Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (12 page)

Tonight we have a film and a video camera backstage and the audience lights keep going up at strange times. But the audience stay with us and at the end a large section of them won’t leave. They wait up to half an hour for an encore we don’t have. There’ll be outraged letters in
Rolling Stone
about that.

Behind stage, in our small and ill-appointed dressing room beneath the Bowl, we entertain G Harrison, who looks rather shell-shocked after a trip to Montreal to see a Grand Prix, then a drive across the border to New York to avoid a Canadian air-controllers’ strike. It’s very good to see how he lights up with the satisfaction of seeing us all performing.

Anne has organised bottles for our dressers and drinks behind stage for our rather dour American crew, of whom only a handful have tried to make any contact with us at all – my favourite being a dwarf, who carted huge weights around, generally behaved like a roadie and had an easy, warm, approachable manner.

Eventually I was driven away from the Bowl to a party flung our way by H Nilsson, who lives in a house of modern, airy design, atop a ridge of mountain above Bel Air.

Harry Nilsson, so big, all-embracing, soppily friendly and sporting a complete and refreshing lack of the obligatory LA tan, moves around with his young son on his shoulder. Not drinking, either, as far as I could see. He’s terribly happy that George H has surprised him by turning up.

Today I’m up and out to buy the croissants and the papers. But London disappoints with its shabbiness, with the endless unswept, litter-strewn pavements and the lack of anything new and bright and lively.

A pint and a half of IPA at lunchtime with GC and John Tomiczek at the Freemasons. The remarkable thing about our meeting was that Graham had given up smoking. His most familiar landmark – the pipe with its attendant paraphernalia – proggers, matches, ashtrays and lumps of half-burnt tobacco – have, if he’s to be believed, been discarded for ever …

He says he’s not
quite
sure about what he’s done, but it was an impulse when he arrived at LA Airport last Wednesday evening and was confronted with some of the worst smog he’d ever seen in the city – so he’d decided not to add to it. So he hasn’t used this prop … that he’d had since the age of 14 … for almost 72 hours. ‘Mind you, I’ve had to hit the Valium rather hard to make up for it.’

Helen and I and parents and all the kids of Gospel Oak packed into All Hallows Church to give thanks for the harvest.

Rachel’s class sang a ‘Potato’ song to Mr Muxworthy’s guitar and babies cried as the vicar tried to defy the appalling acoustics of this strange Gothic Revival interior. Talked with Father Coogan afterwards – ‘Very Hampsteady food,’ he observed, looking down on a font with smoked salmon peeping out from behind Yugoslavian crispbreads.

Have instituted a ‘read-a-Shakespeare-play-a-day’ regime. More realistically, I’ve subtitled it ‘Read Shakespeare’s plays by Christmas and his sonnets by New Year’. Decide to read them through chronologically, as they were written, and completed
Love’s Labour’s Lost
today. Plenty of laughs and relentless wisecracking. A real Marx Brothers screenplay.

Tom is twelve today. He says that ‘I only woke up at 5.30 … that’s not bad …’ But he is now a fully-fledged adult as far as air travel goes, as I find
out when booking a half-term holiday for us all in Ireland at the end of the month.

A depressing foray to Tottenham Court Road/Oxford Street to buy a new 8 mill film to show at Tom’s party. Depressing because of the domination in that corner of London of the awful, blinking, hypnotising spell of video … There is video equipment everywhere – video films, video games – and it’s like a giant amusement arcade providing a sort of temporary electronic alternative to listlessness. Lights flash and disembodied voices bark out of electronic chess games and football games. There doesn’t seem to be much joy around here.

Rather staid interview with the BBC at Broadcasting House. TJ does it with me.

The IBA ban on TV or radio advertising of
Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation
provides the main gist of the chat.

‘Do
you
think it’s filth?’ she asks us.

‘Oh, yes,’ we reply hopefully … and I add ‘and worse than that, puerile filth … ’

The nice lady interviewer doesn’t know quite what to make of a comedy album called
Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation
and neither do we. But all parties try hard.

