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They’re finished by two and suddenly I feel a surge of well-being and in a buoyant mood I begin to write the sort of monologue I wanted to write last January, and for most of this week, but couldn’t. Now a nice fantasy forms itself, with good jokes and one liners – more like the Oxford or Cambridge Union speeches.

Belushi, big and panting like a steam engine at a station, sprawls round my dressing room. We talk about groupies. Belushi blows, wheezes, scratches his crutch and confides that ‘I’m only fucking my wife now’. I concur and we agree only to fuck each other’s wives.

The work in progress on the monologue is brought to a temporary halt by more media exposure. I’m driven over to some studio somewhere for a show hosted by an actor called Robert Klein – a brisk, dark, intense-looking man who has just picked up a Tony nomination. He’s talking to three guests on his one and a half hour (with commercials) show: Jerry Garcia of a seminal and long-lasting West Coast group called the Grateful Dead, Clive Davis of Arista and myself. There is an audience of forty or fifty kids packed in a small studio, in which the air conditioning has failed.

Jerry Garcia is big, bearded and looks and sounds deep and rich. He freely bandies words like extrapolate and seems to need no help so I slope off to a small back studio and continue to scribble the monologue.

I do a 20-minute chat with Klein. He’s easy, informed and intelligent with a good sense of humour. One of the two or three best people who’ve ever interviewed me on Python matters.1

Saturday, May 12th, New York

Sleep well. I don’t suffer from nerves on account of the show quite so much now. I think my experience with the monologue last January at least convinced me that even if the worst happened there would always somehow be a show. Breakfasted – for the first time this week – on the full works – eggs and bacon, etc.

At dress rehearsal the show is well over half an hour too long and feels heavy and much more hit and miss than my previous two shows. With less than an hour to go before air, Lome begins his selection process. Two or three sketches are cut (one, a Nerds piece about Mr Brighton arriving with a Pakistani wife, I had never liked) and cuts are made within a long pirate spoof, ‘Miles Cowperthwaite’.

I do not react well when Lome sends Al Franken down to my dressing room to cut the monologue. Lome’s touch, however positive, is nearly always delicate, and to send poor Al down with 55 minutes left before I have to go on – and to have him put his pencil through whole chunks of what I spent most of the later part of the week writing, is a most uncharacteristic and tactless move.

At 11.35, after Belushi’s cold opening, as I wait behind the tacked-up scenery flats, only a half-inch of plywood separating me from the Great American Public, Lome threads his way through the old scenery and counsels me to take it easy. ‘Look them in the eyes – they’ll like you because you’re nice.’

The monologue starts well, but half-way through some part of my brain closes off and I’m not wholly riveted to the task of communicating my jokes to the Great American Public. Instead a voice in my head queries the importance, or indeed the necessity, of what I’m doing and why I’m standing here, and suddenly I’m conscious of the silence between the laughs, rather than the laughs themselves.

But the rest of the show swings along merrily. The miracle happens again. Lome and others are complimentary about the monologue, and I cheer up considerably.

When we get to the goodnights, James Taylor, the week’s musical guest, and Billy Murray hoist me on to their shoulders. As one of the stagehands told me later, ‘It’s not every host they put on their backs.’

3.30 a.m: to Danny’s Bar – more drinking, dancing and, as dawn breaks outside, Belushi and two others start playing live. Strong, fine, noisy music. People have to spill out of the tiny bar onto the street to talk. It’s six or six thirty – a remarkable sight. The tatty bar in a storehouse