Tuesday, June 25th 2019

Things are supposed to quieten down as you get older, but from celebrations of 30 years of one of my oldest and most valued charities – the Association For Research into Stammering Children – to a visit to Oslo for gin and tonics in the wardroom of Gjoa, the first ship to navigate the North-West Passage by sea, to a last-minute stand-in appearance with Michael Caine on the One Show, to a less last-minute appearance before a sword-wielding Prince William at Buckingham Palace, my 77th year could not have begun more noisily.

And it looks to be set at full volume, at least for the next few weeks, as I have another seven dates left on my Erebus /Python stage tour, and a few days of acting in July. As yet, I’m not allowed to say exactly what part, but I am growing a beard, so it’s not Joan of Arc.

I must give very big thanks to all the audiences on the tour so far. The response has been so warm and generous that it’s like spending an evening with old friends. Opening night of the 2019 tour was at the Pavilion in Bournemouth. Which was, by coincidence, highly appropriate for Python’s anniversary year. My first memories of Python filming were all around Bournemouth. The It’s’ man made his debut crawling out of the sea at Poole Harbour.

There’s a flavour of those heady days in the Python Years volume of my diaries.

Friday July 11th 1969, Bournemouth.

“Drive over to Shell Bay, beyond Poole, along a flag-lined route – the Queen is visiting Poole today. In the afternoon filmed some very bizarre pieces, including the death of Genghis Khan, and two men carrying a donkey past a Butlins redcoat, who later gets hit on the head with a raw chicken by a man from the previous sketch, who borrowed the chicken from a man in a suit of armour. All this we filmed in the 80° sunshine, with a small crowd of holiday- makers watching.”

It seems like only 50 years ago.

Monday, October 1st 2018

It’s been a while since I enjoyed the full-on delights of a big book tour. There was Brazil in 2011, and a big post-Python At The O2 tour for my diaries in 2014, but since then I’ve been acting and writing rather than selling. This is the crunch time for any venture, the time when you leave the cosy comforts of pre-publication expectations behind and face the verdict from the public.

So far, so good. Erebus was officially available in the bookstores from Thursday September 20th. I was in the car crossing the border into Scotland on Tuesday 25th when I heard the news that we had sold enough to make the top ten in the Sunday Times Best-Seller list. I had a feeling from the reception in Harrogate and Newcastle that a lot of people were interested, and most of them were enthusiastic. The talk at St Boswells in the Scottish Borders went well and the terrific response from sell-out audiences in Falmouth, Dartmouth and at the Appledore Festival in North Devon, justified our Erebus-like course from the north to the far south in a single week.

A bat joined me on stage in Dartmouth. I was looking down and didn’t see it. The audience saw it and laughed. I looked up thinking I’d done something funny, but I hadn’t. At Falmouth I addressed the congregation from a pulpit and remembered that for a few months between wanting to be a test pilot and an explorer, I’d toyed with being a vicar. Captive audience, that sort of thing.

All in all, it couldn’t have been a better first week. Great oysters at Rick Stein’s in Falmouth, discovering one of the great pubs of Britain- The Rat Inn near Corbridge, playing the Tyne Theatre in Newcastle which was opened only twenty years after Erebus disappeared into the ice.

I was working so hard I missed seeing both episodes of my North Korea journey, but heck, I didn’t expect to be still standing unaided at 75!

And there’s another week to go in the UK and Ireland, and then off to the USA and Canada. The North Korea documentary will have gone out in America on September 30th. Will I be allowed into the country? Watch this space.