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Monday, November 19th

Started work on the new Python movie. A bright, crisp morning. Cycled to the meeting at 2 Park Square West and arrived about tennish.

Then a general chat about the world. The Anthony Blunt spy story1 is top news at the moment. America is about to indulge in its own maudlin fascination with power and privilege now that Ted Kennedy is running officially for President. We in beleaguered England, continually battered by stories of our imminent economic collapse, at least have one of our own scandals to keep us happy.

Have we not become as established as the Establishment we seek to kick? Are we not really licensed satirists? Keepers of the Queen’s Silly Things, enjoying the same privileges as the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures who has been revealed to have been a very naughty boy – but will be given the full protection of a Cambridge man in an English Establishment that is still Oxbridge-controlled?

JC thinks war is a limiting subject. El and myself both see it in wider terms. The talk then shifts, or is shifted, by TJ who is lobbying indefatigably for World War III, to a science fiction world of the future. Where very little has changed. Possibly a benevolent and very well-meaning society in which everything is attended to, but it is quite unworkable. Enormous queues to complain everywhere. Everyone born into this society, I suggest, is handed a raffle ticket on birth which gives him or her the chance of being PM eventually.

Some good chat – generally concerned with revealing the idiocy of many of our rules and regulations, hardly a new area, but there is a certain satisfaction in the combined strength of all our input.

We walk in the park, then lunch at our ‘regular’ round table by the window at Odin’s. Over Primeur, Muscadet, walnut and lettuce salads and liver, we become very happy and it’s decided that we shall not shackle ourselves with too much discussion – we shall go away for a couple of days and write anything. We pledge ourselves, like the Three Musketeers, that we will do all in our power to bring about a silly film. JC warns, splendidly, that ‘We’ll show them how silly a film can be.’

Wednesday, November 21st

At 3.30 to the Mornington Foot Clinic to have my corn attended to by Mr Owen. A small, distinguished, elderly man working in a small, undistinguished, elderly room. But he’s quite a character. Prophesying doom and the collapse of the world (at the hands of KGB-inspired anti-American Muslim rioters), as he slices into my corn and cauterises it most expertly.

Actually there does seem some cause for his concern as we approach 1980. Read in the paper today that armed men are holding hostages in Mecca – the most holy mosque in the whole Muslim religion ‘violated’. And the Ayatollah Khomeini still holds American hostages in Iran. All rather worrying. But my foot feels better!

Thursday, November 22nd

Drive down to TJ’s, stopping off at Henry Sotheran in Sackville Street – my favourite London bookshop – to buy a birthday present for T Gilliam, who is 39 today. At Terry’s it’s like old times, writing together up in his top room as darkness falls. TJ has written a classic piece about soldiers presenting their officer with a clock under fire. Really funny. We complete that and by 5.45 find ourselves with a large output – maybe 20 or 25 minutes, for the meeting tomorrow.

Up to T Gilliam’s for his ‘surprise’ birthday party, which isn’t really a surprise. Chris Miller is there and Elaine Carew and Richard Broke.1 Richard tells me that at the BBC Programme Review Board after the Friday Night, Saturday Morning epic the Head of Religious Broadcasting, Colin Morris, castigated the BBC for presenting two such ‘serious and brilliant’ performers as JC and myself with such ‘geriatric’ opposition!

Friday, November 23rd

Up at 8.10. Leave the house at 9.15 to drive to JC’s for writing session.

A very angry, abusive letter to The Times from a man called Allott in Finchley, who clearly doesn’t like the Life of Brian, but admits he hasn’t seen