After the interview TJ and I go to eat at the Gay Hussar in Greek Street. I have quite delicious quenelles of carp and then partridge and lentils. We knock back a couple of bottles of Hungarian wine and admit to each other that neither of us really thinks the album we’ve just been plugging is much good.

After the meal we walk through Soho to the very hub of its wheel of naughtiness – to Raymond’s Revue Bar in Walker’s Court. Here there is a small auditorium called the Boulevard Theatre, where a new comedy club called the Comic Strip has just opened. For a long time after the Establishment folded there have been no such clubs in London, but recently the Comedy Store opened and now this. White and Goldstone
²⁵
are involved and this was the second night.

As we wait to collect our guest tickets, a demure voice announces ‘The second part of the Festival of Erotica is starting now … members of the audience may take drinks into the auditorium if they so desire …’
Sober-suited businessmen down drinks and shuffle off to the Festival of Erotica, whilst the rather scruffier, long-Mac brigade troop into the Comic Strip.

In a small, low room with a stage and seating for about 150, only the front two or three rows are full. There are about six or seven acts, including guests. One duo, calling themselves Twentieth Century Coyote, were excellent, with one superb performer. Targets seem to be the new establishment of the left – feminists, alternative society jargon, social workers.

In the intermission buy drinks in the bar and the Comic Strip trendies mingle with the Festival of Erotica straights, whilst two ladies rub and lick each other on a video film projected above the bar. TJ kept wanting to ‘just pop in’ to the Festival of Erotica, but we stay with the comics and talk to them afterwards. All very young. I wish them well … but the Twentieth Century Coyotes were the only ones I would really keep my eye on.

Into town to see the two and a half hour first assembly of
Time Bandits
.

The effect of the wall sliding back in the room and the first fall into the time hole are stunning, then a series of very funny sequences – Napoleon, Robin Hood, Vincent and Patsy, David Warner and the Court of Eric and the Ogres – lift the film and involve me totally.

It really is the most exciting piece of filming I have seen in ages. I want to be cautious and I want to see all the problems and not be carried away, but the sum total of my impressions leaves me only with heady enthusiasm.

Graham Chapman on
Parkinson
(the first Python to be there, I think). Quiet, pipe-less, subdued, but, as an ex-alcoholic homosexual, steals the show.

J Goldstone rings to say that the
Life of Brian
appears to be making great progress in Barcelona. Starting slowly, it got good reviews and after two
or three days audiences began to pour in. Now didn’t I always say I liked the Spaniards?

Write letters and babysit in evening as H goes off to badminton. Watch John C in
Taming of the Shrew
. John gives an excellent performance. Controlled and clear, as you’d expect, and the quiet moments work as well as the screaming. Better, in fact.

He’s still not one of those actors who seem to start each new character from scratch, but he did make one listen to every word and as such did a much greater service to Shakespeare – and to J Miller, the director – than most of the other actors.

The weather continues various. Today is bright sunshine, which makes a lunchtime visit to Shepperton all the more agreeable.
²⁶

First we visit the
Ragtime
lot, which has been built on the triangle of green fields below the reservoir, hired from the Thames Water Board. It’s been used sensationally. There are two long New York streets of the 1900’s, intersecting halfway. The J P Morgan Library and the brownstones look so solid and substantial and the cobbled streets and paved sidewalks and lampposts so painstakingly reconstructed, that after a few minutes in the middle of all this the only unreality seems to be the Friesian cows munching contentedly in the sunshine behind Madison Avenue.

Then to the newly-refurbished canteen and catering block, open now for two weeks. I feel quite elated at what has been achieved after three years of constant nagging, reaching desperation point so often that I almost gave up hope. But today what was so often a running sore on Shepperton’s reputation is now bright and gleaming and freshly-painted as a set for an ad. The kitchen, through which birds used to fly and, for all I know, nest, is now compact, clean and full of new equipment.

