Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (47 page)

Rave preview by Jennifer Selway of the
Observer
for Friday’s
Comic Roots
– Michael Palin’s ‘brilliant’ half-hour. I can’t remember this adjective ever being applied to my work
before
it’s been seen – only on rare occasions many years after when affection has distorted the memory.

Sunday dinner together – watch a Scottish/Canadian writer [Robertson Davies] on the excellent series
Writers and Places
. Feel a great appetite for all things written and described. Maybe it’s the relaxing break of ten days in France which has finally cleared my immediate work problems away and let other aspects of life come to the front of my mind and imagination.

Tom and his friend Paul Forbes leave at seven to cycle to Brighton. Helen says she can’t help being worried about them.

Drop the Mini at the garage to be serviced, then Helen drops me at Alan Bennett’s house on the corner of Gloucester Crescent. A camper van with what looks like carpet covering it is parked in front of the front door. Alan opens it – a little hesitant, a touch of awkwardness and an instant warmth as he shows me in to the crepuscular gloom of a sitting room which seems to have been very carefully protected against daylight. Mark Shivas and Malcolm Mowbray are on a couch against the far wall. Alan offers me a comfortable old chair and disappears to make coffee.

I long to have a good look round, but am aware of Shivas and Mowbray wanting to talk and set us all at ease. My overriding impression of the place is of elegant dusty clutter – rather like the set for Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
.

Alan reappears. We talk politely of France … holidays … then Shivas asks me about my availability. Well, I can’t go back on what I’d said to Alan … I
do
like the piece and well … they are all watching me … yes, I’d love to do it.

From then on we discuss finance generally and I realise that Shivas wants someone to bankroll the entire project and so far has no definite bites. In answer to his questions about HandMade I cannot but recommend he try them – though it somewhat complicates my position, as the Bennett film will be taking away time from my own project for HandMade.

After an hour there doesn’t seem much more to say. Slight feeling of reserve, which does not emanate from Alan, but more likely from Shivas. I suddenly miss Richard. Everything’s a little too polite and circumspect. Walk home.

Tom rings from Brighton at 11.30. He got there in four hours. They’re coming back by train.

Spend the rest of the morning writing my obit tribute to Luis Buñuel for
Rolling Stone
.

In the
Telegraph
, a
Comic Roots
review under the nice heading ‘Chortling beamish boy’, I learn ‘there is something roundly Victorian about Michael Palin’s face, a durable cheerfulness not to be found among other members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus … alone of the Python team he can deflate cant without venom’, but cautions ‘John Cleese’s angry logic is missing from his humour’.

At five o’clock Felice
⁸⁹
and Richard cycle up here. RL has a film to direct now, and is into top gear, with that bristling, bubbling, provocative self-confidence which he adopts to paper over the doubts beneath.

To Angela and Veryan’s ‘Jubilation Party’ at Chilton. It’s to celebrate, or mark the occasion of, Angela’s 50th birthday, V & A’s 25th wedding anniversary, Jeremy’s 22nd and his top 2nd in Politics at York. It’s all been organised by the family as the caterers went bust a week ago.

So we are parked in a field by Marcus and a nice, bright-eyed girlfriend of Camilla’s from Oxford, with whom she is going to Mexico and the Yucatán this holiday. I’m green with envy.

As the early cloud clears a perfect day develops. Not unpleasantly hot, but hot enough to make the ample shade from the big copper beech and lime trees on the lawn seem very welcome.

The moat is filled, now the bridge has been repaired, and is covered in a solid green veneer of duck-weed. New-born ducks skid around as on the surface of a billiard table.

Lots of Herbert relatives, and the slightly disturbing presence of Sir Dingle Foot’s widow, Lady Dorothy. She used to be engaged to Daddy, and he called it off when she wouldn’t agree to drop her political affiliations with the Liberals. Now I feel she regards Angela and me as the children she never had. ‘Can’t go too near people – I fall over so easily,’ she warns. She invites Helen and me to one of her parties … ‘I do enjoy a good party.’

