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A Day For The Diary

Wednesday, May 12th, 2021

I just heard on the radio that May 12th is National Diary Day, or National Dairy Day as it always comes out in my emails. It was with rather a shock that I calculated that I’ve been a regular diarist for over fifty years. Monty Python hadn’t been heard of when I made my decision to give up smoking and keep a diary instead.

I wavered a bit on the smoking front. Five years after I’d ‘given up’, I found myself one of Three Men In A Boat, spending a lot of time in the middle of the Thames with two generous smokers – Tim Curry and the late great Stephen Moore – as we waited for Stephen Frears to make up his mind what he wanted us to do next. A regular visitor to the set was our screen-play writer Tom, now Sir Tom Stoppard who tempted us with very long, very smart, ciggies which looked irresistibly sophisticated. I was soon on ten a day and was saved by a severe cough, which frightened the ducks off and reminded me why I’d given up in the first place.

Keeping a diary was one habit I never kicked, and I still put pen to paper most mornings to record what has happened in my life the day before. It’s been especially useful during the Covid months when there was often a tendency to give up on the day and spend long hours staring out of the window. For the diary’s sake I had to learn how to make identical days feel different, even if all I did was come up stairs backwards.

I always thought it was odd that the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919, when more people died across the globe than in all the battles of World War One, was almost perversely ignored by the writers of the time. Hardly a mention from the likes of Hemingway, or Scott Fitzgerald.

I’d love to have known how they got through it. How close it came to them, how scared they were of the future. So to all of you who may be encouraged to start a diary on National Diary Day, stick with it. Make it National Diary week, or National Diary Year, and the next thing you know you’ll be celebrating National Diary Half Century. And a word of warning – to all those of you getting out pails and butter churns tomorrow, check the spelling.

Walk, Don’t Run

Monday, March 1st, 2021

It’s just over a year and a half ago that I gave up running, after 40 years. Taking up regular running way back in 1979, when Life Of Brian had just opened in the cinemas (apart from those which banned it ) was one of the best things I ever did. At the price of a few pulled muscles I kept myself lean and fit. There were so many cold, wet days when all I wanted was to stay by the fire or under the covers, but I’m so glad I persevered. I ran in streets and parks and beaches all over the world, from Saudi Arabia to Sierra Leone, but my regular patch was Hampstead Heath, close to my home in London. Just the right mix of hills and woods and off-piste tracks and paths.

After my heart surgery I scaled down from running to walking, and have come to value the Heath even more. It’s still a challenge, but now I have more time to take it all in. The bird life, the trees, the woods, the mix of secret places and some of the finest views of London. I walk some days to Kenwood House and back. It’s a great goal to aim for, offering you the chance to stroll around the grounds of your own mansion. I love the changing moods of the place. This morning an early mist gave the house a ghostly, spectral presence and I’m glad I had my iPhone with me.

Kenwood House in the early morning mist.

In between long walks and bird-spotting, I have been whiling away the days by making a start on the book about my Great-Uncle Harry. He died young, 31 years old, and in a bad place, the mud of northern France, but I’m trying to give his life some value, so he’s not just another name on the wall of a memorial. This involves a lot of detective work, but it also brings into focus a blood relation who has been consistently ignored and whom I now feel quite close to.

My friend Basil Pao described pandemic life as feeling like the world has pressed the Pause button, and to try and break up this sense of being in lockdown limbo, I try hard to keep in touch with friends and there are always surprises, and when Paul Whitehouse told me his daughter’s a Clangers fan, I was happy to oblige.

Hope you’re all going to have a jab as soon as you get the chance. For me having the vaccine was a no-brainer – if only to get me out of the house.

Here’s to the light at the end of the tunnel, or the needle at the top of the arm.

London Lockdown

Last week came the sad news of the death of Albert Roux, one of the titans of French cuisine, brother of Michel and father of Michel Roux Jnr. Apart from the excellent meals I’ve knocked back at their signature restaurant, Le Gavroche, I’ll always be grateful to the Roux brothers for letting the Pythons film the Dirty Fork sketch there in 1970. To let a film crew anywhere near a place that you love is always a risk, but when Monty Python is involved the danger to life, limb, tables, plates and glasses, lobsters and oeufs en cocottes must be drastically increased. So thank you Albert and Michel for being great sports and if anyone is interested, our day in Le Gavroche can be seen in “And Now For Something Completely Different”, and captured in the publicity still taken that day, which has become a bit of a classic.

Dirty Fork cast, outside Le Gavroche, London 1970.

This is as close as you’ll get to Le Gavroche right now, as like every other restaurant in London it’s closed in order to save lives. How did we get here and when will we leave? Answers on a postcard please.

