Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (16 page)

Feeling I’ve been consistently negative thus far (in D’s terms), I agree in principle to flying to Atlanta in May to speak on the
Time Bandits
book’s behalf at the big publishing sales convention.

As five o’clock and my departure time closes, Denis finally gets around to
Yellowbeard
again. No, Denis, I’m not budging. It’s not worth discussing. ‘Wait a minute,’ says Denis, ‘hear me out.’ So he tries to rush headfirst at the brick wall again – except from a slightly different angle this time. All he wants is one week of my writing time … no more … just one … and (as I stand up) …

‘Michael …’

‘I listened to you.’

‘… And what’s more -’ but at that point the Great Salesman is cut short in mid-pitch by a sharp and silly series of knocks on the door and George Harrison’s head appears, beaming leerily.

George carries a sheaf of company reports and, oblivious to the urgency of D’s business with me, he sits down chattily and shows me one of them – ‘Sing Song Ltd’ – which has a net loss of £34.

We listen to some of GH’s new songs. ‘All Those Years Ago’ is my favourite of a number of very good tracks.

Take the children swimming to the Holiday Inn at Swiss Cottage. We practically have the pool to ourselves. After I’ve come back and am settling down to cold roast pork, the phone rings. It’s 9.30 and the
Sun
newspaper wants to know if there’s any truth in the rumour that John Cleese has been married today in New York. I tell the hackette that I know nothing, but think it extremely unlikely, what with John being gay and all that.

She persists in her intrusion, I persist in my fantasy – and she eventually gives up. Silly world.

Eight-fifteen, start to drive down to London Sessions House for two weeks of jury service.

The Sessions House is a solid, impressive, neo-classical building started in 1914. It’s been added to and there are now 19 courts within its ‘grounds’. Park my car at a meter, then join a mass of some 200 new jurors, who are herded into Court Number 1 – a classic of the TV and film sort, full of wood panelling with a vaguely Baroque flourish. Here we sit and await a preliminary chat. A peculiar feeling – a roomful of 200 people, none of whom knows each other. Early banter tails off, and within five minutes all 200 of us are sitting in a tantalisingly breakable collective silence.

Then we’re reduced to groups of 20 as our names are called and the groups are led off to one of the other courts; it’s all rather like school.

My fellow jurors seem to be drawn mostly from the working classes, with a sprinkling of woolly-minded liberals like myself. There seems to be a notable absence of anyone looking rich and successful. I suppose you don’t have time to do jury service and become rich and successful.

Sit for over an hour in a smoke-filled room. I try to read Sir Walter Scott’s
Waverley
, but his convoluted prose and circumlocutory embellishments are not ideal for such a situation. I hear a loud voice beside me … ‘Yeah, there’s a TV personality on one of the juries. Mate of mine saw him this morning … Can’t remember his name.’

Then, just as the day seems irretrievably lost, our room is called, again, and we are led upstairs. This time I’m called onto the jury. There are no challenges and we actually begin my first ‘live’ case as a juror. It’s not one to enter the annals of Great British Trials, but there are satisfyingly comic complications involved.

The two accused are Indians, two young men with fashionable Western moustaches and pudgy faces, who have six charges against them arising from a fight they are said to have started in a pub in Clapton, E5, on an August Sunday in 1979. (There are very few cases ever heard here that have been waiting less than a year to be called.)

We are now actually belonging to a case – we have a purpose and, for the next two or three days, this judge, the three barristers, the clerks of
the court and the two moustachioed Punjabi bandits in the dock will all be locked together in a curiously reassuring intimacy.

Drive down to Newington Causeway for more life with the Singhs. Publican and two assistants gave evidence, as did an enormous policeman. Medical evidence was read out as to the seriousness of the eye injury caused by a thrown bottle to an apparently innocent old Indian watching. There is permanent damage to the eye and he has to wear contact lenses. So this is the most serious aspect of the case.

