Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [44]
2 John was always getting offered cabaret engagements, and he preferred to do them with Terry and myself than on his own. They paid quite well. He gave them up after being savagely heckled by London University medical students.
1 A monologue I wrote for the 1965 Oxford Revue at Edinburgh. I always preferred to write and create characters rather than jokes per se, and this depended very much on performance.
1 The brainchild of German producer and Python fan Alfred Biolek, this was to be a show written by and starring the Pythons, speaking German. It was duly recorded at Bavaria Studios in Munich in early July 1971. As least I can now sing ‘Lumberjack Song’ in German – a great way of clearing crowded ski slopes.
1 On Do Not Adjust Your Set.
1 The editor of Oz magazine asked for teenage schoolkids to put together an edition. The ‘schoolkids’ produced an issue which put Neville and others in the dock at the Old Bailey, accused of corrupting morals and intending to ‘arouse and implant in the minds of those young people lustful and perverted desires’. His long hair was ordered to be forcibly cut.
1972
Sunday, January 2nd
In the morning, Rolf, Ranji [Veling] and I went for a long walk on the Heath and talked about Rolf’s pet subject – how to simplify life. He feels that the problems of pollution or increasing crime or mental illness are the result of us all wanting and being offered too much.
I’m glad that there are cars and planes and television and washing machines, and I think we cannot suddenly pretend that they have not been invented – but I feel we must control their use, and that they should be used not to dictate but to stimulate. Any urban planning should include an open play area at least twice the size of the car park, instead of the opposite; there should be severe restrictions on cars in central London – but above all, in every area there should be greater encouragements for people to meet and talk – not in official meetings or on two nights a week, but all the time. There should be space indoors and outdoors, where people would want to stop and gather. At the base of every block of flats there should be a big, well-furnished well-equipped coffee shop or restaurant, a big foyer with papers, magazines, books on sale – and even a few fairground attractions. It would mean a radical re-direction of funds available for housing, but one quarter of the vast wealth in the hands of private property developers would, I think, help to equalise a system which at present is doomed – the colossal difference in living conditions which is being widened every day as new council estates are built on the cheap – and with them is built boredom, jealousy, repression, anger …
Helen and I drove over to Simon Albury’s flat in Ladbroke Grove. Simon was fairly high when we got there, as were David and Stan. Unstoned were most of the wives, David’s sister Rosemary, and ourselves. Source of the stuff was R.1 I drank bourbon and smoked occasionally, and heard riotous tales from Rosemary Dodd about her Cordon Bleu cooking for the nobility. She had worked with the Queen’s cousins for some time, and apparently they drank so much that at one meal there was a special footman detailed to stand behind the hostess and hoist her politely up every time she sank beneath the table.
R, as lithe and big-eyed and diffident as ever, suddenly becomes animated. He is smoking his third or fourth joint of the evening (no passing around here – it’s R’s joint) and telling me of his poetry writings. After a long and serious build-up I was expecting The Waste Land at least, but what I got was ‘Zim, Zam, Zap, the Zimbabwe is going to Zap you man’ – as Simon A remarked, ‘Pot never helped anyone.’
Tuesday, January 4th
At Terry’s when Amin – a Pakistani from Alison’s Botany Department — returned from Pakistan. He was out there throughout the brief India – Pakistan war – in which East Pakistan was finally taken by the Indians on behalf of the Bengalis who live there. It was a short, sharp war, which has resulted in the setting up of the