Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [91]
On the air about 11.45. A dull old prog with lots of stock BBC muzak to put everyone to sleep. Esther doing her bit very well, with great energy considering she had done a radio prog at 9.00 in the morning as well. We have a rather unimpressive chat. Esther reads the extract from the ‘Bok’ rather badly (afterwards I find this is mainly because the bearded, bespectacled little Producer keeps screaming through her earphones to tell her to stop before she reads anything compromising).
Tuesday, November 13th
Met with Jimmy Gilbert at BBC in the morning.2 Jimmy very genial, welcoming – very much the feeling of a nostalgic reunion, for all of us, except Gilliam, had helped to keep Jimmy in material for two series of Frost Reports. He had only inherited Duncan Wood’s office the week before, and it was still in the process of changeover. The walls were bare, a disembowelled record-playing unit lay against one wall, and Jimmy looked far from at home in it.
I’m not sure if he really grasped what we wanted – which was, in effect, a new series of Python, without John, and different in style from the others by being unified, organic half hours, and not just bric-a-brac, loosely slung together. He is going to see Alasdair Milne1 next week and will put the programme suggestion to him. Quite a substantial part of our future is now in genial Jimmy’s hands.
Thursday, November 15th, Southwold
I went up to Southwold on the train to see how the parents were. Found Mother looking fairly chirpy and less tired than when I saw her last. Daddy is slower and less capable each time I see him. However, he still responds to my visits in much the same way – it’s obvious that he enjoys them and that he’s pleased to see me. But his mind wanders and he is easily distracted, which is making Mother very irritable. I always remember him as an irritable man easily moved to the sharp reproof, happier with the sarcastic put-down, embarrassed by the open compliment. Now, unable to marshal his thoughts and actions very clearly, the tables are turned and he is the victim of another’s bottled-up bitterness and impatience.
While I was there we went for a long walk in the cool bracing sea air at Minsmere, with a big red sun sinking behind the bird sanctuary as we walked. He has had more hallucinations recently. He talks about ‘When that man was in the kitchen …’ and so on. Recently he locked the door in the evening, in case ‘those men’ got in. He knows by their accents that they are quite cultured, and they are apparently friendly, but it is frightening that they should be so real to him.
Saturday, November 17th
Ate breakfast on the Ipswich—London train, and read some of Ivan Illich’s book Tools for Conviviality. In the words of the old cliché, a most thought-provoking book, and very depressing – for he so clearly and radically tackles the problems of’progress’ and social organisation that I was left with a feeling of profound dissatisfaction and yet at the same time helplessness.
His diagnosis – that we have gone too far, too fast, that we are the slaves, not the masters of technology, in short that the contribution an individual can make to society has become so limited and so insignificant is very clear, but where do we begin to change things? How can we eventually start renouncing what we have in order to go back to a less complicated society but one with greater respect and freedom for the individual? Suddenly I am aware that aggression and greed are not vices which suddenly spring up and are crushed in a war, they are institutionalised in the system we live in.
Back home to complete and utter disorientation. There are men on my roof erecting a corrugated iron temporary roof atop some scaffolding. This new structure towers over our house only marginally less conspicuously than the hand of God actually pointing at the front