Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [96]
Tuesday, January 8th
Met Eric and Terry for lunch at Pontevecchio in Old Brompton Road. Eric ordered a bottle of champagne and orange juice and we sipped this whilst waiting for T to arrive. Outside a really angry day, with heavy rain lashed against the windows by gale-force winds. The grimness of the weather rather matched my mood.
Left with the feeling that our futures are distinctly unsettled. Lots of offers, but few which seem to have much sense of direction. We haven’t done a new series for eighteen months, and the current repeats are the last time we will have a series of Python on BBC TV, unless Jimmy Gilbert can get the go-ahead for a non-Cleese show. The film is a development, and certainly the best thing we have around, but so far no final word on finance. To spread further despondency, all I needed was a call from J Cleese.
It came in the evening. There had been the suggestion, from his very own lips, when we put the film together in December, that we should spend a week on it in mid-January. Tonight, when I ask him about availability, he tells me that he can only make one and a half days’ meetings during January and none at all until the first two weeks of February. This bombshell is dropped quite unapologetically. I swallowed for air and within a moment or two my reaction came – but it wasn’t as I expected. It was a reaction of relief rather than anger, a sudden welcome burst of indifference about John and his future and his work. He may come in with us, he may not, but as from this evening I couldn’t care less.
Friday, January 11th
Down to Joseph’s for a haircut at 1.00. He has just bought his own electricity generator – for unlike food stores, restaurants, cinemas and TV stations, hair-dressers are not exempt from the emergency electricity restrictions and can only work half-days. All the lights were switched off, but J was taking advantage of an anomaly in the law which allowed him power to dry the hair of people who had been washed in the morning shift.
Small hints of emergency life around. The Radio and TV Times are now very slim, with only a couple of pages devoted to indirect programme information. Cardboard boxes and, indeed, packaging of all kinds, are increasingly short. In shops now tins, etc, are packed on a slim cardboard base with polythene wrapped around them.
In the evening Helen and I went to see Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe at the Curzon. A stylish, revolting, very funny and very sad film about four men1 who decide to eat themselves to death. Some of those heavy, over-rich meals at restaurants taken to ultimate, absurd lengths. Outrageous but never offensive, never heartless, never cheap. Sad to think that it can’t even be given a national certificate and has to be restricted to London viewing.
Monday, January 14th, Southwold
Mother looked encouragingly well on her 70th birthday. She is living testimony to the fact that people can thrive on a difficult life. Her face may have aged, her stoop increased a degree in the thirty years I’ve known her, but her energy, mental and physical, is barely diminished. It’s great that at 70 she seems as likely to survive the next twenty years as myself or Thomas or Willy. There is no hint of age withering her.
I took them out to the Crown Hotel in Framlingham for a celebration lunch. The hotel was warmed by a blazing log fire, the food was good and simple and the main hall of the hotel had as extensive and fine a selection of Tudor beams and timbers as I’ve seen. Very gemütlich. Afterwards we walked along the battlements of Framlingham Castle. It was a cloudy, but bright and mild day, and the expedition was quite a success.
I left Southwold to get back to London at about 5.00. Heard on the car radio that the latest and maybe the last attempts at conciliation between government and TUC had broken down,