My first sight of Wanda, cut together.

And very good it is too. As I had expected, uncluttered, competent direction, no artistic gimmicks, and a pretty tight edit by John Jympson. John C has made Archie work completely – his best all-round performance since Basil Fawlty. Kevin and Jamie are immaculate.

I find myself a little disappointed with myself. God knows why – maybe it’s just because so many people have built up what I’ve done: ‘star of the film’ nonsense. I think it’s not that I do what I do badly, it’s just that I’m not really called on to do much more than react to other people’s bullying. What I can do best of all is the subtler shading of character and perhaps that’s what I missed in Ken, except for a few lovely moments – two of the best being those I did on the very last day of filming.

Afterwards John has us all in for a session of thoughts and reactions. Thorough to the end.

John explains to me his new film ‘A Goldfish Called Wanda’. I am to play a man with a stammer who kills Kevin Kline by running him over with a steamroller. John bemoans the fact that he’s written himself another ‘boring, uptight authority figure’, but otherwise sounds very enthusiastic and is anxious to plan ahead so it can fit in with my dates.

My ‘dates’ depend on a conclusion to ‘Explorers’, to which I attend later this morning, for the first time in several weeks. Can make little headway. Suddenly free from weeks of tight deadlines, I’m momentarily lost, and cannot work out my priorities.

To Don’s for 9.15 haircut appointment. The extraordinary mixture of Brazil and Private Function has left my head looking like a hairstyle exhibition site. Don notices the silvery threads. I’m going grey, gently but alas irreversibly.

This evening I go to catch my first glimpse of a Brazil cut at the Baronet viewing theatre – a full house with 30 or so people crammed into a very small space. The film is two and a half hours long. As expected, each frame an oil painting. A garden of visual delights. Dream sequences puzzling but unfinished.

Jonathan’s central performance is masterly. He holds all the disparate pieces together. Manages to react 600 different ways to the same sort of situations and carries you along, explaining by expressions what we are required to think and feel. Detail as usual of design, costume, props, etc, marvellous. Definitely a film for two or three viewings. Doesn’t have the naive charm of Time Bandits – in fact has no charm at all – but is a spirited, inventive, enormously intriguing work of imagination made celluloid.

Feel remarkably together and well prepared for the day. Alan is at breakfast and hadn’t gone to sleep until two as he had the room over the bar. ‘It was like Christmas down there,’ he says, rather morosely.

He goes and I’m alone in this recently-refurbished, rather ornate dining room with ‘Adam’ pretensions and a giggly waitress who reports loudly my every word back to the kitchen.

I’m driven down solid, leafy roads to a cul-de-sac in Ben Rhydding and up to Briargarth, which is my home for the film. A long, detached, stone house of (probably) Edwardian vintage, with a porch and gables. Carpenters, painters, sparks swarm over it. Loud banging, shouts, and, amidst it all, actors –myself, Maggie and Liz – wandering gingerly, waiting to take possession.

Gradually the first scene creaks into action. Round the table, eating Spam. We reach around for our characters, absorbing all the clues and helps and hindrances of this brand new place in which we must act as if it were all too familiar.

Maggie, brittle and tense so often in non-acting moments, gives so much out when she plays the scene that it’s exhilarating to be with her.

A hot bath and a lager. Then walk down into Ilkley – clean, ordered, respectable, with oriel windows above the shops, glass-canopied arcades and ornamental flower beds. It’s like the Garden of Eden after Gospel Oak. Choose Chez Francois – a wine bar – for a solitary meal. Read of Bunuel and the Surrealists in Paris in the late ’20’s and ’30’s. Similarities with Pythons. Bourgeois against the bourgeoisie. Bunuel sounds rather like TJ. Very interested in sex and the Middle Ages and blamed the media for all the world’s ills.

See assembly of ‘Mr Creosote’ at lunchtime (instead of lunch). Evidently 9,000 gallons of vomit were made for the sketch, which took four days to film. It’s been edited rather loosely at a poor pace and dwelling too much on TJ’s actual vomiting, but the costume is marvellous in its enormous surreal bulk, and Mr C’s explosion is quite awful and splendid.