Angela in a ’50’s-looking dress which could have been one of the earliest she wore. And that’s meant as a compliment. Can she really be 50?

To the ABC cinema complex at Sauchiehall Street. Met by the manager – neat moustachioed war veteran with Royal Signals tie. Up to one of their many ‘lounges’ where a ‘spread’ is laid out for the hungry and thirsty press at present sitting watching my film.

So I move into fifth gear and smile a lot and am completely helpful and co-operative and remember names and show a polite and hopefully completely straight face, even when a little old lady from the
Jewish Echo
asks me why I called the film
The Missionary
. Actually it is not as daft a question as it sounds, her point being that the title might put people off, which is something I’ve heard before, and which troubles me because I’m sure it’s true.

Then entaxi to the Woodside Health Centre, where it has been
arranged for me to have the second part of a typhoid vaccination. The Health Centre is set amongst a jumble of modern blocks of flats, which have largely replaced the solidly stone-built red sandstone tenements which look rather good wherever they’ve been renovated.

The doctor writes on my form ‘
The
Michael Palin’, and sends me off to the Treatment Room. Can’t help reflecting on the glamour of showbiz as I sit in this little roomful of the ill amongst modern tower blocks with litter blowing all around. Eventually I’m seen by a stout, warm, friendly nurse and jabbed.

At breakfast in the rather appealingly dilapidated, unmodernised, Scots-Gothic country house that is the Braid Hills, the ceiling starts to leak and champagne buckets and washing-up bowls are requisitioned with great good humour by the staff.

At midday I take a taxi to the Dominion Theatre, where
The Missionary
will open on Tuesday. It’s an independent cinema in the smart Morningside area of the city, run by the genial Derek Cameron with an attentiveness which befits one whose father built the place (in 1938). The bar and restaurant are run and designed as places to linger and they have a busy clientele of all ages, who come here, some of them, just to eat and meet.

Local Hero
is in its 17th week and
Gregory’s Girl
for a third year. Bill Forsyth’s favourite cinema? I ask Derek C. Oh yes, he says, when he comes here he just raises his hands to heaven …

I cannot think of a pleasanter place for
The Missionary
to have its Scottish premiere.

After breakfast TG drops in. I haven’t even finished reading his
Brazil
and was hoping I’d have this morning to complete it, so can’t give any very knowledgeable criticisms. But I like the part of Jack Lint and TG says he has kept it away from De Niro – just for me! So it’s agreed that I’ll do it. Filming probably some time in December.

Later in the morning Terry takes me up to the Old Hall in Highgate – his new £300,000 acquisition. Horrible things have been done to it inside, but its garden bordering on Highgate cemetery and the panorama of
London from its plentiful windows are almost priceless. Of course it’s enormous and rambling, but still just a town house, not a country manor. And TG needs the challenge of the space like a drug. I find the damp old smell of the wretched conversions make the house depressing, but TG says it has quite the opposite effect on him because he knows what he can do with it.

Read
Water
, the latest DO’B project from Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who are his latest blue-eyed boys. DO’B would like me to play the part of Baxter. First 16 pages are wonderfully funny, but it all falls apart and there isn’t a laugh after that. No characters are developed, new characters are thrust in instead and the jokes become stretched and laboured.

Dick Clement rings re
Water
. I’m honest about my feelings and, indeed, it’s refreshing to talk to someone like Dick who is intelligent and tactful and is, after all, a TV writer with an impressive record –
Likely Lads
, etc. We can understand each other’s language. He professes his liking for naturalistic comedy, and yet sees
Water
as an international film. I tell him that I think ‘international’ comedy a very dangerous concept.

I find Dick’s choice of Billy Connolly to play the black revolutionary a real commercial cop-out … ‘Well, he’ll be sort of brown,’ Dick reassures.

