Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [355]
Owing to my cold, I’ve put off a proposed curry evening with TJ and Alison at Veeraswamy’s to celebrate ‘Roger of the Raj’ and the end of the Yarns.
So happily watch at home, with Helen and a half bottle of champagne – and thoroughly enjoy it. ‘Roger of the Raj’ is now, in my book, quite restored to top status. It’s been a long process of rehabilitation after the depths of gloom into which I unaccountably sank over it last summer. It’s now up there with ‘Tomkinson’ and ‘Olthwaite’ as one of my three greats.
T Gilliam, who is very restless at the moment since ‘Brazil’ has not been accepted unequivocally by anybody, was round again this morning, bubbling over with a mixture of excitement and embarrassment. He has a new plan for a subtle sort of Gilliam/Palin link-up. I will write my children’s book for Macmillan and he will film it! Simple – except that I’m writing a book, not a film script, and I won’t be putting thoughts to paper until January.
TG is only slightly daunted by this. He still thinks that for the two of us to collaborate on a children’s film – me the basic script and characters, TG with the visual fireworks – would be an unbeatable combination and manage to solve the problem of his almost all-consuming urge to do his own movie in the next two years. Otherwise, he says, he will go mad.
Thursday, October 23th
Taxi takes me to King’s Cross to catch the 7.45 to Leeds. Dawn only marginally lighter than the pitch darkness of an hour ago has rather resentfully broken as we move out of the station, as if God didn’t really want today to happen.
The restaurant car is packed. I sit with David Ross, whom I like more and more each time I see him. Droll Scottish humour. Breakfast as we nip along across a flat landscape, dimly lit by a sullen sky, to whatever awaits us at the Yorkshire Post literary lunch.
To the Queen’s Hotel. Only Steve Race, a fellow speaker, in evidence. A soft-spoken, humorous man, much concerned with being polite – in the best way. I liked him and had to tell him that he was one of my earliest television heroes. He and Hank on Whirligig.1 It was satisfying to share pure nostalgia with the man responsible for it.
Into a sort of large public ballroom with windows boarded up. A sea of faces at long tables – maybe 400 people out there. About 10% were what one might call ‘young people’ – under 35. But mostly they were middle-aged, generally female, wearing hats and there to be seen to be there, without exuding any obvious signs of literary curiosity.
They gave us grapefruit segments, beef in a brown and unexciting sauce, good Brussels sprouts and a trifle which looked like the remains of an unsuccessful heart-swap operation.
Donald Carroll, an American, spoke first. He mumbled, was a little pissed and his confidence dried up in the face of this monstrous regiment of women. Jilly Cooper, nervous, but attractive because of this, showed that it was possible to make them laugh, particularly if you quoted someone else. I spoke third and delivered a bit of half-farce, half-fantasy which I thought deserved a lot better than it got. There were many laughs, but it was impossible to get this audience to just enjoy itself – presuming, that is, that many of them would know how to go about enjoying themselves in the first place.
Katharine Whitehorn spoke with the cool, poised, assurance of one who knows exactly where her appeal lies. Quite shamelessly disdainful and Hampsteadian, and she has the profile of a rather beautiful cow. Steve Race was nice and clean and funny.
Afterwards we signed. An embarrassing moment, this, if you’re not a favoured author. Donald Carroll had not a single taker. I can quite understand how, on the train back, he could refer to today as ‘the