Back to London by a quarter to twelve, tine to get back home on the Broad Street line, change, grab a quick coffee and drive down to Berkeley Square to have lunch with John Cleese at Morton’s. I rang John at the end of last week, as I just suddenly felt like a chat with him — warmed, as I had been, by his quite superbly funny performances in Fawlty Towers.

We drank a couple of whiskey sours at the bar and, as so often happens to John, we’re joined at the bar by a rather boring man, an architect, who was just off, as he put it, to ‘Saudi.’ Five years ago, if a man had said he was going to Saudi Arabia, you’d probably think he’d been in trouble with the police. Now it’s where the money is . . .

We go up to the restaurant and, despite his having just completed a very funny, widely praised series on the awful way people can be treated in hotels and restaurants, John and I are shown to the smallest table in the room, at which John has great difficulty in actually sitting.

. . .

He was stongly defensive when I suggested that there was a certain resentment that he had never been present on any of the film publicity trips. ‘I thought people liked going,’ was John’s response.

. . .

I dropped in at Nigel’s studio to see him and Judy. All was quiet. Nigel says the art market in England is in a deplorable state. They sit sometimes for days with no one coming round — Nigel seems to manage to make ends meet by sales in New York. American money does have its uses.

— Michael Palin, Diaries 1969 – 1979: The Python Years