Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (88 page)

Take Rachel down to Marshall Street Baths in Soho for a swim. She loves swimming and doesn’t do enough of it and I’m very much happier with a weekend if I work some exercise into it.

The baths are impressive. Custom-built – maybe 50 or 60 years ago. Stone fittings and marble surrounds to the pool. A sort of Art Deco curved ceiling, restored in the last year, and a good-size, almost empty expanse of water – and all this within spitting distance of the London Palladium. I think we may have made a find here.

On the way home drop off at 68a Delancey Street to find an army of builders spending my money. The building is now moving forward at a reassuring pace. Talk to a contract painter down from Wolverhampton – ‘They won’t work weekends in London.’

Dying to begin work on the ‘
AF
’ rewrite, but T2000 still hangs onto me and my time. The process of parting company with them is a slow and lingering one, and though I took the decision to resign in the ‘Troubled’ days of February, I still find myself, not writing my film, but taking the Underground to Euston for another BRB [British Railways Board] meeting.

Then we are treated to a most depressingly impenetrable hour’s disquisition on railway marketing, scattered with American business jargon rather proudly, as if the dynamism of the words will somehow miraculously interact with the business itself to make it as efficient. As it is, the
words are a smokescreen, and we learn almost nothing, except how to make an interesting and very relevant subject deeply boring.

To TV-AM to record a story for Children’s Book Week. I read the last chapter of Spike Milligan’s
Badjelly the Witch
. Rather pleased with myself, as no fluffs and plenty of spirit – ‘We didn’t expect
acting
,’ says the floor manager afterwards.

To lunch at Odette’s with Clem Vallance
¹⁶¹
– for the next step towards my
80 Days
project. He has a background in travel and anthropological ventures – he once took Gavin Young to do a programme on the Marsh Arabs.

We get on well together, but the most dramatic thing about the lunch, apart from getting on well together, is that a date for departure is fixed – September 13th 1988. Almost a year from now, at the tender age of 45, providing Michael Grade [Controller, BBC1] likes the idea and I have no second thoughts, I shall be embarking on the longest journey of my life.

In Oxford with Tristram. We travel up to John’s together to talk to Dr Boyce, the Bursar, about the possibility of using the college for filming next summer.

Boyce is a pleasant, approachable man, anxious to know that we shan’t be ‘lampooning the college’ or giving it ‘the “Brideshead” treatment’. He walks us around. We leave him a script and assurances that we are interested in a serious re-creation of the college life in the 1860’s. He smiles, not altogether convinced, I feel. Maybe it’s my haircut.

To lunch at Brown’s in St Giles. A ‘fern restaurant’ as Tristram advises me such places are called, owing to the profusion of rather dull, potted Filices.

Home to be de-Kenned by Don. My curls, or most of them, removed after two months and three weeks of looking like Gaddafi, Malcolm McLaren, Simon Rattle and ‘a thin Dylan Thomas’ (TJ).

By Underground to Leicester Square and a short walk to the austere and temporary looking suite of rooms above St Martin’s Lane that pass for Akela’s offices. Colin Brough has almost nothing to say about the rewrites of
The Weekend
. He’s more enthusiastic about the clutch of new titles I’ve slung together on the train between Chalk Farm and Leicester Square.

He, and I, quite like ‘Listen’, but I also have a fondness for ‘Putting the Cat Out, and Other Things to Do at the Weekend’. Brough looks horrified at this – do I realise how much it will cost in small ads?

He has some interesting ideas on casting and direction (I notice a very elegant rejection slip from Michael Caine on a side-table) and seems to want to expedite the project by sending a copy ASAP to Paul Scofield. It would be ironic if he accepted, for he was Angela’s idol when she was a teenager, and we used to tease her about him! On directors he suggests Alan Bennett and Ron Eyre. Both excellent choices and a reassuring indication that he’s thinking in the right sort of direction.

To a six o’clock drink with Robert to mark the publication of his new book – ‘Now this one you
must
read,’
¹⁶²
Robert insists, and I feel guilty. It’s quite slim, but a little polemical for my leisurely tastes – about our museum policy and how we live in the past too much.

