Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [76]
Wednesday, May 23rd
After Leeds a long run down to Norwich, which was our thirty-fourth performance since we started at the Gaumont, Southampton, twenty-seven days before. My parents came to see the show. It was good to see my father there. I didn’t think he was up to going to the theatre, but it was his own decision.
The first Python stage appearances abroad were on an eccentric tour of Canada. All the team were there, augmented by Neil Innes and Carol Cleveland.
Sunday, June 3rd, Toronto
In Toronto, a small crowd, maybe 150 in all, were waiting outside the customs and, as we came out of the customs hall, there was quite a lot of cheering and shouting. (Apparently our TV show had been out the night before and CBC had added an announcement that we would be at the airport at 6.00.) They were a cheerful rather than a violent crowd. Signed a few autographs and climbed on to an old British bus with an open upper deck, which had been provided for us. CBC had also provided a four-page illustrated news-sheet called ‘The Flying Python’ and were wearing Gumby T-shirts. There was a lot of effort involved, but somehow the welcome seemed anti-climactic – the fans were not quite vociferous enough, and there was a lot of time spent sitting on top of the bus feeling rather conspicuously spare, before we moved off.
The trip into Toronto was soon cut short when a policeman flagged down the bus and turned us off the motorway for travelling too slowly.
This morning I woke at about 4.30 with a feeling of complete disorientation – it took me some moments to remember that I was in a hotel room, and it was quite a shock to remember that the hotel room was in Toronto. A heavy wave of homesickness came over me – the room was colourless and unfriendly, the hotel was massive and impersonal, and I was going to be away from home in rooms like this for the next three weeks. I switched on TV. In a chintzy set with potted palms, a very well made-up, expensively gowned, 35-40-year-old actress was talking to Kathryn Kuhlman, a frizzy-haired, rather wild looking mother/confessor figure. The actress was telling of how she gave up her life of sleeping pills, and came to know Christ. At moments she tried to cry, but couldn’t – it was a grotesque, but quite compulsive exercise in hard-core bad taste. As Kathryn Kuhlman turned to camera to make her final message on God’s behalf, piped music soared in, and, as the credits rolled over this programme that had been about giving all up to join Christ, I caught the title ‘Miss Kuhlman’s gowns by Profil du Monde’. An extraordinary programme – a kind of coffee-table Christianity.
Tuesday, June 3th, Toronto
I switched on the Watergate hearings – and here was instant courtroom drama – the characters seemed to be characters I’d seen before – the Edmund O’Brien figure of Sam Ervin, the chairman, the film star smoothness of Senator Howard Baker, and the star today – Sally Harmony – a somewhat overawed, but quite pretty divorcee, who was trying to explain away her involvement in the bugging. The whole Watergate case has taken up more press and broadcasting time than any other cause célèbre I can remember. The Americans watch it with fascination and they are given all the hearings all day on three channels. There are signs that the coverage is beginning to slacken, however. I think the initial shocks have all been absorbed by now, and unless Nixon is found to be directly involved in the bugging or cover-up of Watergate, the story will not pick up its impetus of two or three weeks ago.
Meanwhile there was Sally Harmony, sweating lightly on her upper lip, being cross-questioned in front of millions. It’s so like fiction that there could be a danger that it will become fiction in people’s minds.
Wednesday, June 6th, Toronto
After about five hours’ sleep last night, I was called at 6.30 to go for an early show interview with CTV – the main alternative