Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (82 page)

Lunch at Odettes with Steve and Michael Shamberg [
Wanda
’s American co-producer]. Shamberg looks and sounds East Coast, in fact he’s from Chicago and now works in LA. He has an aristocratic drawl and a pleasant, laid-back approach, which is easy, quite intelligible and relaxing.

Shamberg thinks we should have a theme song for
Wanda
. Suggests someone like Phil Collins, who is popular in the US but British. Groans from Steve. Apparently it was suggested to JC, who didn’t know who Phil Collins was. Mind you, he also thought Sting was called String, and Boy George George Boy, so not much hope of guidance there.

Write a letter to the Bishop of Birmingham re chairmanship of T2000. Checking a hunch, I find from Robert Hewison’s
Python – The Case Against
that he was indeed one of the bishops who spoke out against
The Life of Brian
.

Start the day with a lot of energy. Organise a family party here for Granny next week. This involves ringing Angela at Chilton. A small, unhappy voice answers. She’s feeling awful again. At least she doesn’t disguise it with me. She feels guilty about Granny – not seeing her enough, not being able to tell her what she’s going through. She’s doing her tap-dancing and working at the Quay Theatre [in Sudbury], etc, but she says they’re only temporary diversions and ‘the blackness’, as she calls it, always returns.

Wake to a dull morning. Am to launch a public transport initiative called ‘Freeway’ in Trafalgar Square mid-morning, only to hear that the launch has been cancelled, as the special bus broke down.

Good news on the transport front is a letter from Hugh Montefiore, ex-bishop, confirming his interest in the T2000 chairmanship, and requesting me to phone him after Easter.

Take Ma, by taxi, to the Clore Turner gallery [at the Tate]. She manages well, despite a swell of visitors. I manoeuvre her tiny, increasingly gnome-like bulk into gaps beside pictures wherever we can find them.

Then to the restaurant for lunch. Hard to hear each other and the waitress calls Granny ‘the young lady with you’. But Mum has a wonderful way of filtering out angst in such situations. I quite envy her cheerful smile.

Home and help prepare for a big night at Julia Street – the arrival of all the Herberts for a family dinner. Angela has driven down from Chilton. She arrives first at a quarter to seven. She tries to be cheerful and on top of it all, but clearly is not comfortable.

A noisy and merry occasion, except for Angela’s unease. ‘Find me a job with witty people’ is her last (despairing) attempt at a smile and a lifting of the spirits.

To an un-looked-forward-to task at Highbury Magistrates’ Court, to which I’m called as a witness in the case of the owner of the cab that hit our car last November.

No-one either welcomes me or even tells me what to do or where to go. Ian, big Scot from across the road, who took the cab’s number, is already waiting. We sit for half an hour completely unattended.

Then a police officer, there to give evidence, recognises me. He moans about the Crown Prosecution Service, which is only a few months old, and replaces the police’s own prosecution service.

A little later, after we’ve been sat there for 50 minutes, another helpful policeman comes to tell us that the case is on at the moment, but has just been adjourned owing to non-appearance of a witness.

He suggests we sit in the back of the court and wait to talk to the prosecutor. We do so, and are eventually told that the witness who didn’t appear was Mr Palin. At which point I spring up and tell them I’ve been outside for the past hour. Magistrates full of apologies and very pissed off with a hopelessly confused, overworked prosecutor, who hasn’t even looked our way, let alone consulted with us.

Twenty-first wedding anniversary. A very warm day in prospect.

A call from the production office of a film which Chris Menges is directing.
¹⁴⁸
Would I come out for a week in June to Zimbabwe to play ‘the nicest man in the world’? Unfortunately it’s the second week of
Wanda
rehearsals. Also a call from
Animals’ Roadshow
– would I like to be interviewed, with Denis, by Desmond Morris?

From the ridiculous to the sublime!

Back at home catching up with the diary before going out yet again when a call is put through to me by Rachel. A voice, of no particular class or distinction, says ‘Prince Edward here’. I play my reactions cautiously, my mind flicking at double-speed through a card-index of possible Prince Edward impersonators, but it transpires it really is Prince Edward.

