Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [3]
MP
As Ethelred the Unready, Complete and Utter History of
Britain, 1969. ‘Well you won’t be doing any more of those’,
John predicted, accurately as it turned out.
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Introduction
I HAVE KEPT A DIARY, more or less continuously, since April 1969. I was twenty-five years old then, married for three years and with a six-month-old son. I had been writing comedy with Terry Jones since leaving university in 1965 and, in addition to contributing material to The Frost Report, Marty Feldman, The Two Ronnies and anyone else who’d take us, we had written and performed two series of Do Not Adjust Your Set (with Eric Idle, David Jason and Denise Coffey) and six episodes of The Complete and Utter History of Britain. After the last one went out in early 1969, John Cleese rang me.
‘Well, you won’t be doing any more of those,’ he predicted, accurately as it turned out, ‘so why don’t we think of something new.’
So it was that, quite coincidentally, Monty Python came into my life, only a month or so after the diary.
This was far from my first stab at keeping a regular account of how I spent my time. At the age of eleven I resolved to record each day of the year, and kept it up until the 18th of July. The style was staccato, and looking back now, quite surreal.
Letts Schoolboy’s Diary, January, 1955
Tuesday, 18th. Big blow-up in prayers. Had easy prep. Listened to Goon
Show. Got sore hand.
Monday 24th. Had fight with (form) VR. Got hit on nose. Did two sets of
prep. Jolly hard! Cabbage for lunch. Watched TV.
At regular intervals I tried to resume the habit, but as I grew older keeping a diary seemed an irksome duty, like writing to one’s parents, and anyway, there was far too much going on in my teens and early twenties to have either the time or the inclination to write it all down. Yet there remained a nagging feeling that it was a small failure to let life go by without in some way documenting it. The feeling persisted as I grew older. All I lacked was the will-power.
Then, one night, after a meal at the house with my wife Helen and Terry Gilliam, who happened to have dropped by, I found I’d run out of cigarettes (at the time I had a twenty-a-day habit). I looked for a half-crown piece for the slot machine up the road, but could find nothing. I rifled through drawers, flung open cupboards and slid my hand down the back of sofas with increasing desperation.
‘You’re an addict,’ warned Terry.
I smiled wanly. ‘I’m not an addict, I would quite like one last cigarette before bed, that’s all.’
‘Look at you,’ Terry persisted, as I began rummaging in ever more unlikely sources, in the laundry basket and amongst the marmalade, ‘you need your fix!’
‘Look,’ I hissed, tipping up the shoe-cleaning box and forensically scrutinising the contents, ‘I don’t have to have a cigarette. I never have to have a cigarette, it’s just a small pleasure, all right?’
‘Not if you can’t sleep without one.’
The only way to face down these taunts was to deny myself the single thing I wanted most, a nice firm pull on a freshly-lit, deliriously soothing, pungently bracing tube of tightly packed tobacco coaxed from a brand-new packet of Piccadilly Tipped. And that’s where the will-power came in. For the first time in many years I went to bed without a cigarette.
Not only did I survive without the second most satisfying smoke of the day, next morning I survived without the first most satisfying smoke of the day and I never bought a packet of cigarettes again.
So cocky was I that I looked around for other giants to wrestle. As it happened I had, for the first time in years, some free time on my hands. My writing partner Terry Jones was away and I had arranged to travel to Switzerland for a few days with Helen and the baby. Why not have another crack at the diary? It would keep my newly liberated fingers occupied and writing about my post-nicotine lifestyle could only strengthen my resolve to keep