Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (60 page)

A night at home. Evening ends with me becoming rather hooked on a snooker semi-final between Higgins and Thorburn – both of whom have a marvellous, battered, dissolute charisma which is so much more refreshing than the boring, bland healthiness of the Coes and Steve Davises, the Torvills and Deans. Long live Alex Higgins and his fags and beer. Though, the way he goes on, he probably won’t!

In the Sundays – ‘Fegg’s’ first appearance in the best-seller lists, at No. 6 on the ‘General’ chart, and a nice review of ‘Fegg’ by Russell Davies in the
Observer
, opposite the Philip French rave for
Private Function
. A nice feeling for a Sunday morning. The brief, illusory satisfaction of being wanted.

Then down to the Lumiere for the world premiere of
The Dress
. Lumiere full – six to seven hundred people. A Louis Malle film,
Crackers
, on first, and before that Derek Malcolm ‘informally’ introduces Eva S, Phyllis and myself to the throng.

I really don’t like going to the cinema like this. Miss the dark anonymity – here are Phyllis and I now, marked men and women.
Crackers
is not very good. Heavily played comedy. Louis Malle crying out for a Woody Allen to show him how to direct a comedy of charm and wit.

Then it’s over and almost without pause we’re into
The Dress
. I think that this is a mistake, and does not help distance
The Dress
from comedy, which, with me in it, the audience clearly expects. They begin to titter early on.

I found my performance difficult to judge as I was not required to play for laughs – so none of my conventional yardsticks of success applied. ‘Serious’ acting of the sort I do in
The Dress
seems to be dangerously easy to do and my feeling at the end is one of confusion. I sense that in Helen who thought it very funny to be watching me being so serious.

At Liverpool Street the big expensive, automatic destination board is still only half-working. The lead story in my newspaper is of another fatal rail accident – the sixth in as many months. It looks to me as if the railway system is very near breaking point.

I take deep breaths and try to control my bitter feelings about what Margaret Thatcher’s war against organised labour is costing this country. I feel these are darker days even than in the early ’70’s when Heath took on the miners. This time people are paying for ‘strong government’ with their lives.

But all these awfulnesses seem less immediate as I reach Suffolk and eventually step off the train at Darsham to find my exiguous mater, stooped and thinner in the legs, scouring the incoming train with a frown.

The field behind the house is full of potato-pickers. They’re aided by a mechanical plough, a tractor-trailer and a fork-lift truck, but the picking of the potatoes from the cloggy earth is done by hand. There are a dozen figures, well wrapped in thick coats, scrabbling the potatoes into old fertiliser bags. Bent over the job. Old-fashioned, unskilled agricultural labour in the wind and the rain, a hundred yards away from where I sit at my desk trying to pick the right words out of the equally cloggy soil of my imagination.

Wake at half past eight. Low cloud and rain. No potato-pickers. Work until one. Weather clears and temperature drops sharply without cloud cover.

Mother said quite categorically that she doesn’t like driving the car any more, and, as nearly categorically as she’s ever been, that she can’t foresee another winter at Croft Cottage.

Reckon I’ve spent about ten hours this week on
East of Ipswich
(as I’m
provisionally calling ‘First Love’) – the progress has all been forward and quite exciting.

At the London Palladium for something in the nature of a good turn to J Cleese, who was committed but is filming in the US. We’re supporting the Oncology Club – oncology being the study of tumours – and it’s a big house to fill.

Terry and I look like the oldest members of the cast – which I realise with a shock we probably are. Neil [Innes] is there to cheer us up. He’s given up smoking, on his 40th birthday.

I open the show – almost on time at 7.30 – with the ‘Politician’s Speech’, which goes well, but not ecstatically.

Alexei Sayle begins the assault on the audience with a display of manic energy and lots of ‘fucking’ and ‘cunting’. Chris Langham has a lot of wanking jokes and Rik Mayall does a piece about an elephant giving someone a blow-job in an Italian restaurant. This last marvellous.

