Book Report: Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years

Reading Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years was an odd experience. I found it mostly uninteresting, but had difficulty setting it down for the night. There were a handful of interesting bits, enough evidently to keep YHB reading intently, but in an immense book the bits in between the interesting bits were dominant.

So, the interesting bits. I was startled to discover that they wrote the bits and then decided who would play the parts, at least for Life of Brian. John Cleese evidently was very upset at first that he would not play Brian; he was tired of spending most of the movie in costume and make-up and then coming in to play short bits with no connection to the rest of the movie. I can’t imagine a Brian played by John Cleese, but then it would have been a different movie. I also was amused to discover that the Roman with difficulty saying his Rs was originally a centurion, but that they kept adding bits to make it a bigger part, and then it just made sense to make him Pilate, and then to add his friend (who wanks as high as any in Wome). And that the original idea was to have more scenes with Jesus, but that when the gang watched a bunch of Biblical Epics for ideas, they noticed that the closer a particular scene got to portraying Jesus, the worse it worked as a movie scene, so they avoided those. Which worked very well, in my opinion.

I found myself wanting, after all this time, to watch Brian, so I did, and it was very funny. It’s really Mr. Palin’s movie, though, isn’t it? I mean, yes, Graham Chapman is good as Brian, and Terry Jones as Mother of Brian, but Mr. Palin plays not only Pilate but the ex-leper, the chained-up abusive guy in the cell with Brian, and the very nice but somewhat wet Nisus Wettus (crucifixion? Good, on the left, one cross each) as well as a handful of other characters that were less memorable. It winds up that there’s at least one Michael Palin in almost every scene, and the scenes without him are the least funny, on the whole (except for Brian and his Mother Addressing the Multitude, which is brilliant, and although technically Michael Palin is there, holding a shoe, he isn’t really part of the comedy at that point).

Oh, one other non-Brian I thought was interesting. The six of them had variously been working in television comedy for some time, and when the Flying Circus boosted them into a new level of success, they of course reacted differently. Mr. Palin and Mr. Jones, on the whole, saw the success as a chance to do more, better Python stuff, with bigger budgets and better broadcast times. Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, on the other hand, largely saw the success as a chance to get their own projects financed and advertised. Mr. Chapman and Mr. Cleese saw the success as the opportunity to do less and less work for more and more money, although Mr. Chapman was (at that point) much more interested in drinking and fucking and Mr. Cleese more interested in easy money from industrial films and advertisements. The eventual result, as people and their priorities changed, isn’t predictable from that, either the movies existing at all or the individual careers. Mr. Palin, in particular, does Ripping Yarns and Jabberwocky and writes a novel before Brian, and then goes on to the series of travel shows. Eric Idle, on the other hand, tours with Python-related stuff and then makes a hugely successful (and evidently terrific) Python-related show.

Anyway, although I would have preferred to read an actual written memoir of those years, the thing about the diaries is that they are written before it all makes sense; there’s a narrative imposed by the editing, but the fun part is still knowing what the writer doesn’t about what happens next.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.