Though I have not spent a night away from home since February last year I’ve done more travelling on television than for a very long time thanks to the recent Travels of A Lifetime series and re-runs of the original series on BBC Four. I‘m not that keen on watching myself on screen – I always see the mistakes – but I’ve been reminded how much of the appeal of my travel shows lies is in the professionalism of those I worked with, and particularly the superb camera work of Nigel Meakin. Whilst I was waffling away he was building up a visual scrapbook of each location which in these stay-at-home days reminds us what a rich, exciting and exotic world is still out there.

Apart from a carefully patrolled and distanced studio appearance on the J Ross show, my TV work has been confined to Zoomland, which saves on transport and trousers but is strangely un-intimate. I wanted to have a drink with Robert Lindsay after we’d done our excerpt from Waiting For Godot and with Tennnant and Sheen after doing Staged, but all I could do was press ‘Leave Meeting’, and wonder whether it had happened at all.

Now as I gaze at the pristine pages of my 2021 diary I do at least have some writing to do. Without giving the game away more than I already have, I’m researching the short, enigmatic life of my Great Uncle Henry – Harry to everyone – born in the heyday of the British Empire and died in the muddy shambles of the Somme at the age of 32. If all goes well, it will hopefully materialise in bookshops in two years’ time.

Ahh…bookshops, restaurants, trousers. So much to look forward to.

Inspirational Eccentricity

Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

This weekend two people who I admired very much died. Jan Morris and Hamish MacInnes. Both were in their 90’s, both had lived quite extraordinary lives, and I was fortunate enough to spend some time with both of them. Jan Morris was the author of Venice, one of the best travel books I ever read. It made me want to go to Venice and when I went there, with Helen, in 1967, it made being there even better.

Before she underwent gender reassignment (or ‘changed sex’ as Jan always called it) she was James Morris, the reporter for the Times on the Everest expedition of 1953, and it was he who not only broke the story of Hillary and Tensing’s success, but made sure the news got through on the day of the Queen’s coronation.

With Jan and her partner Elizabeth, filming for the BBC at their Welsh home in 2016.

The other, more personal loss was my old friend Hamish MacInnes, who could have been a member of the Everest expedition in 1953, but didn’t like big expeditions, and went instead to climb an equally dangerous mountain nearby.

Hamish MacInnes was a true adventurer, whose life embodied many people’s dreams, including my own. A climber of great skill and daring who would choose the awkward and difficult route precisely because it was awkward and difficult. A man who led mountain rescue teams but also advised the directors of Monty Python and The Holy Grail how best to throw bodies into gorges. If climbing equipment wasn’t up to the job, he’d not only invent something that was, he’d build it himself. He wrote stories and doubled for Clint Eastwood. Hamish was a free spirit, who made his own rules and went his own way, and lived many lives in one.

With Hamish and Terry J, filming for Holy Grail Revisited, Glencoe, Scotland 2000.

In this increasingly regulated world it is very sad to lose two people who embodied such inspirational eccentricity.

But the good news of the weekend is that Terry Gilliam is not at all dead and turned 80 years old on Sunday. Inspirational eccentricity lives!

Marking Time

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2020

Can’t believe its nearly four months since my last post. But there hasn’t been much to write about. No sooner had I recovered from heart surgery than the great pall of Covid descended, and a quiet life became even quieter. Some good things came out of it. I’m a compulsive book buyer and coronavirus gave me the chance to redress the balance between buying books and actually reading them. I discovered the great pleasure of R K Narayan’s stories. An elegant, assured writer bringing the characters and the atmosphere of an Indian small town to life with colour and much humour. A delight.

If the days weren’t too hot and the garden not too tempting, I worked away on two writing projects – preparing a fourth volume of my diaries and beginning research for a book based on the short life of my Great-Uncle Harry who fought in Gallipoli and died on the Somme. In the short term I enjoyed re-uniting with Robert Lindsay for a Lockdown Theatre performance of A Bit of Waiting For Godot, with Jo Lumley as Narratress (her description). Also did some fresh interviews for a series looking back at my travels which will run through October on BBC 2. Michael Palin – Travels of a Lifetime. More details soon.

Being forced to slow down a far too frenetic lifestyle does have benefits. My heart scare reminded me that my body isn’t indestructible and if I want to keep it that way I must know when to stop working as well as when to start again. Over the last year I discovered a rather enjoyable equilibrium, a balance between work and relaxation that for the first time in my life favoured the latter.

