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Part 1 Listen
I began keeping a diary many times in my life - the first one I have is a diary of 1955, Letts Schoolboy's Diary. I started on January the first and kept it up till July the fourth - but they always fell by the wayside. Then in April 1969 a couple of things made me decide that perhaps I could really do it this time. One was that my life had changed somewhat after three years writing day by day for television programmes like Marty and The Two Ronnies and The Frost Report, I had a bit of a break. Helen and I had been married for three years and we had our first child, Tom, who was then really a baby just growing up, and on April the sixteenth, which was our third wedding anniversary, 1969, I managed to give up smoking, mainly just to show someone who was there at the time, I think it was Terry Gilliam, who said, 'You're an addict; you just want money for a cigarette tonight', and I said, 'Of course I'm not'. Anyway, my bluff was called and I said: 'I don't need cigarettes!' and I actually gave up smoking on April the seventeenth, and that is when I bought a diary and once again wrote the date, underlined it, 'April the seventeenth, 1969', and, unlike my previous diaries, this one survived, and I still keep a diary, not quite every morning, but most mornings, in a longhand notebook, just like I did that first day in April 1969.
They're handwritten and I try to write something, hangovers notwithstanding. I've written in many strange places. the interesting thing about the start of my diaries is that they coincide with the start of Monty Python. I think on the very first page I say something about the rumours of The Five Show - which was later to become, of course, The Six Show, with Terry Gilliam brought in as well, and became Python - that there were rumours of the show starting. But because I was writing about something that was just another job - we hoped it would turn into a success, but weren't at all sure - I actually give as much weight at the beginning to Monty Python as I do to my son Tom growing up. And I keep a note of the first steps he's taken, the first words he's said. I also write down long copious accounts of my visits to the dentist where I had some quite Olympian scale of dentistry, because Python just seemed at the end to be something that maybe would last a couple of years and no more. And that's one of the great things about diaries: they are essentially of the time, they're honest. They're an antidote to hindsight; you can't look back; you can't change; you can't re-evaluate it. Historians might do that later, but basically these are the building bricks of my life, and of history; they're laid down there and they can't really be changed.
The diaries at the beginning, of course, do deal with the very first day of Python, the first day we ever started any shooting. They also deal with the first recording we ever did, the reaction to that, and you can tell it was fairly wobbly to start with and only about 1971 or '72 is Python really looking like something that will be a stayer - we get a second series, then a third series. And I actually write more about the later series, the second and third ones, than I do about the first one, because Python is then beginning to become something quite important. And the interesting thing also is that the diary becomes a little complete then. I start warily, not quite getting a style, but, by '72 or '73, I'm beginning to write the diary like a story of my life. And that's what it is; it's just an account of what I do every day; it's not revealing, particularly; it's not trying to sort of tear the emotional soul out of me; it's just an account of writing what I did during a day. And in this it becomes really quite interesting, because Python, around about 1971 or '72, begins to break up. And the television series really only lasted about two or three years before John felt he was being restricted by the other Pythons; he had other things he wanted to do, and so you sense, from the day-to-day entries, that Python is beginning to break up after two-and-a-half years of television shows, a record, a book, and all that sort of thing; and John is moving on; and then Eric moves on. And really the 1972-3 period is all about the rest of us trying to find work outside Python. This is not the diary - at this point - of someone who is confident and assured that everything is going to be fine for the rest of his life: quite the opposite. By that time, I have two children, a third's on the way, and it's important for me to find some other work. So I do some commercials. I do a commercial with John Cleese for Hunky Chunks Dog Food - not one of the great, proudest moments of my life, but I did that, and we got paid better for doing Hunky Chunks commercials and Lloyd's Bank commercials than we did for making comedy.
Part 2 Listen
But then, in the middle of the '70s a curious thing happens which is, as Python's beginning to run down in the UK, it is suddenly given a shot in the arm in the US. And Python is taken up by first by a Dallas PBS station, and then it spreads around the PBS network and becomes a cult television show in America during late 1974 and 1975. And that gives us an enormous boost. We go over there and we do publicity and the enthusiasm of the American market for Python at that time was much greater than what was happening in the UK. In the UK, we were doing really the second thing, I think, apart from American success, that actually helped save Python in the mid-70s. We had decided to write a film of our own, a completely new film, that became Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And it was made on about a budget of about $300,000 altogether, I think 209,000 or something like that, and this had been a difficult process but we'd enjoyed the writing of it. The performing had been quite tough, and the diary gives quite a good account of the filming of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And it also gives an account of the first difficult screenings of The Holy Grail, when investors didn't like it: people looked at us with long faces and people just walked out. We thought: 'What have we done?' You know: 'We've blown our opportunity to write films', which we'd always wanted to do. And then things moved, and we make some changes to the film and it becomes a success and by that time we've got the American market waiting for anything new from Python, and so Monty Python and the Holy Grail goes across to America.