It’s over by 10.30 and we go to a small party at which Neil is given a birthday cake in the shape of a piano. All the foul-mouthed ‘alternative’ comedians sit quietly with their wives or girlfriends.

Am settling down to watch
Oxbridge Blues
when the door bell rings and there is the red face and sad apologetic smile of Julian Hough. He spent last night in the cells, he claims. He’s no money and has resorted to stealing – rather proud of the fact that he took a bottle of white wine and a jar of caviar from a shop in Hampstead – and then went back for some carrots.

M Mowbray tells me that Mr Gorbachev – the Soviet No. 2
¹¹⁴
visiting the UK at the moment – has requested a print of
A Private Function
to be delivered to the Soviet Embassy! Alan apparently very pleased.

To Duke’s Hotel for a Python meal.

GC and EI discuss the relative merits of cocaine – ‘A killer … keep off it,’ counsels Eric fiercely – and acid, which both agree taken in the right circumstances with the right people can be marvellous. Graham says he played snooker under acid and ‘couldn’t do anything wrong. Potted every one’.

EI has been doing Lampoon’s ‘
Vacation
II’. He said that at least he was keeping up his record of having appeared ‘only in flops’ apart from the Python films.

At the end of a very good meal, I, a little playfully, ask of the gathering when we might all work together again.

A Python History of America emerges as front runner. A totally fabricated history using facts as and when we want them – rather on the lines of GC’s
Liar’s Autobiography
.

Best feeling about our little reunion was the reaffirmation that when we are all in accord there is no more satisfying group to work with. The shorthand that exists between us all cannot be replicated outside. This bond is stronger than it ever was – a bond of people of roughly the same age who have shared a unique experience. I hope we can be something more than a luncheon club.

Across the West End to St James’s Park on my way to a lunch given by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
and
Minister of the Arts, Lord Gowrie.

I approach behind a seedy figure in a dull brown overcoat who turns out to be Alan Bennett. So pleased to see him I give him a big hug. The security man has my name in the book, but not Alan’s. ‘Oh well, up you go anyway,’ he says to him.

Room 622 is the office of Lord Gowrie. A small collection of mixed artistes – Ronnie Scott is sitting already talking, there’s Cleo Laine and Melvyn Bragg and Stephen Frears. Why are we all here? seems to be the general theme of most of the conversations.

Bob Geldof, definitely the man of the moment for writing and organising the Band Aid Christmas record for Ethiopia, arrives bristling over the government’s decision to collect VAT money on the record –
which everyone had made for nothing. The Minister of Arts, sensing this, seems to spend a lot of time grinning at whatever the unshaven Boomtown Rat says.

Jeremy Isaacs – who has done an excellent job with Channel 4, I feel – comes across to tell me that the IBA have refused clearance to put the
Life of Brian
on TV – even at 11.15 at night. It might offend ‘Christian sensibilities’ they say. Isaacs is hopping mad and looking forward to a fight.

Visited Beatties [the model railway shop]. Collected various accessories, including trees and a lot of people – ‘army personnel’, ‘commuters’, etc – all in little bags. Ian Davidson later suggests they should have little models of well-known people – like ‘Sir Harold Nicolson’.

On the way back I stopped at Alan Alan’s Magic Shop in Southampton Row, where I was served by a small, neat, be-suited gentleman with an arrow through his head. Quickly and efficiently he demonstrated an extraordinary variety of bangs, squirts, farts and electric shocks as if he were selling nothing more exciting than a coal scuttle. Little children watched in awe as their fathers idly toyed with a pack of sexy playing cards only to receive a sharp electric shock from the pack. I bought a variety of revolving and lighting-up bow ties, an exploding pen, dribbling glass, etc, etc, to give as presents at our New Year’s Eve party.

For me a curious year.
Private Function
the unexpected highlight.
Brazil
, hard and salutary experience, looks like distinguishing itself in 1985. But I’d not found in 1984 a new and successful vein of creative writing. The limericks are slight, the ‘Vikings’ unsatisfactory, ‘Fegg’ fun and frivolity.