Whether I can keep this going into the year ahead I don’t know. I’ll try. I shall indulge my curiosity but not be controlled by it. After forty years I’ve given up running, and taken to long walks instead. Running was a a fierce and competitive fight with myself, justified largely by how good I felt afterwards. Walking is something to enjoy at the time. It’s about noticing things, taking time, listening to noises other than the thump of your own heart or the slip-slap of trainers. And I treat Hampstead Heath as a phone-free zone.

Strange times. All my life I’ve been spurred on by the infinite possibilities ahead, now those infinite possibilities have been replaced by infinite problems, I’ve drawn in my horns for a bit.

Ah, sorry, that’s my phone ringing.

Big Day For Erebus Fans

Tuesday, May 19th, 2020

175 years ago today, one of the greatest voyages of British naval exploration set off down the Thames, heading for glory.

Day of departure, pictured in The Ilustrated London News dated 24 May 1845

“At half-past ten in the morning of 19 May 1845 anchors were weighed, the ships swung through 360 degrees to make sure their compasses were working, and the Franklin expedition to the Northwest passage finally got underway with twenty-four officers and 110 men aboard. Crowds cheered from the dockside. Sir John waved vigourously to his family as they receded into the distance. The sight of HMS Erebus, freshly painted black, with a distinctive white band around her hull, leading the best-supplied expedition ever to leave British shores must have given them all confidence that the best that could be done had been done.

To this day there is a pub by the river at Greenhithe called the Sir John Franklin, where you can have a pint of beer and steak and chips and stand at the spot where Franklin’s family saw him for the last time.”
Extract from ‘Erebus: The Story Of A Ship’

Alas, thanks to coronavirus, no crowds will be at Greenhithe today to celebrate the 175th anniversary. The wrecks of the two ships who set out that day were discovered 170 years later beneath the Arctic waters. I followed in their footsteps in 2017, and I salute their bravery in unimaginably desperate conditions.

Out Of The Window

Sunday, April 19th, 2020

In the days when I travelled I found myself stuck in many strange places. On an Arctic island in a snowstorm, waiting for rescue planes in the South American rainforest, in Khartoum waiting for someone to take us safely across the Ethiopian border. Now, thanks to lockdown, I’m stuck at home.

I thought it would be boring and frustrating but it’s quite the opposite. I’ve begun to notice and take real pleasure in the small things.

Instead of sitting down staring at my screen and throwing occasional glances out of the window, I now stare out of the window and throw occasional glances at my screen.

It’s spring-time and there are wonderful things out there. A few feet away from me a wisteria has entwined itself across a pergola. For the last few months it’s been a dry and spindly thing, but almost overnight it has burst into life and from being a purely functional perch for birds it’s now a thing of beauty in itself, it’s branches tasselled with long purple-white blossom.

And around it I can see birds whose lives are clearly not in lockdown, working hard on their properties and their sex lives. Not laid up like us, they can go where they want, when they want, as often as they want. I envy them.

But Out of The Window means more than what I literally see. It’s also about observing how different the world is now. Letters from the Prime Minister drop through the letter-box, food deliveries arrive, revealing that you’ve pressed one key too many and ordered 400 teabags instead of 40 and the Archbishop of Canterbury conducts Easter Sunday service from his kitchen.

But some things never change. Like multi-option phone calls which have given me a lot of grief recently. You know the sort of thing…

If you are calling to ask about why something has not happened press 1. If you have a query that involves non-availability press 2. If you have previously called and are already in the system press 3. If you have made an application press 4. If you have not made an application press 5. If you have made an application but wish to withdraw it press 6. If you are from Germany and have left your bicycle in this country press 7. If you are called Anthony and play cricket press 8. If you want a straight answer to a direct question press 47.

I’ve imagined this one. But then imagination is the biggest window of all.

Stay well.

Pre-April Fool

Monday, March 30th, 2020

These last few days have been so strange and so completely different from anything I expected to run into in my lifetime that I’m still not quite sure if it’s a dream and I’ll wake up and find Dominic Cummings screaming with laughter and shouting ‘Pre-April Fool!’

Where else but in a dream would I be counting the toilet rolls in the cupboard or seeing my local supermarket looking like a bank-robber’s convention or finding not a single restaurant open in the whole country.

The spirit of Python was always respectful of the absurd and the surreal. It was our stock in trade. Now we are asked to believe that a bat in China has closed down the cricket season without a ball being bowled, car factories are making ventilators, a French company is turning bras into face-masks and filming on Casualty has been halted for fear of there being too many casualties. Python has been completely upstaged by real-life.