Hear to my great disappointment that the ‘
Mish
’ has not opened well in Scotland. And despite my great welcome by Derek Cameron at the Dominion, and his great hopes for the picture, I hear from Mike Ewin that he’s pulling it off after three weeks to put in
Tootsie
– again.

Python, on the other hand, had its best provincial figures anywhere in the UK at Edinburgh. Nearly £10,000 taken in the first week of the Festival. And ‘
MOL
’ continues strong in the West End, where it’s out-performed
Superman III
easily.

Today Tom and William start the new school year. This is for Tom the start of serious work – the run-up to ‘O’ levels.

Helen says Tom is just like her at school, scatty, easily distracted and not really happy being taught maths and French and things. But neither of us should draw too much satisfaction from seeing neat parallels between our children’s efforts and our own. They are not us, after all, they’re them.

I go on down to TJ’s and we read each other our starts. Both quite respectable, both start in space. Jim Henson rings, anxious for TJ to commit to directing a piece called ‘Labyrinth’.

I am tempted by a phone call from Ray Cooper to attend the first of a two-night concert in aid of Multiple Sclerosis, in which many great rock stars of the ’60’s, all friends of Ronnie Lane who has MS, will be appearing, including Ray C.

As if starved of live performance for so long, Ray tucks into the opportunity with gusto. I’ve never seen him live before, only heard the legendary tales. And he is a revelation. Impeccable timing and precise movements combined with a sense of high theatrical style which just avoids being camp or purely exhibitionist, is wondrous to behold.

But even Ray is upstaged by the extraordinary appearance of Jimmy Page, who weaves his way around the stage like a man who has been frozen in the last stages of drunkenness, before actually falling over. He sways, reels, totters, bends, but still manages to play superbly. The others look on anxiously and Ray tells me at the end that Page isn’t well … ‘And he lives in Aleister Crowley’s house.’

But the coup of the evening is the appearance of Ronnie Lane himself. Led, painfully slowly, onto the stage by Ray (who is everywhere) and Harvey Goldsmith, he is strong enough to sing two numbers. Very moving.

And Ray, going at his gong like the demented anti-hero of some nineteenth-century Russian drama, hits it so hard that it breaks and falls clean out of its frame.

Another good morning’s work on ‘The Man Who Was Loved’.
⁹⁰
Really
solid writing, not stop and start stuff, and few interruptions. Let letters pile up and just get on with it.

Terry comes up at two and we have a read-through. He has opened out the Viking saga (with a good song) and he likes what I’ve done on the modern, slightly more serious story. It does look as though we could have two films! Some discussion, then we swap scripts again and work on until after five o’clock. A good and productive working day – like old times.

Then TJ goes off to sign copies of
Erik the Viking
at the Royal Festival Hall and Helen and I go down to the Methuen Authors Party at Apothecaries Hall in Blackfriars.

As we go in, Frank Muir is on the way out. Some hail and farewell chat. I remember
The Complete and Utter Histories -
and his courage in putting them on. He remembers our piece about the waves of invaders in ninth- and tenth-century England being controlled by a man with a megaphone.

Only later in the evening do I find out that Frank’s latest book for Methuen is called
The Complete and Utter My Word Collection
!

David Nobbs is anxious that I should read his latest novel because it’s set in Sheffield. I’m afraid it’s on a pile with dozens of things people have sent me to read. Even just acknowledging that they’ve sent them cuts my reading time down to about a book a month at the moment. This is another area of my life I must sort out.

Alison rings with the latest offers. BBC Bristol are doing a heritage series about Britain – would I write the one on transport?
Omnibus
want me on a programme about taste. Yet another video magazine seems to have begun, just to annoy me. Interview about
Missionary
and
Ripping Yarns
? And at last, at the grand old age of 40, the first offer to play Hamlet – at the Crucible, Sheffield.

In the evening we go down to Terry’s for a meal with Ron Devillier. TJ cooks marvellous Soupe Bonne Femme, herring and roast pork, with lots of salads and bits and pieces.