TORONTO. DAWN. I AM WOKEN EARLY BY THE RUSH OF WARM AIR THROUGH THE NOISY AIR-CONDITIONING. IT REMINDS ME THAT WINTER IS ON ITS WAY. THE SLOW EARLY BUILD TO THE TOUR IS ALMOST OVER AND NOW the real work begins. We will be performing nightly and sleeping in the bus for days on end. After next weekend in Ottawa no more luxury hotels for a while. And it’s going to get colder. Right now, though, it’s beautiful and sunny and it’s the publication day of a new autobiography of the Pythons called The Pythons, a huge coffee-table tome. It is so heavy Michael Palin has described it as un-putdownable and un-pickupable.
We have picked up a stowaway: Jennifer, a wardrobe person from Rutland, has come along for the ride, perhaps lured by the proximity of so many rutting males, so our touring party is now temporarily swollen to ten. I don’t think she has come on the road just to help me change into my shorts for the Bruces….
Tonight’s show is in Kitchener, which was called Berlin until World War One, when they renamed it after a British general who was busy helping wipe out Canadians. We drive south through pleasant, wooded countryside with hillsides lined with maples, broken by wide, placid brown rivers. Except for the occasional shock of rust, the leaves haven’t yet turned, and it’s still remarkably green for October. The sun is shining, and all is well with the world. Ah, how agreeable to be a greedy bastard, carried in comfortable carriages from gig to gig.
Well, it ’ s sing-along time, so let ’ s have the lights up and let ’ s have a bit of karaoke, which is Japanese for “drunken bastards singing out of tune.” This is your chance to get off your butts and join in, including all of you up there in the liposection. Blimey, they’ve been lifted more than Cher!
O Death, O Death Thou art so unfair! To take away Sonny And still leave us Cher.
Canadians are a quieter and politer people than the Americans, and act one is something of a struggle. We win them by the end, though, and they stand and yell and shout for more; but at times it was distinctly hard work. Part of the problem is the sheer size of the auditorium. Centre in the Square is a very large house and seats eighteen hundred. It is also very wide and very deep. You could play baseball in here. The balconies are a long way off and the whole thing is a vast empty horseshoe. Even during the performance I am worrying that there is something wrong with the beginning of the show. Act one is just not taking off as it should, and though we get there by the time the Bruces come on, there is still something seriously adrift at the start. I didn’t get time to eat before the show, and by halftime I am really dragging. I wolf down some food and swallow a hot tea, and act two goes much better. After the show I pounce on Scott Sansom, our stage manager from the 2000 tour, and demand he gives me his harshest notes. It’s no good pissing about with politeness; we have a couple of nights of big shows in Toronto coming up, and I don’t want to blow it. Scott’s thoughts reinforce my own feelings about act one. It’s time to take drastic action.
I call a cast meeting on the bus while we drive back to Toronto. It’s after midnight, and we’re all tired, and I have signed and posed for pictures for an hour, but this is important. Jen is looking cute in her pink tracksuit, and Peter somewhat anxious, and John his usual calm self. Skip is present, and Gilli sits with her pencil poised. After all her hard work I am proposing to change it all again. We all agree that the opening is not working very well. The problem is that it is all new material, and the audience simply prefers familiar material. There is no getting away from this fact. As soon as we slip into Nudge Nudge they are happy. We have to try and get to this stuff sooner. John valiantly performed “I Bet You They Won’t Play This Song on the Radio” with me, manfully providing hundreds of silly sound effects.
I bet you they won’t play this song on the radio
I bet you they won’t play this new XXXXing song
It’s not that it’s XXXX
Or so controversial
It’s just that the words are so XXXXing strong
You can’t say XXXX on the radio
Or XXXX
Or XXXXX
Or XXXXX
You can’t even say I’d like to XXXX you someday
Unless you’re a doctor with a very large XXXX
So I bet you they won’t play this song on the radio
I bet you they won’t even dare program it
I bet you their XXXXing old program directors
Will think it’s a load of horse XXXX
It works okay, but it is still a fairly unfamiliar song and it’s not hitting the way you need at the start of the show. So it’s cut. Cut, too, is Peter’s entry from the audience into Strip Quiz. This quiz game is only mildly amusing, and so it goes. We start making swift changes to act one, shaking it up and reordering it. “Galaxy Song” comes in from act two to follow the Pepperpots on the Moon skit, and Peter and I decide to have a go at the classic Argument Clinic. I hadn’t wanted to do too much Python on this tour to avoid making it too similar to my last tour, but there seems no doubt that Python stuff is what they want. My real anxiety is Toronto. Will they feel cheated or short-changed if there is too much of the same stuff as before? I figure that’s a risk we simply have to take. After Toronto the rest of the gigs in Canada are at places we have never played before. We simply must get the show right here and now and risk it. We decide to get into the theater early and work on the enormous changes as fast as we can, and cross our fingers we can get it all done in time for the curtain at eight. It’s a union hall, which means we don’t have the stage after five, so it’s going to be a race against time. No doubt it will be a very scary day, but that’s showbiz, folks. Everyone feels these changes are great and will work, but just to add to my anxiety Skip hands me the schedule for tomorrow’s interviews. Tiarra has scheduled two and a half hours from ten until twelve thirty, when I am scheduled to have lunch with the Greedy Bastard promoters, who want to ask me to do more interviews! Ironically I shall have to interrupt this lunch held to persuade me to do more interviews in order to do an interview for CBC News.
Sphincters crossed for tomorrow.