2008jan05. Excerpts from Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years.
Minor Unnecessary Notes: The last word on the cover blurb from Cleese (not present on the edition pictured below) is supposed to be in italics. Un-italicized, it ruins the whole point of using the quote, actually. Also, I’ve preserved the punctuation but belatedly realize that my program is going to auto-switch some of it from the UK to the US ... forgot to add a “intentional non-US punctuation” subroutine (along with twelve thousand other things). Chor. Tull.
Thursday, November 12th 1970: Shooting at a pet shop in the Caledonian Road [ ... ] In the pet shop there is scarcely room to move, but the angel fish and the guppies and the parrots and the kittens and the guinea pigs seem to be unconcerned by the barrage of light – and the continuous discordant voices. The shop is still open as we rehearse. One poor customer is afraid to come in, and stands at the door, asking rather nervously for two pounds of Fido. ‘Two pounds of Fido,’ the cry goes up, and the message is passed by raucous shouts to the lady proprietor. ‘That’s 15/-,’ she says. ’15/-,’ everyone starts to shout. We’re finished by 5.30. Outside the shop is a little boy whose father, he tells us, is coming out of the nick soon.
’What’ll you do when he comes out?’
’Kill him.’
’Why?’
’I hate him.’
’Why do you hate him?’
’He’s a ponce.’
All this cheerfully, as if discussing what kind of fish fingers he likes best. [pg 43]
Thursday, August 5th 1971, Southwold: At the same time, in London, Richard Neville (footnote: The editor of Oz magazine asked for teenage schoolkids to put together an edition. The 'schoolkids’ produced an issue which put Neville and others in the dock at the Old Bailey, accused of corrupting morals and intending to ‘arouse and implant in the minds of those young people lustful and perverted desires’. His long hair was ordered to be forcibly cut) was being sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment for publishing the Schoolkids issue of Oz. I can’t help feeling that he would have appreciated this countryside for the same reasons that I do – and yet the only way society has of dealing with his imagination and intelligence is put him away for over a year. [pg 62]
Friday, December 31st 1971: The split between John and Eric and the rest of us has grown a little recently. It doesn’t prevent us all from sharing – and enjoying sharing – most of our attitudes, except for attitudes to work. It’s the usual story – John and Eric see Monty Python as a means to an end – money to buy freedom from work. Terry J is completely the opposite and feels that Python is an end in itself – i.e. work which he enjoys doing and which keeps him from the dangerous world of leisure. In between are Graham and myself. [pg 65]
Wednesday, March 15th 1972: [ ... ] The filming went smoothly, as it has done all this week. John C hasn’t been with us, as he dislikes filming so much that he had a special three-day limit written into his contract. [pg 74]
Friday September 27th 1974: Disadvantages of being dressed as a [policeman] were that, as I waited for the cue for action, I would be approached by Americans asking where they could find a restaurant where they wouldn’t need to wear a tie and harassed motorists asking me where the GLC licensing department was. One old lady approached me, stared hard at my false moustache and said, ‘What are you?? Real or a fake?’
’Have a guess,’ I said.