To Python rehearsal, to find that Neil Simon had been on the phone and wants to meet me – he has some film project.

After a costume fitting I drive up to Britannia Row Studios in Islington to record ‘Every Sperm’ track. Ring Neil Simon. He professes himself to be a fan, says he is halfway through ‘one of the best things I’ve written’ and there’s a part in it for me. Arrange to meet him on Wednesday.

The recording session is delayed while they find a piano tuner, so I sit in the big and comfortable games room and watch England start their vital match with Spain. They must win and by two goals to be certain of going into the semi-finals. Our defence is unshakeable, mid-field quite fast and controlling most of the game, but we can’t score. 0–0 at half- time.

In between play I’ve been singing ‘Sperm Song’ to Trevor Jones’s rather solid beat. Eventually we find a combination of takes we’re comfortable with and I drive home to watch the second half. England fail to score and slide out of the World Cup. It’s a hot evening.

Not used during the morning as a series of sharp and hostile showers passed over. Some hail. Whilst they filmed Deborah and the photography scene I remained in the caravan, completing various tasks like thank you letters to the actors, and writing a new introductory narration for Jabberwocky, which I heard from TG yesterday is to be re-released in the US during the summer. He’s very excited by the improvements made by Julian in re-editing.

Give lunch in my caravan to the ‘Repertory Company’ – Graham, Phoebe, Tim [Spall], Anne-Marie [Marriott]. Open champagne to celebrate good work done and, sadly, our last day all together. Quite a smutty lunch with RL’s description of Long Don Silver, a man with a huge dong and varicose veins, who used to be featured in a club on Sunset Strip – hung upside down.

In one of the afternoon’s sunny spells we grab a shot of myself in a horse and trap arriving home. As I wait for the clouds to clear the sun I see our two executive producers emerging from the orchard. George looks like Denis’s son. His hair has reverted to Hamburg style, swept backwards off the forehead. He hands me a magnum of Dom Perignon with a pink ribbon tied round the neck. I embrace him warmly, then the cue comes through and I’m swept away round the corner.

They stay around for the next shot – a small, hot bedroom scene between Deborah and myself. George squashes himself into a corner of the room behind the lights, but only a yard or so from Phoebe. She’s quite clearly made nervous by his presence and her face and neck flush and we do three very unrelaxed takes. Then George gets uncomfortable and moves off and we finish the scene.

Drive down to Musso and Franks for a pre-show meal. TJ declares sensationally that this is the first time he’s ever eaten before a show. I remind him of last night. ‘Oh . . . yes . . . apart from last night.’

Back at the Bowl, five thousand paying customers. Denis has had to drop the lowest price from ten dollars to seven to try and fill up the extra seats. So there are about five and a half thousand folk out there for opening night.

The show goes well. The audience is reassuringly noisy, familiar, ecstatic as they hear their favourite sketches announced – and it’s as if we had never been away. A continuation of the best of our City Center shows. Thanks to the radio mikes my voice holds up.

Afterwards an extraordinary clutch of people in the hospitality room. I’m grabbed, buttonholed, introduced, re-introduced, in a swirl of faces and briefly held handshakes and abruptly-ending conversations. There’s: ‘I’m Joseph Kendall’s nephew . . . ’ ‘I’m Micky Dolenz’s ex-wife . . . ’ ‘We made the T-shirts you got in 1978 . . . ’ ‘Do you remember me . . . ?’ ‘Great show . . . Could you sign this for the guy in the wheelchair?’

Finally we free ourselves of the throng and into the big, black-windowed Batcar, signing as we go, then smoothly speed off to a party, given for us by Steve Martin in Beverly Hills. His house turns out to be an art gallery. Every wall is white, furniture is minimal. The rooms are doorless and quite severe in shape and design. There’s a soft pile carpet and it’s all quiet and rather lean and hungry. In fact just like its owner.

Martin is very courteous and straight and loves the show. He isn’t trying to be funny and we don’t have to respond by trying to be funny. But his girlfriend does have a tiny – as Terry J described it – ‘sanforized’ poodle called Rocco, which pees with both legs in the air. This is the comedy high spot of the evening.