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At lunchtime, after I’ve taken Rachel up to the swings, a lead-grey sky suddenly opens up. Hailstones, leaky kitchen – the works.

J Goldstone tells me that EMI are re-releasing Holy Grail on a nationwide basis with Blazing Saddles. Fifty-fifty at the box office, and the whole double-bill could be worth £400,000. So EMI are backing Python after all.

Tuesday, April 24th

Work on my New York Times article on the election. It gradually comes together during a spotty morning’s work. It’s not easy to cut oneself off and concentrate during school hols.

Nancy sends me a telegram telling me that, with my Concorde track record, I should embark on a boat for NYC now to arrive in time for Saturday Night Live on May 12th. So they do want me. I accept the news with a few misgivings. Something deep down says don’t do it.

Thursday, April 26th, Southwold

Buckle down to another journalistic task – this time 750 words for Variety – they want a Python piece to go in their Cannes Film Festival issue. Write it between nine and eleven. It comes easily, whereas the NYT article kept trapping me, by its status and ‘importance’, into trying to be heavy and significant.

I had spent an hour in bed this morning contemplating my SNL appearance, and had decided that I should begin my novel on May 5th as planned, and that SNL would not be progress forward, but a repetition of something I’d done as best I could anyway.

Armed with all these and other supportive arguments, I rang Nancy this evening to ask her to get me released from the show. There was a long and pregnant silence and Nancy finally desperately told me that she couldn’t get in touch with them. Lome and Jean and everyone had settled everything then left for European holidays.

Funnily enough, Nancy’s decisiveness must have struck on some equally deep desire of mine to go to New York. I suddenly thought, well, if I have to do it, I’ll do it and be positive about it. Armed with this new frame of mind, I don’t feel nearly as bad about my volte-face! My ‘conversion’ was helped by a talk with Howard Goldberg of the NYT who was very happy with the article and is leading the op-ed page with it tomorrow – Friday 27th.

Friday, April 27th

Joe McGrath phones early, as I’m typing up the Variety piece. He’s hustling me to do a commercial. Uses many techniques when I say no – ‘They wanted either you or Peter Sellers or Stanley Baxter. I wanted you.’ Etc, etc. Eric has recently done one for their company … But I stand firm and he uses his last card, which is loot. He’ll still, if I don’t mind, get the agency to ring my agent. What persistence.

Meal at Anne Henshaw’s. She’s 38 today.

Home to find Kelly, our baby-sitter, has been rung by John Cleese, who was stuck in Hull without a Good Food Guide] Kelly had to look through and find him somewhere. No luck!

Saturday, May 5th

Rachel is the first one to remember my 36th birthday. Shyly she potters into our bedroom around eight. Helen gives me the new Joseph Heller book, Good as Gold, as well as ‘The Book of Lists’ and a hammer.

Simon Albury arrives with a cake and forty candles just in case. SA announces his intention of trying Gestalt therapy – just once. Then Terry Gilliam arrives and I have an impromptu birthday party. Simon A is busily trying to sell Gilliam his idea for a ‘Gilliam World’ park – like Disneyworld, only nastier.

I leave for New York tomorrow for yet another SNL – and rather wearily start packing just before midnight.

Thursday, May 10th, New York

Down to NBC Studios. Reassuring old 8H. Big, clumsy and un-modern – it’s a joy in the middle of all these glass and steel air-conditioned silences. NBC is going through rough times in the ratings war, but this is considered to be a ‘good’ process, which will lay bare the waste and reveal it as the only network with some soul and independence.

Tape, and write, my promotional announcements. I never enjoy being stuck up there in a vast empty studio at midday, having to say Saturday Night Live