Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [4]
There are times when I’ve resented the whole process, when I’ve felt lumpen, dull and inarticulate, when detail has slipped away and the whole exercise has seemed completely pointless. But the longer I’ve kept the diary the more inconceivable it has been to abandon it. It’s become an effective and tenacious parasite, mutating over the years into something as germane to my life as an arm or a leg.
The motivation for keeping the diaries remains the same as it always was, to keep a record of how I fill the days. Nothing more complicated than that. Though this inevitably involves emotional reactions, I’ve never treated the diary as a confessional. Once I’ve noted the day’s events, usually the next morning, there’s little time left for soul-searching.
The perfect, well-crafted, impeccably balanced entry persistently eludes me. Prejudices bob to the surface, anger crackles, judgements fall over each other, huffing and puffing. Opinions and interpretations are impulsive, inconsistent and frequently contradictory. But I’m not sure if that matters. After all that’s where a daily diary differs from autobiography or memoir. It is an antidote to hindsight.
‘A nice firm pull on a freshly lit,
deliriously soothing, pungently
bracing tube of tightly packed
tobacco, coaxed from a brand-new
packet of Piccadilly Tipped.’
_______________________________
It seals the present moment and preserves it from the tidying process of context, perspective, analysis and balance. It becomes history, but quite unselfconsciously. What proves to be important over a long period is not always what a diarist will identify at the time. For the historians’ sake I should probably have noted every detail of the birth of Monty Python, but it seemed far more important to me to record the emergence of my new family than the faltering steps of a comedy series that would probably last no more than two years. And that, I feel, is as it should be. Legends are not created by diaries, though they can be destroyed by them.
This selection is culled from thirty-eight hand-written secretarial notebooks amounting to some five times the volume of material reproduced here. The early entries sit a little awkwardly as I search for a voice and a style that relies on more than lists of events. My reward for perseverance, often in the face of tempting discouragement, is to see the diary bed itself in and slowly begin to tell a story, with regular characters, a narrative, and a sense of continuity.
In the course of these diaries I grow up, my family grows up and Monty Python grows up. It was a great time to be alive.
MICHAEL PALIN
London, January 2006
Michael Palin is not just one of Britain’s foremost comedy character actors, whose inventive genius and astonishing versatility were vividly demonstrated in his widely acclaimed Ripping Yarns series; he also talks a lot. Yap, yap, yap, he goes, all day long and through the night, twenty-three to the dozen, the ground littered with the hind legs of donkeys, till you believe it is not possible, simply not possible for him to go on any longer, but he does. He must be the worst man in the world to take on a commando raid. You might as well take a large radiogram with the volume turned up. On and on, hour after hour, tiring the sun with talking and sending him down the sky, Michael chats, quips, fantasises, reminisces, commiserates, encourages, plans, discusses and elaborates. Then, some nights, when everyone else has gone to bed, he goes home and writes up a diary.
JOHN CLEESE
Publicity biography for Life of Brian, 1979
1969
Though the first entry of all was April 17th 1969, I’ve opened the diary on the first day of Python filming. All the entries were written at my house in Oak Village, north London, except where otherwise noted.
Tuesday, July 8th
Today Bunn Wackett