Michael
Palin was on the phone, insisting that even niceness must have ‘a bottom
line’. Typically, though, he managed to say even this nicely, leaving
the organiser of the latest Amnesty International charity concert, The Secret
Policeman's Other Ball, in no doubt that, although he was having to disappoint
him this time, his heart was still very much in the right place. ‘I haven't got anything there at the moment,’ he had said, meaning no new material. ‘And I know what it's like. I don't want to get up and do something no-so-hot, thinking it's only one night, then have to cringe through the next 18 months with the record-of-the-book-of-the-video-cassette.
‘Plus’ - he really was having to fight - ‘I have a movie which may go, it's all set with money and things, and I need a month more at least to get into shape. Honestly, I really would get myself into a terrible mess.’
Saying ‘no' never comes easy and especially not when, secretly, you're longing to be seduced away from the typewriter. But Michael Palin had just been saying how his life was planned out at least until the end of 1983, with very little room for manoeuvre, when the phone rang.
The last couple of years have seen him mainly sitting at his desk, writing Time Bandits, the film he co- authored with its director, Terry Gilliam; scripts for the next Monty Python film, and a screenplay called The Missionary which, if it goes into production, will be his first solo outing.
Which is why he was looking forward to starting work on the new Python film. And why, during a slacker period, he'd jumped at the chance of doing a piece on film for the first programme in the new series of Innes Book of Records. Apart from Neil Innes being ‘the closest anybody's ever come to being a seventh Python’, he had, quite simply, been feeling the need for a bit of company.
‘Apart from how nice it is working with a group of people,’ he said, ‘I'd forgotten how close the public were to the Python television filming. We were always doing it in launderettes or the back streets of Ealing, persuading strangers to let us into their homes.
But working
for Neil's show, lying under an underpass on a modern estate outside Bristol,
waiting to be prodded by the famous BBC poin-ted stick and told to act, brought
it all back.’He was even dressed as a uniformed constable, as so often in Monty Python. ‘They love a bit of showbiz, you know, coppers. I sent them up rotten, as I thought, delving deep into my bag of copper jokes, but by the end of Python, coppers were starting to make up half the studio audience.’
Neil Innes has provided musical back-up at all the Monty Python stage shows since the mid-70s. He traveled across Canada with them, appeared with them on Broadway, and played with them on their four-night stand at the 19,000-seat (although attendance was limited to 8,000) Hollywood Bowl last year.
But Innes' and Palin's paths had first crossed many years earlier, when Innes was still with the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. The band were regulars on Do Not Adjust Your Set, the semi-legendary ITV children's programme which - together with Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and eventually, Terry Gilliam - Michael Palin appeared in and wrote.
We
thought we were being pretty wacky and weird and odd-ball and
off-the-wall,’ Palin said. But even Palin admitted to finding the Doo
Dah ands front-man, Viv Stanshall, ‘a bit enigmatic at times’.
Neil Innes, on the other hand, he said he had always found uncomplicated
and approachable and ‘an essentially social member of the Python team
on the road’. ‘Neil's songs are the only things that go down unequivocally well wherever we play,' Michael Palin began at one point. ‘He's very versatile.' But then, hearing what must have sounded like a This is Your Life-style endorsement issuing from himself, he changed gear. ‘No,' he said, ‘I'll tell you the truth. He has a shameless love of dressing up, that's what he loves . . . the Panstick, the lights, all that.’
The last series of Do Not Adjust Your Set went out in 1969 which, like everything pre-Python, Palin says seems like ancient history to him now.
‘Everything before Python,’ he said, ‘seems a bit conventional and rather dated. A bit watered-down. A sketch with a tag-line on the end has always seemed somehow rather awful since.
‘At the
same time, people have been consistently anxious to hail "the next new thing"
which I think has tended to prevent growth.’ Not The Nine O'Clock
News, for instance, he finds ‘naughty but fairly safe’. We haven't softened,’ said Palin, expressing mild surprise. ‘None of us has. So we'll go on waving our crutches at society for as long as the basic enjoyment of each other's company is there.
‘It was felt that we should go on and do it rather than ditch it, as a good way of getting things out of our systems, if nothing else.
‘Naïvely, perhaps, we'd like to think we've just been doing it for ourselves.’