Back at home, Terry Gilliam rings. He has been on the phone to Denis in LA for one and a half hours, discussing
Time Bandits
. After their chat today, in which TG took Denis through the film cut by cut, demolishing nearly all his suggested edits, TG reported Denis to be sounding very unspirited, not to say low, not to say depressed.

I think the process of learning how difficult we all are is more painful than Denis ever in his worst dreams expected.

At times today as I was locked in an unmoving line of traffic on the approaches to Russell Square, I felt a surge of panic at the thought of keeping His Honour Justice Bruce Campbell QC and his entire court waiting.

But I was there on time and, after a further half-hour of Judge’s summing up, our moment of glory arrived, and they had to wait for us whilst we were locked in our windowless little room to try and reach a verdict. Without much dissension we decided to acquit him of the first charge of actual bodily harm, as it was a case of one man’s word against his.

The court reassembled, our foreman gave our verdicts, then the antecedents of the accused were read. Both had been in trouble with the police before. Onkar has three children and one about to be born; he’s only 23, has not got much of a future either, but has just recently been taken on as a bus driver. Despite the heart-rending pleas of the counsel, our kindly, humorous judge stuck his chin out firmly and became the stern voice of punishment. Onkar Singh was to be jailed for three months, his brother three months, but suspended. And that was that.

Split into a new jury group and assigned to Court 7.

Observed a Jamaican being sent down for eight months for illegally importing and probably dealing in cannabis. I suppose there is a danger that cannabis-dealing leads on to dealing harder drugs – but this was certainly not proven here. The man’s girlfriend and mother of his two children had just gone into hospital with a blood clot on the brain, but the judge disregarded all this. Disturbing, especially when I think of the vast number of people – respectable and rich included – who smoke and trade in cannabis freely.

Then a frightened, wide-eyed black kid comes into the dock. He took a knife and threatened a shopkeeper and stole £40.00. He is sent to Borstal, despite this being his first offence and despite strong recommendations in his favour from Lambeth Borough Council, whose representative was present in court.

I asked at the Bailiff’s Office about my chances of avoiding a long case on Thursday (my
Russell Harty
night) and they were most understanding and decided that the safest way was to discharge me from a second week’s jury service altogether. This took a moment to sink in, then a great feeling of relief at this unexpected freedom. I had to wait an hour to collect my expenses, so sat in a café opposite the courts and read the paper and mulled over what to do with this free week.

Walked across Waterloo Bridge – something I hardly ever do – stopped and looked in the church of St Mary-Le-Strand, which I never, ever do, being usually far too busy roaring round it in a car. Peace and quiet and Baroque extravagance in the middle of one of London’s busiest one-way traffic systems. Noted that the church was built by order of Parliament from money raised by a tax on coal!

This morning – a march against unemployment. Can I come? But despite feeling personally more scornful of Thatcher and her solutions – Surrey Power, as I call it – I still have this aversion to making a lot of noise in a public place in direct support of any political force. Mainly because I don’t easily believe in political solutions.

I think you have to work and communicate on a much more basic level than behind banners or tub-thumping on platforms – this is the showbiz side of politics. I personally feel much happier encouraging tolerance and understanding on a man to man level, or through my humour rather than telling people something which I don’t believe – i.e. if you follow this leader, or endorse this system, everything will be alright.

Complete
Waverley
(which works on me like Hardy – demanding much loyalty and dogged persistence to begin with, but finally rewarding perseverance with a good tale and leaving an after-taste of affection towards the worlds he’s described and the characters he’s filled them with).

This very evening, begin to read Proust’s
À La Recherche
… Feeling limbered up after
Waverley
and
Romola
and spurred on by the purchase, for £50, of a new and much-praised edition by Kilmartin.

Unexpectedly I wake with a hint of tension, usually experienced in more extreme forms when I have to go filming, write a debate speech or appear on
Just a Minute
. But today it’s anticipation of my own self-imposed project – the film script, which (in tandem with Proust) I begin today.