He wants me to join a giant
It’s a Knockout
competition to be held for charity at Alton Towers in … of course, June. It’s on the day we’re rehearsing, and the day when I would like to be in Zimbabwe with Chris Menges. Explain my problems, but he deals with the first one by saying that JC will take part if all the
Wanda
cast agree.

At seven by cab to the Latchmere to see Bernard Padden’s potato plays. Padden rang earlier in the week to make sure I came along. Have roped in Terry as well.

The theatre is casually run by very tall, wafer-thin, young students. ‘Are you unemployed?’ TJ and I are asked at the ticket office … We joke – something about only for tonight. This cuts no ice at all with the young man who rather curtly elaborates, as if talking to very stupid people, ‘Are you currently in acting work?’

Call Alan Bennett to pass on my favourable reaction to last night’s Padden play. He will try to go to it. He confesses that the heavily gay ambience would worry him. I tell him to take a butch friend with him – ‘a hulking heterosexual’ as Alan puts it.

He’s trying to write another stage play – ‘I’m always trying to write a stage play, but I just can’t come up with the plots.’ He says he has no difficulty writing the monologues currently being made by Innes for the Beeb.

Then I call Cleese, who disarms me with very generous observations about
East of Ipswich
, which he has at last got around to seeing. He’s the third to mention it this morning.

He and I laugh as loudly as I have for a long while over John’s revelation that the first thing he knew of the recent discoveries about the Queen Mother’s relations was a headline on Teletext ‘Three more Royal relations found in Surrey mental home’. It was the ‘more’ which really broke him up.

Up to Church Farm by lunchtime. Tom drives some of the way and Rachel shows me her diary. She gives days marks out of ten. Hasn’t had less than six and a half this year!

Do some garden clearing and weeding for Granny. Often think I would make a good gardener. Solitary, contemplative, open-air sort of life has an attraction for me. Yesterday, skimming the papers for hints of places to go for a break at the end of May, I lighted with interest upon an article about Mount Athos. You can spend 96 hours with the monks evidently – living very simply in a splendid location – olives and bread and hard
beds. Strikes me as perhaps the sort of ‘new’ experience I should be looking to sample.

To the Minister of Transport. His office is located in the HQ of the Department of the Environment in Marsham Street. It is one of the drabbest, shabbiest, most utterly dispiriting of all the drab, shabby, dispiriting buildings put up in the 1960’s and ’70’s. The fact that it houses the ministry responsible for the environment is richly ironic.

Three men sit ranged at one side of the table; the Minister at one end, his private secretary, who transcribes all we say, in laborious longhand, into a big book – rather like the old Boots’ scribbling pads. We are not encouraged to shake hands with the advisers – two on buses, one on rail tunnel – and they sit there, either frozen with fear or with boredom.

Mitchell is very welcoming and easy, though, and only gets at all disturbed when revealing that he has been sent a broadsheet from the GLC in Exile along with our [magazine]
Transport Retort
. He cannot disguise his distaste for the GLC in Exile and becomes quite headmasterly, as if warning a boy from associating with ‘townies’. They are ‘
intensely
political’ he warns us.

Fine spring morning. Amongst other things, a script arrives from Susie Figgis on behalf of Chris Menges, bearing a short, but memorable note on the part offered – ‘it is in fact Joe Slovo, who is one of the most important figures in the struggle for the liberation of South Africa … ’. It certainly makes a change from the camp butler or the zany transvestite English hairdresser.

Read it through, sitting in copious bright sunshine. Very moving. It’s written by Shawn Slovo, who is, I assume, son of Joe. [Shawn is, in fact, his daughter.] Straight to the heart of a family directly affected by the cruelty of the SA regime. Makes all the stuff we’re doing here seem suddenly trivial – window-dressing. This is spare, tightly-written, unsophisticated but enormously inspiring. It’s literally about life and death.

So ring back and express my enthusiasm. They will not be able to get back to me until Monday – so Prince Edward will have to wait!

