Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [298]
In an excess of zeal tonight I crack the top of my dental plate whilst cleaning it.
Worlds collide, restoration drama meets John Belushi, Saturday Night Live, April 8th, 1978.
‘The Chilites dance routine does not please Lome and is cut just before dress rehearsal. “You’ll thank me in years to come,” says Lome. I’m thanking him now’ Garrett Morris (left), Bill Murray, myself and Dan Aykroyd. (April 8th, 1978)
‘An awful, monumentally awful moment’. Dancing with five cats down my trousers, Saturday Night Live, New York. (April 8th, 1978)
Eric and Carey, me and Rachel, Life of Brian, Tunisia, 1978.
‘Tom decided he would like to appear in the afternoon’s filming … It was one of the less comfortable scenes but graced by the presence of the visiting George Harrison. So at least he can say he’d been in a scene with Pythons and Beatles.’ (The Life of Brian, October 22nd, 1978)
Holidays at Roques. Helen and me, Tom, Anthea, Ian Davidson and Edward Burd.
Happy family. The Coach House, Sag Harbor, NY, 1979.
My childhood friend Graham Stuart-Harris.
‘1979 comes in cold Very cold.’ On the pond at Abbotsley.
‘I have to open a fete at William Ellis School … I smile and sparkle and fail to hit anything with seven balls.’ (May 19th, 1979)
Mary and Edward Burd, Roques.
Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels hypnotises me before the show.
‘Mikoto comes to cook us a Japanese meal. The preparation is a painstaking and delicate business – as indeed is communication with Mikoto.’ (June 12th, 1979)
Al Levinson, my American friend, with Rachel, Sag Harbor, NY, July, 1979.
‘They give us grapefruit segments, beef in a brown and unexciting sauce… and a trifle which looked like the remains of an unsuccessful heart-swap operation.’ With Donald Carroll (left), Jilly Cooper, Steve Race and Katharine Whitehorn at a Yorkshire Post literary lunch. (October 25th, 1979)
Gospel Oak, 1979, with Will, Rachel and Tom.
Thursday, September 21st, Monastir
Back on our imperial rostrum again this morning.
One of the great delights is playing with John on his close-ups. John is, on a good night, one of the world’s great corpsers, and today I have the rare luxury of being able to try and corpse him absolutely legitimately. On one take he is unable to speak for almost half a minute.
Drive back with JC. We take a bedtime Armagnac in my room and I bore him with a monologue about my novel. JC doesn’t think he could write one. His mind tends to the factual and informative, he says – he feels he can’t reproduce or create atmosphere.
Friday, September 22nd, Monastir
At the location by eight to provide off-camera lines for the crowd at Mandy’s house, which is located in a busy corner of the Ribat, dressed to give the feeling of a Jerusalem tenement block of AD33. Lots of Gilliam detail. Full of Arabs, it really looks amazingly good.
Graham gives us a few full-frontals early on. He does pose rather well – probably an unconscious result of many years’ absorption in gay mags.
As well as our ever-enthusiastic crowd of Arabs, we also have some English tourists, rounded up from nearby hotels and referred to by various collective nouns – the ‘Clarksons’, the ‘Cosmos’.
I was asking our patient, hard-working Arab assistant director, who has the unenviable task of explaining Terry’s instructions, how the locals were assembled. Apparently some are students and others just villagers, recruited after a tour of the surrounding areas in which the assistant director, as he told me, ‘explained Python to them’. That must be worth some sort of award.
Terry J’s method of teaching an Arab crowd to speak English is quite a phenomenon … He was pressed for time, admittedly, but the Jones technique went something like this …
‘Let’s try it then … “We are all individuals”.’
The good-natured, completely baffled Arabs mimic Terry as best they can.
Terry:’Good …! Good … you’ve nearly