Sit at my desk at a quarter past nine, comfortably cocooned against steady, unbroken rain outside and realise that, despite two months of intended mental refreshment and stimulation, I’m still as riddled with incompatible alternatives for stories as I ever was.

Nothing springs instantly to my pen – no characters so all-consumingly important that I have to write about them. It’s a shame really – all those people out there with burning convictions and desperate messages to the world which they can never make anyone listen to and here am I, pen poised to create entertainment for the world and not knowing what I want to say.

Go up to William Ellis in the evening to hear about the curriculum, etc. Headmaster clearly pleased with progress so far on the transition from grammar to comprehensive. He does sound as though he loves his work.
Turnout of parents almost all middle-class – others seem to leave the school to get on with it. (Trouble with democracy these days?)

Eric rings later to fix up a Palins/Idles theatre trip next Monday. Tells me that Graham has just been on the phone to ask him to be in
Yellowbeard
. But surely … ? No, says Eric,
Yellowbeard
is not dead. GC has nine million dollars of Australian money and is planning to film it off the Queensland coast. Eric is worried about how best he can say no yet again.

Classic writing morning. Up to the desk, clear space and open notebook at about five to ten. Estimate when I should finish. Two-thirty seems reasonable. Yawn. Stretch. Yawn. Look blankly through all I’ve written this week, trying desperately to summon up any belief in the purpose of these arbitrary scribblings and character snippings. Long for coffee, but it’s an hour away.

The hour passes with hardly a line written. It’s like insomnia, in reverse. My mind refuses to wake up.

I take the opportunity (rare this week) of a dry spell and run. As I pound up the path to Parliament Hill, a title occurs to me – ‘The Missionary Position’.

Maybe, though, that’s too whacky, too leading, so I settle for ‘The Missionary’ and the subject matter of the film swims into clear focus. An idealist, a tortured idealist in the last days of the British Empire – the missionary work would be interpreted as widely as possible, and the title has a nice touch of irony. Come back 45 minutes later muddy but feeling that I’ve made a breakthrough.

Cook Toulouse sausages with apples for Robert H.

Over dinner he makes what he calls, with characteristic modesty, a brilliant discovery – that the six Time Bandits are the six Pythons. He’s awfully pleased at making this connection and seems quite unmoved by my own denial of any such parallel. For the record, anyway, our casting was: Randall – Cleese, Vermin – Gilliam, Og – Graham, Fidgit – Terry J, Strutter – Eric, Wally – me.

Had a vivid dream this morning. It was set in Halifax. Very positively Halifax.

It was hazy – a mixture of Lowry and Hieronymus Bosch – but on top of the hill the walls were of rich, red stone and I walked through colonnades and arcades built in seventeenth-century classical style and met young students who told me what a wonderful place Halifax was.

At the writing desk by ten. I pursued the idea of
The Missionary
, which began to fall very nicely into place. By lunchtime I had actually sketched out a synopsis – with a beginning, middle and end – which I dared to become quite excited about. In the afternoon I tightened and typed this up. So by four, at the end of the first week’s writing, I have a story. I feel, as I say, warily confident. Will see how it survives the weekend.

A mighty clap of thunder as a short and violent storm passes overhead as I settle into a piece for the
New York Times
– Howard Goldberg having sent me a telegram asking for a piece on Prince Charles and Lady D. Have completed it by seven.

Ring HG in New York. He’s frightfully worried that I will not, as he puts it, ‘keep it clean’. ‘I’m hired by Calvinists,’ he explains. Dictate through to the
Times
later in the evening.

Take Tom P (who’s been off school today with a cold) up to St Anne’s Church, Highgate, for the first night of the William Ellis opera ‘Death of Baldur’. This has been the big musical event of the year for the school. It’s an English premiere and the composer, David Bedford, is there with short, well-cut grey hair, looking like a natty parent. Tom is in the ‘off-stage’ choir and is tonight stuffed to the gills with throat sweets, etc, to help his voice.