I find myself in an odd position. Just a half-year after having my heart repaired and feeling ready to kick-start my life for a last sprint to the Great Tape In The Sky, I find the sky isn’t where I thought it was. It’s much closer. In fact were I to stop washing my hands and standing two metres away from everybody it might be right outside my door.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing at home and have always found self-isolating to be a necessary evil. But it’s much easier when everyone else is doing it. Apart, of course, from those who are out there trying to make us all better.

And I’m getting use to spending the days looking out of the window, hoping a sparrow will come by with an idea and thinking about the glass of wine I shall have this evening. 52 years of married life have made my wife and I experts on co-existence, and Hampstead Heath is not a bad prison yard.

That’s today. Yesterday is a place to avoid, nostalgia being a forbidden fruit right now, but tomorrow is the one I have most trouble dealing with. What will it look like and when will it look like what it will look like? Predictions fly around and theories sprout from bushes, but in the end William Goldman’s dictum about Hollywood – “Nobody knows anything” – has been proved right again.

Stay well, Stay indoors. God bless our National Health Service and be glad of what we have. Sunshine, good neighbours and three series of This Country.

History Doesn’t Always Repeat Itself

Thursday, June 5th, 1975

Cast my vote in the Referendum (the British electorate was asked: Do you think that the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community). I voted ‘Yes’ because I was not in the end convinced that the retention of our full sovereignty and the total freedom to make our own decisions, which was the cornerstone of the Noes’ case, was jeopardised seriously enough by entering the Market. And I feel that the grey men of Brussels are no worse than the grey men of Whitehall anyway.

But I didn’t decide on my vote until this morning, when I read the words of one of my favourite gurus, Keith Waterhouse. He would vote ‘Yes’ he thought, but without great enthusiasm for the Referendum or the way its campaign has been conducted, because of the attractions of the European quality of life! And he concludes, ‘I may be naïve in hoping that remaining in Europe will make us more European, but after a thousand years of insularity from which have evolved the bingo parlour, carbonised beer and Crossroads, I am inclined to give it a whirl.’

Footnote: 67% per cent said yes. Of the administrative regions, the only rejections were in Shetland and the Western Isles.

Knowing Terry

Saturday, January 25th, 2020

I’ve spent so much of my life knowing Terry that it’s very hard to take in that I shall no longer be able to put an arm around him or ask him which of the twenty-seven beers he’s just sampled I should drink, or thank him for the most amazing dish he’s created or watch his indignation when I mention one of the many buzzwords which unfailingly caused him to ignite. “Democracy’ was one. “America” another.

It’s not easy to define what it’s like just being with someone. Memories drift in and out. In the Oxford Revue at the 1964 Edinburgh Festival we performed a version of the Manfred Mann hit ‘5-4-3-2-1’, which we re-christened ‘R-S-P-C-A’. It required the cast to line up on stage in a blackout. The only access was a flight of very steep stairs. Terry was halfway up the stairs when out of the darkness came a loud discordant ear-splitting crash, a moment’s silence, followed by a plaintive high-pitched cry. ‘Oh no! I’ve broke my sodding guitar’.

It wasn’t Johnny Cash, but it was a wonderfully endearing moment.

What else do I remember? Giving blood together – Terry enthusing, “They give you a cup of tea!”. Being asked to be the first to use the newly opened public toilets in Lambeth Walk. Terry and I, bladders at a standstill, as the band played outside, and reporters gathered for our verdict. Queuing up to buy the Sergeant Pepper album and spending the entire working day, when we should have been writing jokes for David Frost, playing it over and over again with forensic delight. The night I had to drive Terry to the local hospital after he’d slashed his finger while shucking oysters. The sight of two Pythons walking in, one with his hand up in the air, so raised the spirits in A and E that the doctors asked if we could come in more regularly.

Terry was a quiet thoughtful man, but once he’d taken refreshment he could become dangerously relaxed. His unscheduled striptease on stage at the Oktoberfest Beer Festival in Munich was later described by Eric, who witnessed it, as one of the most potentially suicidal performances he’d ever seen.

Tunisia 1978. Terry directing The Life Of Brian and playing the hermit at the same time. Discussing camera angles whilst stark naked save for a long grey beard (attached to his genitals by gaffer tape I believe)

After the Meaning Of Life our working lives went off in different directions but we continued to meet up for a beer, or a game of squash, or a meal and we’d chat about our different projects. Terry was unfailingly supportive, but honestly critical too. He had a way of nailing down what was not working and suggesting a way round it. He treated me as if we were still writing together.

Terry was warm, generous and sociable. Always interested in meeting new people and sharing his enthusiasm with them. I’ve made many good friends through Terry and their messages and memories, coming in over the last few days, all conjure up a vision of a good man.

And that’s really it. Terry was a good man.