Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (7 page)

To my relief, the
Time Bandits
, as of April 4th, is not in bad shape at all, and most of last week’s rapid rewrites, though in many cases the result of writer’s cowardice, do seem to improve the shape and pace of the story. So by the time I’ve completed a thorough read-through I’m feeling very positive.

Up to T Gilliam’s to discuss with him. Find him in a house of illness. Amy puffy with mumps, Maggie, newly pregnant, looking very tired, and TG crumpled and dressing-gowned. His temperature returned to 101 last night and he was thrown into a sweating turmoil after a phone call from Denis O’B in Los Angeles. TG thinks he has ‘brain fever’.

We talk through for four hours. And by the end I’m exhausted by the effort of keeping concentration and a sense of proportion and not succumbing to Gilliam’s periodic moments of eyeball-widening realisation … ‘We only have seven
weeks
… ’ ‘I haven’t even … ’, etc, etc.

Look forward with glorious anticipation of relief relaxation to my two days off in Southwold this weekend with Rachel.

Slept a welcome eight hours. Woken by chirpy Rachel at eight and up and eating croissants on Easter morning by 8.30.

Brian
appears to have had some effect on Granny – she confessed that she didn’t go to church on Good Friday … ‘Thinking of you and your film, I just couldn’t.’ Has it shaken her faith constructively or destructively? She
did
say she couldn’t take Pontius Pilate seriously any more!

Drive over to Eric’s for a Python meeting about the next album, which we have to deliver under the terms of our Arista/Charisma contract.

Eric suggests we call the album ‘Monty Python’s Legal Obligation Album’ and I suggest that we have it introduced by some legal man explaining why we have to deliver it and the penalties if we don’t. This replaces the tentative ‘Scratch and Sniff’ title.

So we are all going back to our notebooks to cull material and have it typed up, and we reassemble on my 37th birthday to record.

Gilliam has had positive chats with Jonathan Pryce to play the Evil Genius. Pryce is apparently tremendous in
Hamlet
at the Royal Court and if we get him I think it will add to the extraordinarily confusing richness of the cast.

Bike up to Belsize Park then spend an hour sorting out mounds of unanswered fan mail (well, about 40 letters!) to give to the Python office to dispose of. This is quite a milestone as up till now I’ve always replied myself – even short, scruffy notes – but such is the amount of work behind and before me that I really can’t manage the time any more.

A fine drizzle as I cycle round to Mr Owen the Feet at a quarter to nine. Start of Rachel’s second term at Gospel Oak today and she doesn’t show any sign of nerves.

Mr Owen talks for 40 minutes and cuts away at my corn for five. ‘I would have been a professional violinist if it hadn’t been for the war … ’. A cat wanders through the surgery.

Jonathan Pryce cannot do
Time Bandits
– he’s holding out for a part in the new Steven Spielberg – so we discuss alternatives. David Warner top of the list. Denis O’B still wreaking awful havoc with TG’s peace of mind. Airily suggesting we try to get Sellers to play the Supreme Being. TG sounds tired and heavily pressured.

Train to Manchester. Although I spend most of the journey bent over my books, I can’t help overhearing that there has been some sort of US raid on Iran during the night. About one man in the whole restaurant car seems to have heard the early morning news – and says that the Americans launched an Entebbe-style commando attack in Iran which ended with two US aircraft smashing into each other in the dark and killing eight men.

It really does sound like a most perilous affair and makes me aware of that where-I-was-when-I-heard-the-news sort of feeling – here I am speeding towards Manchester on the day the war broke out!

Arrive at twenty to twelve. Met by Roger Laughton, Ken Stephinson’s boss at BBC Features.
¹²
He’s a chattery, eloquent, rather macho head of department, who went to Birkdale School, supports Sheffield Wednesday and also went briefly to the same Crusader class
¹³
as myself! ‘Then why weren’t we best friends?’ he asked, jokingly but quite significantly.

