Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [7]
Thomas stood without holding on today.
Monday, July 21st
At 3.00 this morning I woke Helen, and we both watched as the first live television pictures from the moon showed us a rather indistinct piece of ladder, then a large boot, and finally, at 3.56, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the lunar surface. He said the ground beneath his feet (I almost wrote ‘the earth beneath his feet’) was composed mainly of dust – for a moment one felt he was in danger of falling into a kind of quicksand – but soon he was reassuringly prancing about and telling us that the one-sixth gravity conditions were less hazardous than in simulation.
The extraordinary thing about the evening was that, until 3.56 a.m. when Armstrong clambered out of the spaceship and activated the keyhole camera, we had seen no space pictures at all, and yet ITV had somehow contrived to fill ten hours with a programme devoted to the landing.
To bed at 5.00, with the image in my mind of men in spacesuits doing kangaroo hops and long, loping walks on the moon, in front of a strange spidery object, just like the images in my mind after reading Dan Dare in the old Eagle comics – only this time it’s true. A lot of science fiction is suddenly science fact.
Thursday, July 24th
Met with Ian and the two Terrys at the BBC. We listened to some possible title music – finally selected Sousa’s march ‘The Liberty Bell’ from a Grenadier Guards LP. There’s something about brass band music that appeals to me very strongly. Probably it’s all to do with my subliminal desire to march along whistling national songs. It’s very difficult to associate brass band music with any class of people. Most enthusiasts perhaps come from north of the Trent working class, but then of course it has high patrician status and support from its part in ceremonial. So in the end it is a brass band march which we’ve chosen – because it creates such immediate atmosphere and rapport, without it being calculated or satirical or ‘fashionable’.
An hour is spent from 5.30—6.30 watching colour pictures of Apollo 11’s return to earth. Again how old-fashioned a) the landing (they landed upside down), b) the scrubbing of the spacecraft and the space-suits, in case they are carrying deadly lunar germs, c) the whole business of helicopter rescues, appears. One is almost conscious of the laughter and amazement of viewers in thirty years’ time, as they watch film of the first men on the moon returning home.
Friday, August 1st
The days seem to merge one into another without particular distinction. It’s tending to feel like that with the writing at the moment. We have four shows completed, but apart from the two weeks’ filming in July, there has been no feeling yet of concerted effort on behalf of the show (now, incidentally, renamed Monty Python’s Flying Circus). Partly because John and Graham have fingers in a lot of other pies – especially their film, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer.1 However, it seems that the next two weeks will be much harder work. At least, there is some kind of urgency. August 30th is our first recording date and we have another week’s filming starting on the 18th. Time is getting shorter. But at least it’s nothing like the hectic pace which we were starting on this time last year with the first Frost on Sundays. Accordingly, I’ve had much more time at home and, as I write this, I’m in the sitting room with Helen sewing and Thomas being fascinated by the sewing machine.
Terry took Helen and myself and Quick and Ken, Philip John, Gerald2 and a girl from Germany whom Terry and Al had met on holiday in Crete, to the Hiroko Japanese restaurant in Wigmore Street.
Before entering our room we had to remove our shoes. Here Ken and myself made what I expected to be the first of many faux pas. After taking our shoes off, we noticed some oriental style slippers nearby and presumed