THE FILLMORE IS A TOUGH GIG TO PLAY. IT’S A HUGE CUBE, WHICH IS IDEAL FOR ABSORBING THE NOISE OF ROCK-AND-ROLL, BUT NOT SO EASY FOR THROWAWAY LINES. THEY HAVE FILLED THE ROOM WITH ROUND TABLES SO IT’S MORE LIKE A bar mitzvah or a Hollywood Ratfuck32 than the nicely laid-out theaters we are used to. It’s also beastly cold. Ancient psychedelic posters look down on us everywhere. There is even one in my dressing room for the Bonzo Dog Band. I think joyfully of the young Neil Innes playing here in the days when he had hair….
I don’t have a lot of voice and worry about the next two nights as I pour lemon and honey down my throat. But we get them. They are standing and applauding and demanding encores at the end…and the San Francisco Chronicle gives me one of the best reviews of my life. “It’s an evening ofeye-opening hilarity with a master comic at the top of his game….”
Today has gone pear-shaped, as they say in England. It’s 3:25 and I’m waiting for a car that hasn’t shown up to take me to a live radio show that begins in five minutes at a radio station I know not which in a location I know not where. And my feeling? Anxiety? Panic? Anger? Mounting frustration? Nah. Relief. Thank God I don’t have to answer any more questions. I can sit and have a cup of tea in peace. After many phone calls betwixt Wendy, our new PR person, Skip, the concierge, and the radio station, they finally figure out what went wrong. The car was waiting downstairs all the time but they were waiting for Mr. X, my supersecret pseudonym. This is the identity I am registered under at the hotel so that I am safe from the legion of panty-throwing women who would otherwise be unable to resist the impulse to call me up in the middle of the night and offer me sex. Mr. X is not, of course, my real pseudonym but a phony pseudonym for the purposes of this diary, intended to conceal my real pseudonym, which is Mr. Y. Oh shit. Dammit. Anyway, when the bellman asked the driver if they were waiting for Mr. Idle, the man naturally enough said “No.” I always thought these pseudonym things were daft. They mainly prevent my family getting through to me.
At the Fillmore I get a note from Sheila Buhr, who was with me in My Girl Herbert at Cambridge University in 1965. We perform the madrigal from that show every night, so when it comes time I introduce her to the audience. I can see her unexpected delight, and she and her husband beam throughout the show. She was one of the first women to be admitted to the Footlights Club, in 1965. The Footlights is a famous old revue society founded at Cambridge in 1883, and it’s where I first saw John Cleese perform and where I met Graham Chapman, a recently departed alumnus. I became a member by auditioning in 1963, and in my final year they made me president. This meant you had to wear a ratty old pink dinner jacket. At the end of the year when everyone else was doing finals the Footlights would mount a two-hour professional stage revue at the Arts Theatre Cambridge, which would then go on tour, ending up at the Edinburgh Festival. Since the club did not admit women it was always a difficult job finding funny girls with experience performing sketch comedy. I determined to alter all that and my first act as president was to change the ancient rules to admit female members. I was quite a radical chap in my little leather jacket. Gay dons wept and begged me not to alter the tradition, but it was clearly nuts not to have funny females on an equal footing in a comedy club. Oddly almost the first woman through the door was Germaine Greer, who was hilarious, and later bet me she could sleep with every male member of the cast of My Girl Herbert. I took the bet and won; she got stuck on the horn player.
When I check into a hotel I always go under the name Mick Jagger. I find I get a better class of wrong number.
The great and good PythOnline editor Hans Ten Cate was also at the show with Mrs. Hans. They are a couple of very nice chaps. His devotion and dedication to the Python religion is legendary. He is the Paul of Pythonism, with Kim Howard Johnson as Peter. I think it is high time Python was recognized as a religion. People say it changed their lives. It seems to give people hope. They gather together in groups to chant mass quotes. We have all spent three days on a cross. And it would give us a very decent tax break. For fuck sake, if Scientology can be rated a religion, then Pythology ought to qualify under any decent tax system.