• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Tuesday, January 15th, Southwold

Python meeting at T Gilliam’s. We decide to do two weeks at Drury Lane, tho’ I have a feeling in my bones that we would have done better to concentrate on one smash-hit week and leave people wanting more, rather than expose ourselves and our material to the spotlight for two weeks.

There was some fairly bitter debate over timing of the film and rewriting. In the end, after the personal differences had been aired, we got down to some fast and efficient business, dates were agreed and there was a very useful hour’s discussion of the film. An idea I had for the gradual and increasing involvement of the present day in this otherwise historical film was adopted as a new and better way of ending it, so I felt that I had done a bit of useful work over the last hectic month.

We decide to call our Drury Lane show Monty Python’s First Farewell Tour (repeat) and overprint it with the words ‘NOT CANCELLED’.

Thursday, January 17th

At lunchtime, met Tony Smith, John Gledhill, Terry J, Terry G and André at Drury Lane to have a first look at the theatre in which we will be spending two weeks at the end of February. A gloomy first encounter. In the dark foyer, flanked by dusty, heavy pillars and classical columns, the eye is immediately drawn to a war memorial – to the fallen in two wars.

The approach to the auditorium, the passageways and halls, are furnished and decorated in the grand classical style. Doric columns, porticoes, domes, balustrades and statues of great actors in niches. On the walls flanking the wide and impressive staircases are huge oil paintings. It somehow feels as likely and as suitable a venue for Python as a power station. The size of the auditorium would a year ago have made me laugh and run out straightaway to return Tony’s contract, but having rehearsed in the Rainbow, and played the Wilfred Pelletier Theatre in Montreal, both of which hold over 3,000 seats, the wide open spaces of the Theatre Royal (2,200 seats) no longer hold quite the same terror. Nevertheless, the sight of three balconies and innumerable lavishly decorated boxes, and a general air of London opulence and tradition, tightened my stomach a little.

Friday, January 18th

GC and I, at GC’s suggestion, went to the BBC to talk to Jimmy, who is vacil-lating still over a BBC series. Frightfully welcoming and anxiously effusive. He took us to lunch and straightaway brought up the subject of the series. He wanted to check one or two details – just so he could make a clear suggestion to his superiors, he said. From then on he talked as if the series was in the bag.

It seemed as tho’ some decision had been made in the Beeb to treat us nicely again, and Graham and I completed a tidy half-day’s work on behalf of Python by collecting a list of seven studio recording dates from Jimmy G, which, being in November, would fit in well with our year’s schedule.

Suddenly it seems that 1974 could be our busiest and most creative since ‘71.

JG told us that to date The Brand New Monty Python Bok has sold 161,000 copies, and the new record is selling faster than any of the previous ones. Less hopefully, he showed us a decidedly gloomy letter from BBC sales people in New York; despite all Nancy is doing, they do not seem any closer to a US TV sale of the series.

Indeed, one station in New York had, apparently, ‘indicated a positive distaste for the program’. But the sales people, who are part of Time-Life Films, have evidently been affected by something like the same masochistic enthusiasm for the programme that Nancy has. At the end of the letter they did say that, for them, selling the programme was becoming rather like a crusade.

Sunday, January 20th

Took the kids for a short walk up to Lismore Circus with Sean1 (Thomas’s godfather) and Simon (Willy’s godfather). They rode their bikes for about ten minutes, when a window in Bacton (the tall tower block in the Circus) opened and a vehement old lady shrieked at them to ‘go away and play where you live’. I