• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Finally we start to read the first sketches of the new movie. Eric has a couple of quite tart monologues, then I read the first of our two blockbusters. It’s received with much nodding and the ‘Some good bits’ line. JC reads a long and rambling and not awfully funny piece about Kashmir and sex and male brothels, which doesn’t go down very well. It’s our second effort (mainly TJ’s), including the clock presentation, which is the one big hit of the session.

Sunday, November 25th

This is the day I should be looking forward to but am not. I have to give a party for Al and Claudie – or rather I want to give a party for Al and Claudie – but, as it turns out, I’ve rarely felt more in need of a Day of Rest.

Al is very morose, though tries his best. He has done little on his trip but stay in or on bed at the Willow Hotel and lately make several frustrating trips to the US Embassy, to find that he has serious problems with Claudie’s visa – if she tries to enter the US as Al’s wife. Al really should have checked all this out before he left, but that’s Al – we love him for his romantic enthusiasm, not for his practical knowledge of the immigration system of the US. But he is down in the dumps.

Fortunately the combination of the champagne and Gilliam and Simon A and the Coopers all get to work on him. We have a little speech from yours truly and Willy presents Al and Claudie with portraits of them!

My mother survives, indeed flourishes, on all of this. The fire crackles. Clare [from next door] makes a superb theatrical presentation of two dressed salmon. The French contingent smoke themselves silly and a good time is had by all.

Al and Claudie are the last to leave. Al, with a few nips of Laphroaig and a good chat under his belt, steps out into the wet streets at seven.

Take my mother to see Life of Brian. The Plaza is packed. A sell-out. I think she enjoyed it, except for a few qualifications about the ‘Crucifixion’ ending. But the fact she’s awake at all at the end of a day like this, says a lot for her strength and stamina. Remain virtually incognito and afterwards we slope off to the Dean Street Pizza Express.

Tuesday, November 27th

A grey, unprepossessing day. Damp and quite warm. Take Al and Claudie out to Heathrow to catch the two o’clock Pan Am return to NYC. Al, leathery tough though he may look, is a softie at heart, and confesses that he is very frightened of what might happen when they arrive at NYC immigration. But I try to cheer him up and give him and Claudie a small book of Bewick’s woodcuts with careful and finely-drawn vignettes of an idyllic and calm rural world – long before US immigration regulations and Kennedy Airport.

I hear Mervyn Stockwood announced his resignation today. I also hear that he has cancer and drinks heavily to douse the pain.

Wednesday, November 28th

As November, and our two-week Python writing period, draws to a close, I find myself fighting for time. Suddenly everyone wants me for something or other. Quite apart from TG’s film looming, I’m also contacted by a BBC Manchester TV features producer, who wants me to do a programme on railways for him; four or five managements have written expressing interest in my play.

Mel Caiman is almost daily in touch, like a sheepdog trying gently to bring me into the fold of his new humour mag. I have a book review for New Yorker magazine, which I must do by December ist and today I have to present the Melody Maker pop awards at lunchtime and talk to Hunter Davies for a piece in the Sunday Times.

A hired car smoothes me down to the Waldorf Hotel in the Aldwych, where I spend the next three hours, drinking and talking and only for about twenty minutes mounting a stage and presenting eighteen or twenty ‘trophies’ to the MM readers’ favourites.

Met Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats – the current articulate pop idol, just down from a tour of Scotland. He was unshaven, slouched and wore a loose-fitting yellow velour suit that