He drives me out of Manchester to Ken’s quite extraordinary converted station cottage at Saddleworth. Extraordinary, not just because expresses thunder past not ten feet from his windows, but because the stretch of railway line is magnificent – coming from the south over Saddleworth Viaduct then curving in an impressive long bend to disappear then reappear in the shadow of massive slabs of moorland.

Marjorie cooks us a very tasty, delicate meal, which we eat in the Ladies’ Waiting Room, whilst listening solemnly to President Carter’s live message to the US people at one o’clock our time, seven o’clock a.m. their
time – describing, quite straightforwardly, his own personal responsibility for the immense cock-up.

At Park Square West to meet Ron Devillier,
¹⁴
who is on his way back to the US after a TV sales fair in France. Ron is anxious to market the Python TV shows in the US and, in view of his pioneering work in awakening the US to MPFC [Monty Python’s Flying Circus], we listen to him with interest.

Cleese, who had not met Ron before, clearly warmed to him and at the end of an hour’s discussion (Ron emphasising the extraordinary audience ratings which Python still picks up whenever it’s shown in the US), John proposed that we should meet in a week’s time, when all of us reassemble for the recording of
Python’s Contractual Obligation Album
, and we should agree to approach Ron formally and ask him to set out his terms for distributing Python tapes.

Denis is quite actively pursuing a company called Telepictures Inc, who he hopes can be persuaded to handle
all
Python product (in and out of the series).

Again the big business approach of Denis confronts and seems to conflict with the decentralised Python plans, which are born of mistrust of big American companies and trust in individuals whom we like instead. I foresee the Telepictures v Ron Devillier situation becoming a head-on battle between Denis’s ‘philosophy’ and our own.

As I drive from Wardour Street up to TG’s I’m quite forcibly struck by the inadequacy of the title
Time Bandits
. It just won’t create much of a stir on the hoardings, marquees and billboards. My favourite new title is ‘Terry Gilliam’s Greed’.

The post brings a very cheering letter from the headmaster of William Ellis to say that Tom has a place at the school from next September. So do most of his best friends, so this is good news indeed, especially as Willy will now automatically be offered a sibling’s place.

As a reward I take Tom out for lunch and a trip to the South Ken museums. But the reward turns into quite an effort – for I take Louise and Helen [Guedalla], Rachel and Willy as well as Tom.

Buy the children McDonald’s fast food, then drive on down to the Geology Museum. Have to detour as Kensington Gore is cordoned off because of the Iranian Embassy siege at Prince’s Gate. Now in its fourth day – and deadlines and threats have passed. There is massive police presence, but a remarkable calm now as the siege becomes a London institution.

Rachel and Helen haul me round the various exhibits and we in fact visit three museums. My mind is a mass of surrealist images from a score of exhibition stands and I am quite exhausted by the time we get home at six.

After a poor night’s sleep, up in good time and down to Euston by 9.30. Myself and the film crew catch the 9.55 to Manchester. I’m supposed to be an ordinary traveller in an ordinary second-class coach, but will viewers think it entirely coincidental that the only other occupants of the 9.55 today seem to be Orthodox Rabbis?

We drive over to Grosmont to interview Kim Mallion about restoring railway engines. It’s a strange process trying to appear natural whilst having to do unnatural things like stand in an unusual relationship in order to keep the interviewee’s face to camera, having to cut him off in mid-sentence because we have to move casually to another pre-set position and at the same time trying to mentally edit his remarks and your questions, knowing that this whole encounter will probably take up no more than one minute’s film. I began to realise why TV interviewers and presenters develop their aggressive pushiness. They’re doing their job. Well, I’m glad I’m in comedy.

Woke at four to the silence of the countryside.

For a moment or two, lying there in the pre-dawn in the isolation of this tiny North Yorkshire village, I was seized with a crisis of confidence. What I was doing all seemed so unreal. I am not a documentary presenter – I have no special knowledge or authority to talk about railways, or even a special skill in getting people to talk. I have been chosen mainly because of what I have done in the past, which has made me into a reasonably well-known TV figure, but more precisely I’ve been chosen because Ken senses in my personality something which the viewer will like and identify with.

