The Python Years: Diaries 1969-1979 Volume One

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Number of Pages: 672

Michael Palin has kept a diary since newly married in the late 1960s, when he was beginning to make a name for himself as a TV scriptwriter (for the Two Ronnies, David Frost etc). Monty Python was just around the corner. In this first volume of his diaries he tells for the first time how Python emerged and triumphed, how he, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, the two Terrys – Jones and Gilliam – and Eric Idle, came together and changed the face of British comedy. But this is but only part of Palin’s story. Here is his growing family, his home in a north London Victorian terrace, which grows as he buys the houses next door and at the bottom of the garden, here, too, is his solo effort – as an actor, in Three Men in a Boat, his writing endeavours (often in partnership with Terry Jones) that produces Ripping Yarns, a pantomime and other theatrical plays. Meanwhile Monty Python refuses to go away: the hugely successful movies that follow the TV (his account of the making of The Holy Grail Python movie is a page-turner), the at times extraordinary goings on of the many powerful personalities who coalesced to form the Python team, the fight to prevent a American TV network from bleeping out the best jokes on US transmission – all this makes riveting reading.