Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [358]
Really I feel just very tired. Tired of talking, tired of endlessly having to justify the film – to defend it against a controversy that will probably never happen. At least opening day is now less than twenty-four hours away.
Friday, November 9th
I go for a run across the Heath. Tonight is our confrontation with Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark [on BBC2’s Friday Night, Saturday Morning] and, as I squelch through the now leafless beechwoods and around West Meadow, with Kenwood House a glittering white symbol of order and reason in the background, I sort out my thoughts about Brian, and the points that the movie tried to make seem to be all to do with power – its use and abuse by an establishment.
As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning’s thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In fact I am about to type ‘I do not believe in God’, when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence.
Look for the last time at my notes and drive down through Aldwych and across Waterloo Bridge to the Greenwood Theatre. Over drinks we meet Tim Rice, the presenter – tall, open, unassuming and quite obviously a sensible and sympathetic fellow – then little gnomic Muggeridge – great smile and sparkling eyes – and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark – big, impressive, avuncular, cradling the second of his whiskies and complaining gently that he’d been told the wrong time of the film and had missed ‘some of it’. But his chaplain had told him all about it, he assured me. I found him quite amenable.
JC was, and always is, nervous at first and had asked Tim Rice to direct his early questions at me! As I found Tim so easy to talk with this was quite an easy task and I felt that I was being as fluent and as relaxed as I’d ever been. We must have talked for ten to fifteen minutes, getting a few laughs, making very clearly the point about Brian not being Jesus and the film not being about Jesus, and I think keeping the audience amused.
Then Stockwood and Muggeridge joined us and were asked for their opinion of the film. From the moment that Stockwood, resplendent in his purple bishop’s cassock, handsome grey hair, fingering his spectacles and his cross with great dexterity, began to speak, I realised his tack. He began, with notes carefully hidden in his crotch, tucked down well out of camera range, to give a short sermon, addressed not to John or myself but to the audience.
In the first three or four minutes he had brought in Ceauçescu and Mao Tse-tung and not begun to make one point about the film. Then he began to turn to the movie. He accused us of making a mockery of the work of Mother Teresa (a recent Nobel prize-winner), of being undergraduate and mentally unstable. He made these remarks with all the smug and patronising paraphernalia of the gallery-player, who believes that the audience will see he is right, because he is a bishop and we’re not.
‘If there’d been no Jesus, this film would not have been made,’ crowed Stockwood. I wanted to say ‘If there had been no Jesus, we wouldn’t have needed to make the film.’
Muggeridge, in his odd, obsessive way, accused us of denigrating the one man responsible for all the first works of art ever and made other thoroughly irresponsible digs. Vainly did John try and remind him that there were other religions in the world, that there was a civilisation before Jesus, that there have been artists who have not painted