She surveyed my loose moustache and pinned-up hair for a moment; ‘You’re real.’ [pg 189]Thursday, February 20th 1975: Another Python meeting. [ ... ] A selection of letters are read out to the assembled gathering. From CBC Canada – ‘We would like the Python group to contribute up to ten minutes of material for a special programme on European Unity. The group can decide --’ the reading was interrupted here by farting noises and thumbs-down signs. [pg 208]
Sunday, March 9th 1975, New York: [ ... ] Over to Channel 13, which is in a small, cramped, but friendly basement a couple of blocks from the UN and on the edge of the East River. In the studio is a small presentation area, in which sits Gene Shalit, a genial Harpo-Marx sort of character. [ ... ] Gene Shalit’s children are there (his daughter, who can’t have been more than fifteen, leaned conspiratorially towards me and whispered softly, ‘You know, Python and grass go very well together’) [ ... ] [pg 216]
Thursday, March 13th 1975, Philadelphia: Left Philly at 3:45 with fond memories. Arrived in Washington about 5:00. We have a sumptuous suite in the Watergate Complex, overlooking the Potomac. (A dirty river, a lady reporter told me – especially where it flows past the Pentagon, where it is full of used prophylactics.) I go around stuffing my case full of anything marked ‘Watergate’ – soap, writing paper, even, to Graham’s irritation, the room service menu. [pg 220]
Sunday, March 16th 1975, Navarro Hotel, New York: Ron Devillier picked us up at 12.00 and took us for a drive round Dallas. Devillier, clearly no lover of the downtown area – though he lives in Dallas – shows us the Kennedy Memorial, which it took eight years to put up. He says that now it is hard to imagine how much people in Dallas hated President Kennedy and all he stood for. After his assassination, classes of schoolkids cheered and a teacher who tried to give her class a day off in Kennedy’s memory was fired. [pg 222]
Tuesday, November 25th 1975: Terry comes up after lunch and we go over to Studio 99 in Swiss Cottage to look at the cassette recordings of Python’s first ABC compilation. A very cool American voice – the kind we would only use as a send up – announces, quite seriously, that ‘The Wide World of Entertainment presents the Monty Python Show’. It started well, with ‘The World’s Most Awful Family’, which works a treat after the smooth and glossy ABC packaging of the show, but then the cuts begin. The cat-in-the-wall bell push (a big laugh in the studio) is cut, the man pouring blood all over the doctors is cut after the opening lines – before the point of the sketch has even begun. In the ‘Montgolfier Brothers’ the words ‘naughty bits’ are bleeped out!! In fact any reference to bodily function, any slightly risqué word, anything, as Douglas Adams put it, ‘to do with life’, was single-mindedly expunged. The cuts which to me seemed the most remarkable were in the ‘Neutron’ sketch, when I played the US Bombing Commander who had personal odour problems. The character was in, but every appearance was topped and tailed to avoid all reference to his bodily hygiene. As that was the only original and Pythonesque twist to the character, he just came out as a below-average imitation of George C. Scott. [pg 267]
Tuesday, February 8th 1977: Finished, at last, a six-month-old pile of fan letters. Mostly from Japan, beautifully written, generally on very delicate paper, and nearly always beginning ‘I am a schoolgirl of 14’, as if to add a frisson of danger for the reader. The language is fine too. Python is translated as ‘Gay Boys’ Dragon Show’ on Japanese TV, and one of the letter eulogises ‘Upper Class Twit of the Year,’ but calls it, splendidly ‘The Aristocratic Deciding Foolish No. 1 Guy’. American letters, too, but coarser and more violent generally, shouting at me off the page. [pg 362]
Wednesday, January 18th 1978, Barbados: [Sir Ronald Tree]’s finest work, apart from hosting Winston [Churchill], Eden, General Sikorski and others, was to exert as much pressure as he could to bring America into the war. He tells in his book of meeting leading American businessmen who, in 1941, were predicting a defeat for England – and the Chairman of Sears Roebuck at the time told him it would be a good thing anyway, Britain had become degenerate and Europe badly needed German leadership. [pg 433]
The writers sensed and appreciated this and went off to rewrite, while myself, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray – grim-faced and unshaven – and Garrett Morris – the neat, chirpy black member of the cast – began first rehearsal for our Chilites dance routine. Sometimes I find it hard to figure out quite how Lorne’s mind works. He loves the Chilites’ song ‘Have You Seen Her’ – a hit of eight years ago – and wants to see it on the show. However, since that time two of the Chilites have been imprisoned and one is dead. Lorne still has the lead singer – Eugene Record – and hopes that the rest of us, in Afro wigs, will be able to recreate the Chilites behind him. I’m sceptical, dear diary. [pg 456]
