Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (13 page)

In the event the man in Plymouth never speaks and the poor man
from Oldham is tongue-tied with nerves. So Jones and I rattle on and afterwards I have a glass of wine, sign some autographs and meet Kate Adie – a rather dynamic lady who tells me that she was with Princess Anne unveiling something in Darlington. It turned out to be a particularly unprepossessing plaque to ‘The Spirit of New Darlington’ and, as everyone applauded, Princess Anne leaned over to Kate Adie and muttered a heartfelt ‘Fuck me’.

Attempt to go to Python writing meeting at Anne’s on my bike, but the pump decides to treat me badly and sucks air
out
of the tyre. Abandon cycle for the Mini which decides, equally unhelpfully, not to start without much coaxing. So eventually arrive at this first meeting of Pythons Without John for Further Work on the New Film in an unrelaxed rush.

Anne has, I gather on Eric’s instigation, kitted out the downstairs room of 2 Park Square West as a Python writing place. We have a table and our own coffee machine and some flowers thoughtfully laid out on top of a filing cabinet.

The weather seems to have London in an East European grip.

Still not enough to deter me from cycling to the ‘office’. There to find two bits of good news –
Life of Brian
, which, after much censorship to-ing and fro-ing, finally opened in Norway last week and has taken 100,000 dollars in the first three days. And in Australia the album has sold 25,000 copies in a couple of weeks and is now officially a gold album there.

Whether any of these pieces of good news actually strengthen our resolve to persevere with the new movie or not is debatable. But certainly our little room with its fresh flowers, fresh newspapers, fresh coffee and a ping-pong table is the nearest we’ve come to the Python clubhouse. But I don’t remember a great deal of work being done in clubs.

I watch the Carter and Reagan election. It’s very obvious that Reagan is going to win. I must confess I’ve never known why Carter has been so disliked in the US. Also I find it interesting how Reagan, whose initial candidacy was greeted with jeers and sniggers, is already being accepted as a sane and sensible leader of the Western World. No-one on the ITV
panel really had the guts to say what they were saying about Reagan before he won. Now it’s all smiles.

Tonight I go to see
Babylon
, a hard, uncompromising British film set in Brixton.
²⁸
The setting of the film and its subject make me feel very soft as a writer dealing with the Raj and with Robin Hood and railway trains. There is so much energy in the black music – so many good performances from the black actors that their repression should be seen at worst as a scandal – demanding more movies like
Babylon
– and at best a pointless waste of a national asset. For even in their most hysterical moment of frustrated rage against the white neighbours who tell them to shut up and go back to their own country, Trevor Laird yells ‘This
is
my fucking country.’ They’re here. We need them and we need their creative energy far more than we need the energy expended in hate against them.

As I leave there’s a black boy with a coloured knitted hat leaving up the stairs with me. Bouncing up with the arrogant, easy stride of the kids in the film. And I wanted to just make contact – say something about what the film had done to me. And I just didn’t know how to do or say it. I smiled and that was all.

To lunch with John and Linda Goldstone. A couple of actors from
Shock Treatment
– the follow-up to the
Rocky Horror
film – are there. One is an actress called Jessica Harper, who is in
Stardust Memories
. When John’s next guest – a bubbly, middle-ageing American who talks much about jet-lag – arrives, there occurs the following conversation:

The man was Henry Jaglom, who’s got a movie called
Sitting Ducks
at the London Film Festival. He was very funny in a Jewish, improvisatory sort of way. I liked him a lot. His girlfriend, Patrice, was later seen by Helen taking 12 of the largest pills Helen had ever seen. Jessica Harper was a sweet, light, gentle lady who ate no meat and was of such a slight build she looked like a little doll.

And there was an actor called Cliff de Ville (or some such) who had seen us at the Hollywood Bowl and who, sadly for him, spoke and looked just like Jack Nicholson.

With trepidation to Owen the Feet, having vowed never to return to his shabby little Mornington Foot Clinic, with its fighting dogs in the waiting room and 100-year-old chair.

Today he seems more eccentric than usual and I wonder if he will extract some sort of vengeance upon me for shutting him up rather firmly last time. He injects my toe and gives me the electric needle cauterisation treatment. I was glad to be out of there with the toe still on. He told me that if it was painful in the next week to bear it.

Hobble into the Python meeting at 10.30.

At 12.30 J Cleese arrives to play with the Space Invaders game and watch the 60-minute video of the Hollywood Bowl stage show – which JC has been in charge of editing. All of us feel the sense of occasion is lacking. It is, after all,
Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl
and at the moment it’s just Python Live Against Black Drapes. TJ’s initial worry that it would look boring is borne out. I’m afraid it doesn’t excite any of us.

Should there be a possible 83-minute version for theatrical viewing? TJ and EI feel emphatically no, the rest of us would like to see one assembled. I feel that if the material is well done (and performances at the Bowl weren’t bad) and the cartoon film sequences are fresh, we could quite honourably sell it in France, Scandinavia, Australia and possibly Canada at least.

To EuroAtlantic.

Denis is in – having just arrived from the West Coast. Without a
Time Bandits
deal. So obviously he’s subdued. He asks me what we thought of
the video of the Bowl. I said no-one was that elated by it, and there were very strong feelings in the group that we should not even
attempt
to make a movie version.

Travel-crumpled Denis went off to have a haircut (saying he had to look tidy tomorrow because he’s going to ask someone to lend him £2 million).

Can actually feel the warmth of direct sunlight on my face this morning as I toil over post-synch lines for
Time Bandits
. Rachel sits beside me reading – she’s home with a sore throat and suspected flu.

