Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [68]
In the office Colin Hessian deferentially introduces me to his boss, a Mr Finn. We sit round a rather silly table, and I read the script through – Gumby voices and all. It goes down surprisingly well. Hessian roars with laughter. Finn is clearly worried that we all like it so much, and after some discussion we make some simple changes – in order to give it a happy ending.
There is controversy over the vox-pop ‘I only like toothpaste with crab or hake in it’. Finn doesn’t like this. Hessian, being a good deal more independent than I would have expected, stands up for it strongly. What a silly discussion – it puts me in mind of Terry and Duncan Wood arguing the virtues of ‘masturbating’. Anyway, they accepted the script happily.
Thursday, February 8th
Up at 6.30. Terry is here by 6.45. It’s just beginning to get light, but it looks an unpromising day. Heavy drizzle and dark, dull, low clouds. We are hoping to film the entire Elida-Gibbs salesman film today – some six or seven minutes of script. Fortunately we start early, up amongst the faceless 1930s shopping arcades of Colindale, and by 9.20 a longish sound sequence is completed.
We finish shooting about 6.00, with thirty-seven set-ups in the can. During the course of the day, I have been a filthy, coughing tramp, thrown out of a shop, a salesman in glittering white suit who leaps out of the roofs of cars over shop counters and, right at the end of the day, the most difficult thing, a straight-to-camera hard-sell tongue-twister on the virtues of Close-up Green toothpaste. But I think everybody enjoyed the hard work – tho’ it was cold and wet, there is no stronger feeling amongst a crew than when each person in it knows that the other person is working flat out. Terry was excellent – but does have a tendency to get over-excited, which is not so good when others are getting over-excited as well. This is just the time for icy calm.
Friday, February 9th
Arrived at Rules [restaurant] about 1.00. In an upstairs room the Pythons, and several people from Methuen, who had worked on the book [Monty Python’s Big Red]. On the table were individual sugar Gumbies, and a large chocolate ‘Spiny Norman’,1 and menus on which each dish was followed by an appropriate review of the Big Red Book – trout followed by ‘flat, thin and silly’, etc. The meal was to celebrate sales of over 100,000 paperbacks. Couldn’t get excited or impressed about it, though – it only added to my feelings of guilt. Here we were, being given an enormous and expensive free meal, in honour of us earning large amounts of money. Also I can’t help feeling that Python is better employed creating than celebrating. However, it was a chance to overeat.
From the Methuen lunch – feeling full of cigars and brandy, which ought to be Rules’ coat of arms – walked back through sunlit Covent Garden. Knowing that the whole area will be redeveloped (keeping odd buildings of ‘historical merit’), it’s rather like one imagines walking through London in the Blitz. You know what’s happening is not going to do the city any good, but you’re powerless (almost) to stop it. However, pressure groups of all opinions seem to be more successful now – Piccadilly and Covent Garden have both had big development plans changed by community action and protest. The sad thing is that the basic thinking behind these redevelopment schemes never changes. Blocks (of offices mainly) dominate. Where there was once a gentle elegance and a human scale, there is now concrete and soaring glass. The City of London is rapidly getting to look like a Manhattan skyline, which doesn’t worry me so much – but the blocks creeping into the West End are more sinister, for they are forcing a primarily residential area into acres more of hotels, offices and widened roads, and the scale of London’s buildings – which are, by and large, reasonably small, friendly and non-monolithic – is every day being lost.
Tuesday, February 13th,