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Chapters (21)
  1. Cover
  2. Landing Page
  3. A Private Function
  4. CONTENTS
  5. INTRODUCTION
  6. The Old Crowd
  7. CAST
  8. A Private Function
  9. PREFACE
  10. CAST AND CREDITS
  11. Prick Up Your Ears
  12. PREFACE
  13. CAST AND CREDITS
  14. 102 Boulevard Haussmann
  15. CAST AND CREDITS
  16. The Madness of King George
  17. PREFACE
  18. CAST AND CREDITS
  19. About the Author
  20. Also by the Author
  21. Copyright

Pigs are undoubtedly intelligent creatures and nothing if not determined. The squeals of a pig being persuaded to go where it doesn’t want to or to do anything (which is most things apart from eating) that it doesn’t want to do is the sound of angry, frustrated will. By the exercise of patience and nerve (time always running out), Malcolm Mowbray generally managed to get some kind of convincing behaviour on film. But in the scene where Gilbert has to entice the pig into his car and drive away with it, we all but failed. The scene as shot is just about convincing, but in ideal circumstances (more money, more time) the sequence should have been longer, happier and in the end more triumphant. But it was a night shoot, the woods where we were filming were thick with wild garlic and the appeal of the tastiest morsel blunted.

In the end we were thankful to have got the pig into the car at all and had to abandon the scenes of Gilbert driving along with it as described in the script. Once in the car it had been no joke. With one trotter in his crotch and the other round his neck, Michael Palin compared it to being in the car with an overweight and over-amorous landlady. And like landladies they are, trotting naked over the linoleum in their little high heels, delicate and fastidious, their quivering bottoms wonderful to see. ‘Oh yes,’ said Denholm Elliott, ‘once that thing gets its snout into the lens I can see none of us are going to get a look-in.’ And not merely its snout.

In the end the pig is killed. It wasn’t our pig, admittedly, all three of it now living in retirement in Sussex. Still a pig was killed, several if one counts the carcasses in the bed and in the wardrobe. The final credits sequence, in which Gilbert and Allardyce fondle their newly acquired piglet was put in to take the edge off Betty’s death. But of course that piglet too will be dead by now. I haven’t eaten pork since, though without thinking this a sensible, sufficient or even logical response. The scene of the pig in the bath that started it all seemed, when shot, to hold things up and was cut from the finished film. That’s often the way. Still, it was a favourite scene so I’ve left it in the script as something that did once happen, even if not in the film we made out of it.

CAST AND CREDITS

The première of A Private Function took place on 21 November 1984 at the Odeon Cinema, Haymarket, London. The cast was as follows: