Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [36]
As Terry and I walked through the deserted, rain-soaked streets of Coventry at 11.45 at night, for the first ever Python stage show, it was amazing, exciting and rather frightening to turn the corner and see the Belgrade Theatre seething with people like bees round a honeypot. Here in this silent, sleeping city was a busy, bustling theatreful of people – nearly 1,000 of them. From behind stage one could hear just how enthusiastic they were – there was shouting and cheering before anything had happened. There were ten men dressed as ‘Gumbies’ in the front row of the circle.
When, at 12.00, the house lights faded, John entered as the Spanish narrator in the ‘Llama sketch’, and there was a mighty cheer and prolonged applause. As soon as Gumby came on for ‘Flower Arrangement’, the show ground to a halt again with almost hysterical cheering greeting each line (a good example of the ‘primitive’ style in comedy). For the first half of the show there was a vocal majority killing lines, laughs and all attempts at timing. After a while they seemed to tire themselves out, and one had the satisfaction of hearing people laugh at jokes and words, rather than cheering each character who came on, at random throughout the sketch.
We finished at about 1.30 a.m. but the audience refused to leave – even after the auditorium lights had been on for some time. If any of us so much as put a head around the curtain there was wild applause. After two or three minutes of this, John went out and spoke to them like the good headmaster he is – thanking them for being a wonderful audience and adding savagely ‘Now will you please go home.’ This they enjoyed even more – and it must have been over five minutes after the end that they at last stopped applauding.
It was a strange kind of hysteria for a comedy show to create – one can’t imagine it happening to previous ‘cult’ shows like Beyond the Fringe or TW3 — perhaps it is because Monty Python itself is less controlled and contrived than these shows. We have created characters which we ourselves find hysterical, why should we then be surprised that an audience reacts in the same way?
We walked back to the hotel at 2.30 a.m. – with half a dozen grown men with knotted handkerchiefs over their heads disappearing down the road in front of us.
Monday, February 1st, Coventry
After breakfast at a café across from the hotel – called, believe it or not, ‘The Gay Gannet’, Terry and I drove off in the Simca to revisit my old school at Shrewsbury.
Terry is such a good companion – his insatiable sense of wonder and discovery added immeasurably to the enjoyment of seeing the school again. I showed Terry the studies, stone passages and stark bedrooms, which had virtually been my life for five so-called ‘formative’ years. They hadn’t changed much, except that the studies seemed to have no restrictions on decoration – every one seemed to be decorated with rich curtains, colours, and huge photos of Mick Jagger. The only really sensuous study in my time was John Ravenscroft’s (now John Peel, the Radio One intellectual). On the notice board was a rule about women in studies – women in studies! An unthinkable sacrilege ten years ago.
In the school buildings there was even more exciting evidence that sacrilege had been, and was being committed throughout the school. On every landing, and on seemingly every spare piece of wall, in what had been dull passages and dark corridors, there were paintings done by the boys. One of them, on the same dour landing I must have passed thousands of times, on my way to the History Library, breathlessly late, on this same landing was a large canvas depicting a clothed youth on a bed, with three ladies around him, wearing only black stockings, suspenders and pants, revealing their crutches provocatively. Presumably it was intended to represent the schoolboy’s dream – but to hang this dream in the school buildings seemed to be the best thing that had happened to Shrewsbury since Philip Sidney.1
Wednesday, February 3rd, Southwold
Father is now on L-Dopa, a new breakthrough