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Driving back across Westminster Bridge at a safe and stately pace just before seven, with the Houses of Parliament floodlit and the bridge still uncleared of snow.

Al Levinson rings to wish me a Happy New Year. There was a memorial service for Eve yesterday and 150 people turned up. Which is very heartening, but only seems to emphasise the crippling irrationality of the condition that destroyed her. She was loved and she will be missed.

1978 passes – perhaps the swankiest year yet for me, what with two-week writing sessions in Barbadian luxury and elegance, a Concorde flight to the US, a week in New York with my own personal limousine (which I never used), and nine weeks of star treatment in Tunisia.

I feel that in the last year my work rate has slackened, but the slack has been largely taken up by increasingly complex business arrangements, more meetings and by a slowly, inexorably increasing number of memberships, demands for money, speeches or introductions to rag magazines – all the impedimenta of notoriety.

Next year we will have to live with the impact of the film. I know that, although now it seems that we just had a great deal of fun, both writing and performing, there is going to be something of a sensation when the subject matter is finally revealed.

1 Written by Graham Chapman, it was to be made later in the year. He wanted Moon to star in it.

1 Who looks after the house with Brown.

2 Sheffield-born comedienne (1945–95) with her own show on BBC. She had plastic surgery to make her nose smaller. ‘The old one kept knocking people off bicycles,’ Mark Lewisohn’s Guide to TV Comedy quotes her as saying.

1 I think I was battling with Daniel Martin by John Fowles.

1 Tania Kosevich became Mrs Idle in 1981.

1 Insider’s account of the Watergate scandal, by Nixon’s White House lawyer.

1 A friend from Oxford who was working at the time at Georgetown University in Guyana.

2 Gerry, an Australian, had been recommended to me by Eric Idles mother-in-law, Madge Ryan. Apart from installing false teeth, he also wrote the B-side of Eartha Kitt’s ‘An Englishman Needs Time’.

3 Bob Rafelson film starring Jeff Bridges and Sally Field.

1 Cartoonist and good friend. Never have I laughed so much with someone so morose. He died in 1994.

1 Film producer, specialising in Hammer horror films, and at the time working for EMI.

1 By now separated from her husband Michael.

1 She was an assistant stage manager at the Sheffield Playhouse for a time.

1 Catch phrase, ‘I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not,’ he originally joined as a writer, became the star and left after one year to be replaced by Bill Murray.

1 Herb Sargent, the head writer, brother of Alvin, the screenwriter (Ordinary People, Spider-Man, etc).

1 Actress girlfriend of Paul Simon. Favourite of Robert Altman’s. About to start filming on Kubrick’s The Shining with Jack Nicholson.

2 Agent, record producer, co-founder of Dreamworks in 1994.

3 She was known as New York’s Fashion Queen.

1 Bill Murray had joined the cast three months earlier.

1 Laraine Newman was one of the regular cast, who called themselves The Not Ready For Prime Time Players.

2 Al was also in All You Need is Cash, and now he has since made a lucrative career out of protest. He has his own show on TV and wrote the bestseller Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

3 Writer and cast member, brother of Bill Murray.

1 American merchant banker introduced to us by George Harrison. He’d been Peter Sellers’ financial adviser.

1 Much-sought-after entertainment lawyer. Known for ringing up his opponent and saying ‘I’m Oscar, what’s your best point?’

1 This was re-christened ‘Curse of the Claw’.

1 After a few more auditions Sue Jones-Davis was confirmed in the role, and was brilliant.

1 Despite his separation from Anne, he was still, officially, the accountant for Terry and myself.

2 I’d decided, despite my earlier reservations, to publish Arthur through Signford Ltd.

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