozen for ever in semi-tumescence. Dog’s Ear is on the third floor of one of these warehouses. Dark and solid buildings where your footsteps echo from stout stone floors and ring through empty stairwells. Then the delight of the studio itself – a long thin room of quite unusual scale, almost seventy yards long.
Chris is at the end of the room, setting bottles of wine out on a white-clothed table, and, as I walk down the room to him, my customary sense of proportion and perspective is quite thrown. I never normally spend this amount of time crossing a room.
At the far end and beyond the table is the wide river access and, three floors below, with no walkway or garden or patio to interrupt access, is the green-brown slosh of the Thames. A stunning location – and a more dramatic London setting for a studio it would be hard to imagine. I feel that the docks are, must surely be, about to undergo a renaissance. Already hotels are creeping down from Tower Bridge, and these strong, spacious warehouse buildings with the immeasurable asset of direct river access, will, in ten or twenty years, be full and busy again.
To add to the pleasure of the place there was also the satisfaction of seeing the fruits of Chris and friends’ careful craftsmanship in the production of the lithographs. The end results were sharper, clearer and had much more impact on me than the original proofs.
Drove to the Savoy and there met Lome (discreetly behind shades).
Lome, en passant, muses on what it would be like if J Cleese and I were to do a show together … Now that would be a world-beater, he says, ever so gently.
Tuesday, August 8th
Out to dinner this evening with Anne Beatts – a Saturday Night Live writer who is over here – and Shelley Duvall, with whom she’s staying. Helen came along too, reluctantly at first, for this was to be a rare evening at home. Shelley is good company, though, tells a good tale and has an effortlessly appealing warmth which wins over one’s confidence easily. She’s very sharp and intelligent – except for buying a very small and cross dog, which leaves little pools