So there I am, lying, listening to a cuckoo which has just started up in a nearby wood as the grey gives way to the gold creeping light of another hot day, trying to bring into sharp and positive focus this ephemeral ‘personality’ of mine, which is my chief qualification for this job. How I wish I were dealing in something much more finite – like the skill of an engine driver or a cameraman. Something which you can see, feel, touch, switch on and off. But no, for an hour on national TV I am to be everyone’s friend – the traveller that millions are happy to travel with.

Up at a quarter to eight, resolved to treat my predicament in the classic existentialist way – not to worry, just to do. The weather is perfect for our idyllic shots of Egton Station and the Esk Valley Line. I lie in the grass by the track reading Paul Theroux’s terrible adventures in La Paz [in
The Old Patagonian Express
] and thinking myself in paradise here, with the hot sun shining from a cloudless sky and wind in the thin line of pines above my head.

Interviewed a man who knew some details of Stockton-Darlington, the world’s first public passenger railway. Only after the interview do I find out that his son had been crushed to death six weeks before owing to the negligence of the nearby factory where he was an apprentice. It would have been his 18th birthday today, the man told me – on the verge of tears. He’d had a lot of personal problems – the break-up of a marriage, etc – and this was the last straw. He apologised for not being able to remember all the details for me, but the doctors had put him on a drug after his nervous breakdown and it left him irritatingly cloudy on
memories, he said. He’d half-built a model train. Just an ordinary bloke.

On to the 125 at Darlington and various shots of The Traveller looking around him. I’ve long since run out of delightfully informal, spontaneous and casual gestures and am now concentrating on trying not to appear too idiotically interested every time I look out of the window.

My rosy-spectacled view of Newcastle provoked a nice comment from a local. I was raving about the wonderful easiness of the Cumberland pub in the working-class district of the Byker and someone quipped, ‘Oh, yes, the Cumberland. They say there’s one bar full of locals and one bar full of playgroup leaders.’

Wake to sunshine and clear skies and the chorus of squeaks, rumbles and soft hissing of diesel exhausts from the station below. Outside a panorama of cars and trains crossing bridges. Tyneside coming to work.

We board an HST for Edinburgh which is half an hour late. I haven’t been on a single punctual train this week.

Between Berwick and Edinburgh, as the train staggers home with an out-of-action rear power car (what a bad day for this to happen to British Rail), I sit with three randomly selected ‘members of the public’ and we’re filmed chatting. Maybe the age of television is conditioning us all, but they speak with the easy assurance of people who are interviewed daily.

My last memories of elegant Edinburgh, as serenely unflawed in its beauty as ever, are of a group of very drunken chartered surveyors milling around in the lounge of the North British at midnight, tipping each other in and out of a wheelchair. If they’d been punks they’d have been out in the gutter, but they were Chartered Surveyors of this Fine City and were in dinner jackets and had paid well for their tickets, so no-one stopped them behaving like the worst sort of hooligans. My last image was of them falling on top of each other and knocking back Napoleon brandy from the bottle.

Up and across the Central Highlands – shot of me reading, etc. On time at Inverness’s crabbed and disappointing little station. Inverness full of yobbos, drunks and ladies with twinsets and pearls doing their Saturday shopping. We have time off. I make for the castle, but in front of it are three fairly incapable teenage Scots. One turns and spits long and high into the air. To my astonished horror another runs forward, tries to catch the gob in his own mouth and fails.

The other thing that I notice in Inverness this sunny Saturday afternoon are the number of churches. Severe, pencil-thin towers – the grey pointed fingers of disapproval. Enough to drive you to drink.

So begins the memorable nightmare of the journey to Kyle. The train has an observation car on the end, a special old coach with free-standing armchairs and tables.