4

SHOWBIZ!

Summer term in Cambridge. Always the best of times. The colleges were out and there were lots of girls about in their summer frocks. The exquisite couple Gita and Sonny Mehta (he, later a distinguished publisher at Picador in London and Knopf in New York, and she, a respected author) held court in their superior digs, packed with books, while I lived in a tiny room above a smelly restaurant as we rehearsed for three weeks in the Footlights Club.

Humphrey Barclay and me performing John Cleese’s “Secret Service” on Festival Special.

Edinburgh was a blast. We all dossed in a walk-up sixth-floor cold-water flat, but finally this was showbiz. At the tender age of twenty I made my first television appearance on Scottish TV’s Festival Special, with Humphrey Barclay, the director of Cambridge Circus. Doing a John Cleese sketch, naturally…

Footlights ’63 was a sold-out smash, mainly because we had all the best sketches from the Footlights’ West End hit. Harold Hobson of The Sunday Times said, “They attract admiration as effortlessly as the sun attracts the flowers,” which was nice of him because the next night we nearly killed him as all the sets collapsed when the revolving stage utterly failed to revolve in the world premiere of Henry Miller’s only play, Just Wild About Harry, directed by Stephen Frears. This legendary disaster had brought all the London critics up to Edinburgh.

The Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club had discovered that Henry Miller once wrote a play that had never been produced. Nothing would prevent them from giving a world premiere to this piece at the Edinburgh Festival. Being Cambridge, they had decided to turn an old Baptist church into a modern theater complete with a revolving stage. For six weeks, heavily bearded men sawed and hammered away, but by opening night it was clear that neither the theater nor the stage was ready, and there was nothing to do but delay. Being Cambridge, they had thought about that too. Holding a press conference, they said that the “very minor changes” demanded by the local Watch Committee (who censored plays and public performances in Scotland) were so egregious that they must first contact Henry Miller to see if he would even permit them.

There was some delay in contacting Henry Miller in California. When he was finally reached, not only did he seem surprised anyone was putting on his play, but he had no objection to whatever they wanted to do with it. So that was alright. For Cambridge, a perfect storm in a teacup. They could go ahead. Headlines were written, tickets were sold, and the play would open on the morrow. Except it didn’t. The first scene passed safely enough as I, who had been co-opted into the play amongst the thespians, exchanged a few words with a specially engaged professional little person, while we pretended to paint an apartment in San Francisco. Okay, she was a female acting a male, but it’s not that easy to find short people on short notice for amateur productions of unwanted Henry Miller plays. And Cambridge has always been notoriously gender-lax. And a jolly good thing too. Still, so far so good, the audience applauded dutifully. But the theatrical dream ended at the same time as the scene. The revolving stage refused to revolve. Twenty minutes passed. Of pushing, shoving, heaving, and cursing. No matter how many pushers and shovers and heavers and cursers, the stage stayed firmly locked in place. The actors in the next scene remained firmly offstage. Finally, with one last desperate heave, the revolving stage lurched; the heavy flats began to shake and then slowly collapsed into each other like a pile of dominoes. The theater critics fled up the aisle for their lives, leaving poor Harold Hobson alone up front in his wheelchair. Henry Miller’s only play was dead. That show lasted only one night, but our revue was a different story. We were a big hit.

We naturally checked out our rivals, the Oxford Revue. Where we appeared bright and frothy onstage, they were cool and sardonic. They also had girls. Bastards. They did something called Rejects Night, where they took sketches that hadn’t quite made it, and tried them out on an audience after their main show. This meant we could go along after our own show, and it was here that I first met the lovely, funny Terry Jones. Dark-haired, deadpan, handsome, with the looks of the movie star Anthony Newley, he too brought a tremendous seriousness to everything he did, including singing a song which sounds like an early precursor of “The Lumberjack Song.”

I was Miss World from 1907 to ’24…

I was Miss World, lovely belle amour…

Totally ignoring the transgender implications, it lamented the fact that, sadly, age meant:

No one wants to see me, anymore.

Next summer Terry would go on to star in the West End in the Oxford Revue Hang Down Your Head and Die, a bitter polemic against capital punishment. Oxford, as always, was far more serious about everything.

A year later in Edinburgh, in 1964, I met the unforgettable Michael Palin, who had joined Terry Jones in the Oxford cast. I first saw him onstage and he bowled me over. He did an extended character monologue about an old Northern performer who came on to begin his terrible act with an appalling song, only to notice that on the stage beside him was a large gift-wrapped present. He tried to ignore it but couldn’t, and stopped his song to take a look at it.

He read the label out loud.

“To Mikey, with love from the audience.”

He was overcome.

“Oh, every people. I’m touched. I’m speechless. This is so special for me. I had thought perhaps my act was over, and that people didn’t care anymore; that somehow, I was too old and nobody remembered me. But now this. From you. The audience. It means so much to me. Well, there’s only one thing I can do to thank you, and that’s to sing my song, ‘When Love Breaks Your Heart in a Million Tiny Pieces.’ ”

With tears in his eyes, barely able to restrain himself, he began to sing.

When love, breaks your heart, in a million tiny pieces—

Boom! The present exploded.

The look on his face as he quietly limped offstage was brilliant; and that’s Michael Palin, really. He writes real character sketches and acts them with genuine emotion. I became very aware of this writing talent of Michael’s when I was adapting Spamalot for the stage from The Holy Grail. I loved putting in Mike’s writing, because it was always character-driven.

“What, ridden on a horse? You’re using coconuts…”

“One day, lad, all this will be yours.”

“What, the curtains?”

“Not the curtains, lad.”

Albeit unknowingly, by September 1964 all the future Pythons (save for the wild-card American animator) had met and admired each other.