JC has committed us to the Prince Edward charity weekend (good publicity for the film, he’s been told) and so it looks as if I shall be wearing huge mouse masks and falling into water rather than playing one of the most important figures in the struggle for South African liberation.

By Underground to a lunchtime meeting with Nick Elliott and James Mitchell at L’Etoile.

Elliott says that LWT are definitely intending to go ahead on October 5th. They see no problem with the unions as IBA are to stipulate that in future 25% of programme content must be independent. Their ‘Irish’ agreement will ensure that ‘Troubles’ comes under this category. They do not want to make many changes from the previous set-up, but will have to look for another director, as Charles S wanted ‘too many new conditions – including reappraisal of the part of Edward’.

No pressure is put on me to sign on the dotted line, and we leave on good terms at a little after half past two.

TG rings. He’s somewhere between Rome and Spain. He calls with criticism of ‘No. 27’ – very similar to TJ’s thoughts. He feels, as I do, that it could be expanded, but is still basically a TV film.

He offers me the part of the Prime Minister in
Munchausen
, and has Max Wall in mind for the Sea Captain. He is now after Peter O’Toole again for Munchausen himself.

Then a whole series of calls. The Menges film must start on the 15th of June and won’t change its dates for me. So I have to ring the royal office and accept, rather equivocally, the
Knockout
invitation.

(TG and I speculated earlier that it is an indication of the way things are that knighthoods, CBEs and the like are more likely now to be won by wearing ten-foot-high rabbit heads on the fields of Alton Towers, than in little boats squeezed between the North-West Passage, or for heroic encounters with the French fleet!)

A delightful evening, apart from calls to Granny and Angela, which give a depressing picture of some of Angela’s visit last week. Angela had been
quite open with Granny about her state of mind. Angela says she sees in Granny all that lies ahead for her – loneliness and confusion. I point out that Granny is 83 and remarkably bright and undemanding compared to many much younger mothers and mothers-in-law. But through Angela’s desperately distorted view of life, everything around her can be interpreted at its worst.

But then the delightful bit – Rachel cooks, serves and clears away a meal for Helen and myself. It’s for our anniversary.

Up at a quarter to eight for a few minutes of what, at present, I laughingly call ‘meditation’. It is quite a soothing bridge between night and day, but as soon as I close my eyes Gospel Oak sounds like an international traffic hub.

To Tony Stratton-Smith’s
¹⁴⁹
memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Keith Emerson plays a somewhat laboured piano piece, ‘Lament to Tony Stratton-Smith’ (sic), which sounds like a prolonged Elton John intro. Michael Wale talks from the enormously high pulpit about Stratt’s fondness for public houses, though, of course, no-one mentions that it was ‘the lotion’ (as I heard Robbie Coltrane put it on TV later) that did him in.

Graham does a rather perfunctory introduction to ‘Always Look on the Bright Side’. They play the whole lot – even the verse about life being a piece of shit and always looking on the bright side of death. But, as they say, Tony would have approved. I am the only other Python representative there and very glad I went as we have three wonderfully stirring old-fashioned hymns – including ‘Jerusalem’.

Graham and I walk back to the Marquee, where some hospitality is laid on. GC doesn’t seem very relaxed, but then he never has since he gave up the lotion. He’s been working very hard, doing his lecture tour of the US, and is now rewriting ‘Ditto’ yet again.

At six o’clock Helen and I set out in the blue Mini for Buckingham Palace.

There is something quietly satisfying about driving up the Mall knowing that, unlike everyone else, you are going into the house at the end. Smiling policemen direct us past the camera-wielding public, across an outer courtyard and through an arch between two scarlet-coated guardsmen.

There is a rather gloomy courtyard at the back which could do with some greenery. Have to open the bonnet and boot of the Mini, and the underneath is searched with a mirror.

Then in through the porte-cochère, familiar from Royal Weddings, into a hallway, with a raised area straight ahead. We are shown by the ubiquitous footmen up a red-carpeted, silent staircase and eventually, to the accompaniment of a low and respectful hum of conversation, we find ourselves in a long room with a curved glass ceiling. This is the Picture Gallery.