Geoffrey Strachan is there. He looks wary as he tells me of the imminent likelihood of the disappearance of Methuen London. The Thomson group, ex-owners of
The Times
, have bought Associated Book Publishers, but are not interested in keeping on general books or Methuen Children’s Books. Geoffrey and co-directors think they can raise ten million for a management buy-out, but, gloomily, he reckons Thomson’s could hold out for £20 million.

Whatever happens, things will never be quite the same again and Geoffrey and Methuen – our greatest publishing friends for the last 15 years or more – may be parted in the next few months.

Clem Vallance rings from the BBC, much aggrieved that Will Wyatt has told him he cannot direct
80 Days
. A director, Richard Denton, will accompany me round the world, and Vallance will do all the setting-up. He is most indignant, especially as Denton has no particular qualifications for ‘travel’ filming, which is Vallance’s speciality. The first reversal for what seemed like such a simple, effective idea.

Still no word from A Bancroft on availability in LA in November. Getting a little tight as I have to book my Round the World First Class Apex at least two weeks before leaving.

Business to do in the morning. What do we want our credit to be on
Consuming Passions
[aka ‘The Chocolate Project’ etc] and do we want a credit at all? Decide that to take our names off completely sounds very significant – and I’m not sure what it would be significant of. They want ‘From a story by

… ’, but TJ and I prefer the accuracy and greater detachment of ‘Based on the television play
Secrets
by …’ I’m sure this will involve Anne in much faxing with the West Coast!

To a wet and windy Soho for another Spike Milligan book launch, in an upper room at Kettners.

Michael Foot and his wife pass on the way out. ‘Spike’s looking awfully smart these days,’ observes Footie, in his surprisingly strong and ringing tones.

I leave at eight and, hurrying through the rain, holding aloft the purple umbrella which Angela bought for us, make my way along the pitted pavements of Greek Street to the Gay Hussar, where JC is waiting for me.

A good meal and a comfortable and loquacious session – mainly about
Wanda
. JC surprised that within five days of finishing the film he’d totally forgotten it. He doesn’t want to direct (actually, he’s like me – he’d quite like to, but is worried about the technical side) and is ‘quite honestly’ not desperate to do another film. ‘The difference between us, Mikey, is that you seem to be able to enjoy things.’

I think he’d rather be a philosopher – if only it paid better.

I watch
84 Charing Cross Road
, Anne Bancroft’s latest film. One or two thoughts go through my head. The only negative one is whether or not she’s too old for the character I’m writing (Connie Booth appears briefly in the movie and I’m struck by how good she might be as a ‘younger’ Miss Hartley).

But Bancroft’s superb ability to fill characters with life without becoming fussy or exasperatingly hyperactive, and her ability to move me (to tears by the end of the movie) are breathtaking. She is a strong, big, major actress and would give ‘
AF
’ an enormously firm centre.

In the depths of the night we’re woken by the telephone. Not ringing, but dying. Lights flash and strange, helpless gurgling sounds emit from the receiver. Then it falls silent. Notice that the light outside the bathroom has gone out.

Downstairs to the hall to fix the trip-switch and at last pin down what is odd – the house is in complete darkness only because the street is also in complete darkness. Up to my workroom. A tempest is raging and bits and pieces of leaves and twigs and God-knows what rubbish are being forced under the glass and scattering over my desk. No lights anywhere, except for the stairwells of the flats and the reassuring yellow ring at the top of the Post Office Tower.

Back to bed. It’s by now about 4.25. Helen decides she’s hungry and gets up. The unusualness of a power-cut makes me switch on the radio, but can pick up neither LBC nor BBC, only the emergency services – police, ambulance, etc.

The lines crackle out stories of ‘Trees blocking the eastbound carriageway of the A12’, ‘Lorry and trailer blown over blocking the M20’, ‘Borough Surveyor urgently requested to go to Erskine Road W12 where four-storey block of flats in state of partial collapse’, and the most dramatic thing about it all is the calmness of the voices, the ordered, efficient lack of emotion in lines like ‘There has been a major power failure’. Exciting stuff.