Best moment of the year is in the picture beside me as I write. Mother, hardly bigger than the railings behind her, standing, with a broad smile, on the snowy sidewalk of Brooklyn Heights, with the buildings of Southern Manhattan mushrooming behind her. Journey of the year, undoubtedly.

The papers are full of news of the
Life of Brian
ban by the IBA.
Guardian
reports/describes the film as ‘parodying the life of Christ’. This misrepresentation irritates me and I spend the first working hour composing a letter to the paper.

Turn down four days’ work on a P&O Ferries ad and a training film for a company called Interlink. Wash the Mini, take our old video recorder round to Alison Davies and meet her dog called Burglar. She says she does find calling him in at night quite silly.

In the evening Rachel and I go to BAFTA for a special screening of
The Dress
. An overflowing house, with more than a dozen standing at the back.

Flurries of laughter at moments when I feel the film is taking itself too seriously, but apart from those and the fact that my shirt collar doesn’t look as though it fits properly, I quite like the piece, or at least I don’t cringe with embarrassment as I did at the Lumiere showing.

Rachel is quite pleased with herself too, and probably will never be as excited again by seeing her name on the credits.

Eva tells me that it will be going out in this country with
Beverly Hills Cop
, the Eddie Murphy film which is currently one of the biggest successes ever in the US.

David Leland rings with words of praise. ‘Is there another side of Michael Palin I don’t know about?’ he’d asked himself. He thinks ‘reaction’ acting is the hardest of all to do. I still think it’s the easiest.

After early shopping, take Rachel on a little birthday trip to the Bethnal Green Museum.

Then I take her to Islington to pick up a key for the Art Deco clock
I bought for TG’s birthday, then lunch together at the Pizza Express there. We do enjoy ourselves and, on Rachel’s last day in single figures, I can’t help but feel glad that I’m enjoying her growing up – that I don’t have a romantic, nostalgic, escapist longing for her to be five or six again.

A rather ordinary evening, enlivened a little by Tom arriving home about ten with ‘some friends’, five out of six of whom are women. They process through the house to No. 2. I feel like one of the exhibits at the Bethnal Green Museum, sitting by the fire reading my
New Statesman
as they peer curiously through the glass door at me.

Watch a very impressive programme on Alan Bleasdale. I envy his street wit, and his delight in writing and, in Bleasdale’s case, the seriousness and urgency and fluency with which he seems to be able to write about now. Working-class writers seem to have much more to say about the present state of things. But will he be hoiked up by his talents into a sort of honorary middle-class writer? Watching the programme made me want to buckle down to my own writing. To produce something with some edge, some guts …

No fresh snow, but bitter cold. I hear that this is likely to be the coldest day in London for 20 years. Wrap up well, in double-sweater order, and once again get to grips with
East of Ipswich
. Pleased with the morning’s progress. Am very strict about not answering the phone until one o’clock and it helps.

Phone my mother, who is resigned to her ‘imprisonment’ and re-plan my visit to Southwold for next Tuesday. Angela phones – Chilton without water despite being surrounded by a moat, which is frozen enough to skate on.

Some masochistic streak in me has me pulling on my tracksuit at two and off for a run. I’ve met most conditions in the five years I’ve been a Heath regular, but never cold as intense as this, and I feel I have to try it – one, because I feel I need exercise, and two, because it’s there.

Afternoon curtailed by an interview at the Python office with Michael Owen of the
Standard
. He’s a card. A wry, gossipy, ruddy-faced little man. Sardonic and quite bitchy. He’d seen
Brazil
(although he doesn’t admit so to start with) and couldn’t make head or tail of it. I say I’m glad he isn’t the cinema critic and ask where Mr Walker is these days … ‘Oh, in Hong Kong,’ says Owen, ‘doing something or other for the CIA.’ Alexander Walker and the CIA, that’s a new one.