Fortunately I’m in quite good creative flow at the moment and the lines come quite easily. I even find a couple of slogans (which I’m usually rather bad at). ‘
Time Bandits
– it’s all the dreams you’ve ever had. And not just the bad ones.’ (This is changed after I try it out on Tom, who immediately suggests ‘not just the good ones’!)

Reading
The Wheels of Chance
by H G Wells, which Jan Francis’s husband, a writer called Thomas Ellice, has sent me, hoping that I might be interested in the part of Hoopdriver.

I read the story in about three hours and liked it a lot. H G Wells is a good comic writer – well in the Jerome K Jerome class and even better when he brings in the political angle – the Hampstead women with their New Way of life – and Hoopdriver becomes a full and rounded character, a nonentity who becomes a hero. I love leading characters who are introduced: ‘If you had noticed anything about him, it would have been chiefly to notice how little he was noticeable.’

I visit the eccentric chiropodist, Owen, at 9.30. He launches into a stream of consciousness about prices, his son-in-law, the Jewish mafia who run London Zoo.

He puts on some paste to further kill the beast straddling my toe, assures me it will hurt, tells me not to run for a week and, with a gloomy nod of the head, suggests that there are chiropodists about who wouldn’t have touched it at all.

George H rings. He had seen an assembly of ‘
TB
’ and been very worried by some of the ‘amateurish’ stuff between the boy and the bandits – at
the end especially. He felt the film should be a lot shorter and had advised Denis not to hawk it around in its present state. All of which depressed me somewhat.

At nine my episode of the
Great Railway Journeys
is aired. I was relieved how well the programme held together. Most of the potentially embarrassing spots had either been ironed out or well-padded with music and sound effects.

I expect this will not be enough for the critics. But it was enough for me – and Barry Cryer and Angela and my mother – who thought it was the best of the series, ‘and not just because I’m your mother’.

Pesky reviews.
Telegraph
generously lukewarm,
Guardian
crustily lukewarm,
Mail
happy. All stop short of personal vilification, all mention the pre-opening credits ‘confession’ piece as a good sign of comic delights to come and all register various degrees of disappointment that they didn’t materialise.

Drive down to Coram’s Fields to be present at the launching of a new ‘play kit’ (‘kit’ being a radical/progressive word for what used to be called in car showrooms ‘literature’). It’s being launched by Fair Play for Children, of whom I am a vice-president, to try and help teachers and play leaders with the problems of getting multi-racial kids to play together.

Neil Kinnock MP is there. He’s the Labour spokesman on education and carries with him a little notebook, pages scrawled with figures and notes. Gleefully he unearths some figures he’d given to Paul Foot about Heinz beans’ current ad campaign – buy Heinz products, collect the labels and you can exchange them for new equipment for your school. For 86,000 labels you can buy a video recorder and camera set. Kinnock did some quick sums, searched in his little book and came up with the triumphant result ‘That’s £21,000 for a video set-up.’

Glenda Jackson was also there – nice, friendly, open and quite unaffected. There’s a small video film made by the organisation, which typifies all their problems. Full of good intentions, but hopelessly over-serious in presentation.

Not a smile in it. Just a dose of current sociological jargon. And this is all about play. I said I would be prepared to help their next video presentation. Glenda J agreed too – so they could have quite a cast!

Had to rush away at 12.30 to get to a Python meeting.

A successful read-through. Eric has written a classic – ‘The liberal Family’. GC has made some progress and Terry is very anxious to show Graham his penis. It has some deficiency which he is worried about.

Today we sit and stare at the board on the wall on which cards bearing the names of sketches have been hopefully pinned. Graham muses rather distantly and Terry and I sputter on. But around lunchtime it dies. We only have a working lunch – sandwiches on the table – and afterwards Eric, who has been in one of his silent spells, suddenly galvanises us all into working out a story.

The end of the world, 6,000 AD, the bomber with the Ultimate Weapon, all disappear and we build on the one constant of the month – the working-class family sketch of mine, a fabric of a story about – guess what? – three brothers of the Forbes-Bayter family and the rise to fame, wealth and power of Trevor from obscure working-class origins to become Prime Minister just as the final nuclear war breaks out.

It’s all in place by five o’clock, but I feel quite drained of energy as the room empties. I can hardly believe that after all this work and discussion we have come around to a ‘Ripping Yarn’ which Terry and I could have written in a fortnight on our own.

I find curious solace in talking to a reporter from a Boston, US, radio station. Anne revives me with a scotch and I quite enjoy answering questions from this perky little guy like ‘Do you think Britain’s really finished?’

I have to say as we meet that I do think the family story we worked out yesterday was a soft option and that the End of the World and the 90-minute countdown remains for me a much more striking idea and a more thoughtful subject altogether. There is no disagreement here and for a while it seems that we have two films. A ‘Yarn’ and an ‘Apocalypse’. Terry J loves the idea of making two films at the same time and showing them at cinemas on alternate nights – Monty Python’s two new films.

To EuroAtlantic for the six o’clock Python meeting. Denis O’B has stage-managed the encounter quite carefully. There is an air of calculated informality and there are delicious Indian titbits to disarm us to start with – ‘No meat in
any
of them,’ Denis assures us, with a significant look at Eric.

Then one by one the various members of the EuroAtlantic team give us a report – which sounds less like a report and more like a justification, at times as blatant as a sales pitch, of their own usefulness. Even though John Cleese isn’t present they still sound intimidated and there is an unrelaxed air to the proceedings until Steve Abbott
²⁹
punctures it well.

The atmosphere is very different from the unalloyed enthusiasm of the New Dawn of Python beside the swimming pool at Fisher’s Island 14 months ago.

I drive Anne back at the end of the meeting and she is fuming.

I watch
Points of View
which says glowing and wonderful things about the railway programme – ‘The finest programme ever’ – and flatters me wonderfully. I really seem to have tapped the ageing, middle-class audience.