But still John wasn't part of Python at that time, apart from doing a little bit of film publicity. He was busy writing what turned out to be Fawlty Towers. Eric Idle was writing what turned out to be The Ruttles and All You Need is Cash, and Terry Jones and myself turned out to be writing what became The Ripping Yarns, a nine-part series of stories about The Boy's Own Papers and the kind of books we used to read - people used to read, sorry, not us - in the '20s and '30s. So . . . all of us had an alternative way of life, an alternative means of earning, alongside Python. But Python just hangs on enough for us to think about doing another film after Holy Grail. I think we do some publicity in Amsterdam or somewhere and it comes up. Eric says at a table, I think, 'Why don't we do the sort of Bible story next?', or something like that, and John later came up with the title, The Gospel According to Saint Brian. The idea of Brian being this person who led a parallel life to Christ caught our imagination, and we started writing The Life of Brian. But even then we all had other things to do and other fish to fry. I'd followed up Eric Idle's recommendation to be on Saturday Night Live, and Lorne Michaels had asked me over. And in the very beginning of 1978, I go over and host this extraordinarily popular show for the first time. And I sensed that the people there - Dan Ackroyd, Bill Murray had just joined the cast, John Belushi - all great fans of Python's, which was very rewarding. And very surprising to find people who were, you know [something missing. 'famous, and whom'?], we admired, liking us, but they did. And I did this very first show, and my diary contains an account of the very first monologue I did where for some strange reason I decided I would play my own manager apologising for the fact that Michael Palin hadn't arrived and that I would . . . in order to fill in time so that - 'I'm from the old school of cockney London managers, and we all used to have our dance in those days, would you like to see my dance?' And we got audience all saying, "Yeah, yeah, let's see your dance', and so I said, 'All I need is a plate of seafood salad and two cats, please!' So that got a good laugh, and the props people come along - and we had rehearsed this - pour the seafood salad down the front of my trousers and put the cats down as well, and the music began - I'd chosen 'The White Cliffs of Dover' - and so I did this dance to 'The White Cliffs of Dover' with the cats down there. Anyway, it was all going absolutely fine until one of the cats decided to escape, and it's all there in the diaries about what I thought would be the most disastrous end of my career but in fact worked very well, and I was asked back to do Saturday Night Live on several more occasions and cemented a very good friendship certainly with Bill Murray.
Part 3 Listen
So, we're going to America quite a lot. I cover the making of The Life of Brian. We had more money for Brian than we had for The Holy Grail, thanks to our wonderful new friend George Harrison, whose money bailed us out when EMI (English production company) had actually given the go-ahead for The Life of Brian and then the head of the company had actually seen the script and said, 'We can't touch this, it's blasphemous', and George helped us out and became good friends of ours. He actually . . . I describe in the diary how he came out to Tunisia and took the part of Mr Papadopalos, the man who loaned out the Mount in the film, so George actually appeared in it. So there's a lot about George, a lot about him saving the film. And the end of 1970s really finish with Python getting a considerable boost, both in notoriety from Life of Brian, and also some commercial success, although in America we started top of the Variety Charts, but then we found that Senator Berman of South Carolina or something, banned it from his state and the backlash began. So there's . . . Python is a little bit on a knife edge by the end. I feel that, by the end of the decade of the 1970s, Python has some hope for the future, but we're not quite sure what. And meanwhile, what am I going to be doing? I've begun to think of doing a travel documentary; I want to do some writing; I've tried writing a novel. And The Diaries end in 1979, so we cover a ten-year period, from '69 to '79. The difference was, by the end, I was, I was the same person I was at the beginning, but in a very different place. In 1969, I was looking for work. By 1979, we were being offered work.
But important to me in the diary is that it was a diary, not just of my professional life, Python, or Ripping Yarns, or making commercials. It's also about my family growing up, it's about decisions on whether to stay living in London, the usual things; whether we need a bigger house, where the children should go to school; my father's illness - and he got very ill in the early '70s, just when he'd retired, finished work, life suddenly seemed good for him and very quickly he got Parkinson's disease and coped with that for several years, and I cover that in the diaries as well. So, alongside the professional life, is an awful lot about my own life and just what it's like being a member of Monty Python team, or being just an actor/writer. The specials skill or qualifications growing up in London in the 1970s, with IRA bombs going off many times through this period, with strikes causing blackouts: there are instances in the diary of me writing my diary by candlelight, and all that sort of thing, so there's an insight into the political life of the time aswell. So it does cover an awful lot and the diaries were actually filtered down from about over a million words kept in 38 handwritten notebooks and what is in The Diary is about 260,000 words of that, so it has been edited. Some of the longeurs like family holidays have gone, but there's a lot there in The Palin Diaries from 1969 to 1979, and I'm just hoping that people read them as a story, as a narrative. As something which I couldn't change. The great thing about diaries is that I look at some of the entries and I say, that was badly phrased, it was badly written, it was a stupid judgement, proved totally wrong a week later, I make some churlish sort of comments about friends and then take them back, and all that sort of thing. But that's how one is and that's the great thing that makes diary different from memoir or autobiography, is that you can't go back, you can't sort of tidy things up, you can't put a nice gloss on it. It is what it is. And these diaries are what I was in the 1970s.
Audio extract
Michael Palin's profile and books