In the bar I meet Iain Johnstone,
²⁷
who is very surprised to hear of my directorship of Shepperton. Iain nodded to the restaurant. ‘The
Gandhi
mob are here.’ Richard Attenborough is indeed here, for a planning meeting for his forthcoming film on the great man.

It’s raining at a quarter to seven when I’m woken by Rachel talking to herself. At eight we go down to breakfast – table with bright blue and white check cloth beside a long window of gracious Georgian proportions. Free-range eggs and bacon like it used to taste before it was sealed and suffocated in cellophane packets, and home-made bread and toast too thick and generously cut to fit in any toaster. This sets us up well for the day and, to improve matters, the rain sputters to a standstill about ten.

We play a word game, trying not to listen to the party nearby talking about operations, diets and how many times they’ve been on the verge of death (the next morning Helen hears the same woman, pen poised over postcard, asking at the desk how to spell ‘anaesthetic’).

On Tuesday afternoon, with the wet weather cleared away and sunlight filling the house, Mel [Calman] idly suggested that he and I collaborate on a children’s story. I started work on
Small Harry and the Toothache Pills
that afternoon and completed it and another shorter tale,
Cyril and the Dinner Party
by Wednesday evening.

I’ve called them both ‘Ballymaloe Stories’ and given the scribbled pages (snatched from Rachel’s drawing pad) to Mel to think about. Mel says that he isn’t the right illustrator for the longer story, but will have a go on Cyril. So that’s all rather exciting.

Otherwise I have done very little. I’ve read a rather fine little book on the history of Ireland by Sean O’Faolain, published in 1943, which makes me stop and think. The English have done some dreadful things to this country in the last four centuries. Greed, adventure, religious conviction or plain bullying have all played a part and even in this quite restrained and tolerant account there is an awful lot to shame England and the English.

I shall hate Irish jokes even more. The lovely thing about the Irish and the way the jokes arise, is their literalness. They seem not to be a guileful people, they’re straight, direct, gentle, and yet very good at conversation, at describing beauty and at making strangers feel at their ease.

Our room is full of kids for most of the day, including the ubiquitous Cullin – he of the chunky thighs, who follows Rachel and is rather rough
and Irish and makes her alternately excited – ‘Can you see what colour my knickers are?’ – and prudish – ‘Go away, I hate you … I
do
.’

Last night Mrs Allen chatted to us for a while and said goodbye, as she wouldn’t be seeing us this morning. Mel tells me that when working on
The Ballymaloe Cookbook
with her, he found that she kept a little card about guests’ vagaries. Some are not welcome again. Against one man she’d written ‘Free with his hands in the evening’. Which all makes her sound a rather censorious, stern lady, but she’s far from it. She’s hardworking, capable, but very tolerant and entertaining. An excellent hostess.

I think we’re probably all ready to return to England. My run last night was quite a battle after another lunch, following another solid breakfast, following a fairly unrestrained dinner.

We reach Cork about 9.30, getting lost in the traditional manner. When there are signposts at junctions they invariably have only one arm and one destination (usually where you’ve come from).

TG rings. Paramount are not interested in
Time Bandits
. Last Monday there was a viewing for Filmways and apparently it went amazingly well. The Filmways head of production was jumping up and down at the end, grabbing TG and calling the film all kinds of success.

The next morning Denis rang TG to say that the Filmways board has rejected it. Too long, too British. TG said he was absolutely stunned at the news after the reaction at the viewing. Denis is now fighting (which he enjoys), but is getting twitchy about his money and the long interest rate on which he’s borrowed it.

At 3.30 I drive down to BH for appearance with TJ on a chat programme. It’s ostensibly about the new
Ripping Yarns
book [
More Ripping Yarns
] and then is to be widened into a whole exploration of the technique, limitations, causes, effects and everything else to do with ‘humour’. The sort of thing I dread. A knitting machine operative from Oldham is to be on hand to ask searching questions and a man is on a telephone in Plymouth for further interrogation.