Try to go back to sleep, then snapped into wakefulness by the sound of some heavy metal object cracking against walls and cars.

Power is restored to us by 7.30, but still news is coming in of continued
blackouts. Winds of 94 miles an hour were measured on the ground and a gust of 110 mph on the Post Office Tower, after which the gauge broke.

The phones ring – grannies are both safe. Up at Lismore Circus a huge tree has fallen and several smaller ones are leaning crazily. Boughs and leaves and branches provide an unbroken carpet around the shops. Mr Nice Man and his papers are there – except for the
Independent
. Everyone’s talking to each other, as if it’s the war.

I have an appointment with press cameras at the zoo at eleven, to publicise Oxfam’s Fast Week.

I’m the only one of the ‘celebrities’ who’ve made it. Tom Baker and the manager of QPR have cried off and a lady from
Eastenders
will be late. The press are consulted and word comes back that they will probably only print a picture of me and the
Eastenders
lady together, or possibly just the
Eastenders
lady, but certainly not me alone!

Later in the afternoon I go for a run. The sun has gone and been replaced by a very cold, light rain.

Six or seven huge trees are flattened, with disks of earth and roots measuring 20 feet by 15 feet suddenly wrenched up and standing where the tree itself used to be.

In the grounds of Kenwood House, there is devastation. Paths are almost impassable and an avenue of limes which forms one picturesque approach to the terrace in front of Kenwood has been almost totally uprooted. There is no-one else around now, and being in the middle of this dreadful damage is quite eerie. One thing’s for certain – the reassuring landscape I’ve run through for eight years has been drastically changed. It’ll never be the same again.

On the news I hear that Kew Gardens have suffered enormous losses, which cannot be made good within a lifetime.

To dinner at Terry J’s. The impressive avenue of Camberwell Grove is a shambles, with two cars completely crushed.

The assembled company is somewhat muted, almost as if a party is indecent after what has happened. Ken Branagh and Emma Thompson are there. Emma, with her short, cropped, red hair, looks so different from her
Fortunes of War
character that, despite having stared at her for 50 minutes last Sunday night, Helen still doesn’t recognise her!

She is of the Phyllis Logan school, easy, well adjusted, direct, funny, unaffected and great company. Ken is nice, modest, similarly approachable and unshowbizzy. They are obviously very fond of each other, and a couple, though not living together.

Terry has salmon and crudités and bags of Sancerre and four mighty crabs which just happened to have caught his eye, and then the confit de canard, with lots of red wine.

Terry is like a man with a starting-handle, working with enormous energy, emotional and physical, to give us a really happy, ‘different’ evening, and then, I sense, vaguely disappointed that the vehicle he’s started hasn’t gone forward as fast as he’d like. Personally, it’s one of the nicest, happiest, jolliest, least Dinner-Party-ish evenings I’ve spent for ages.

Home, past the remainders of what the radio is at long last admitting was a hurricane. Britain’s worst since 1703.

Will Wyatt from the BBC wants to come and put his (i.e. the BBC’s) view of the Vallance affair to me next week. Now this is one of those times when I can gauge how exalted I have become, when the BBC Head of Documentaries is prepared to come to me.

Drive in state to JC’s 48th birthday do. Peter Cook is there this year and we spend a lot of time on talk. JC still intrigued at why Ingrams hates him so much. He thinks it’s envy. Peter thinks not. Definitely not. Peter will not hear a word against Hislop or Ingrams.

Peter seems very easy-going at the moment, happy writing bits and pieces for
Private Eye
, doing an HBO special [Home Box Office, founded 1972, the pioneer of cable television]. At one point he asks me if I find it hard to ‘do’ any more. Meaning write and perform comedy. We both agree that we miss the quick turnover to write and perform. Long, slow-burn projects like
American Friends
are all very well, but they lack opportunities for what I think Peter and I can do well, which is rabbit endlessly on and make people roar with laughter while doing same.