Michael Palin’s flying circus: from clown to fabler

‘What is the fascination with Mr Palin?” I was on a train recently with the three volumes of Michael Palin’s diaries. A man across the aisle, who’d been drinking cans of lager with fierce intent, was suddenly standing over me.

“Or are you studying to be a comedian?” He shook his can and sang, “Aristotle, Aristotle, was a bugger for the bottle.”

I meet Palin a week later and tell him about his train tribute. “Was it Terry Jones, by any chance?” he says “We know it wasn’t Terry Gilliam, now that he’s dead.”

Gilliam is, of course, not dead, although Variety did accidentally publish his obituary recently. Palin was on the radio at the time. Knowing it wasn't true, he said, "Oh god, he has a book to promote."

“How fascinating to read your own obituary. I’m seeing him tonight actually,” Palin says, and on cue receives a text from Gilliam. “See you there or see you dead.”

We are in a private members club in Soho. Palin says he prefers this one; fewer celebrities and all that.

“Allowing your star to shine a little brighter?” He waves his hand and laughs. In conversation, he walks a line between celebrity and ordinariness, a desire for solitude and a need to be seen.

Palin is fond of café life. “I don’t have an office as such and we used to meet up – the Pythons – having a meal together was sometimes work. We got more done in that hour and a half than you might do sitting in a proper meeting room with a notepad and pencils freshly sharpened. We liked comedy coming out of life.”

Palin will soon embark on his Thirty Years Tour, a one-man show. "It's a little autobiography really; how it all pieces together", from the early days of Monty Python and Ripping Yarns, through to Great Railway Journeys and his many other travel series.

I tell him I watched his Irish railway journey recently, in which Palin interviews the Edge as they ride the Dart.

“I always find Ireland is somewhere you go and things happen which you don’t necessarily expect. It’s a sort of place where people sort of seem to be generally more relaxed than I find over here. They’ll talk about anything, and have a drink.”

Storyteller

The storyteller in Palin made himself known early on. “I was quite shy in class, but I had a good imagination. I could make people laugh.” At 10, he would put on “funny acts” during the lunch break at school.

His mother was long a supporter of his talents, even appearing in a Saturday Night Live sketch with him in her 80s. His father, however, was not encouraging. He believed Palin was wasting his Oxford education. "He was quite unhappy in certain ways, he had a stammer which can't have helped." After the Depression, and then the war, "you can understand people getting not exactly bitter, but wary of life".

Palin presented a pop show after university. “I told him I got a decent pay cheque. I got married at 22. I think he felt that was a step towards stability. Michael’s got a house and a mortgage and a car.”

He’s been married to Helen, and lived in that same house, for almost 50 years. “It represents the two sides of me. One is someone who quite likes conformity; very happy to lead a quiet regular timetable of life but at the same time is going off doing all sorts of things because one’s mind is saying, it’s not the end of life, being comfortable and consistent and sitting at home. The other part is whatever dreams you have, ideas you have, challenges you get off on.”

It is often said diaries are written to be read but Palin insists he did not intend to have them published. “Ten years ago someone suggested that it was about time I wrote an autobiography.” Resisting the temptation to impose a narrative on his life, he published the diaries instead. How did his friends and family react?

“Terry Gilliam’s only criticism was that there wasn’t more of him in it. Terry Jones had a nice idea that we should produce a volume of diaries in which the Pythons would annotate, saying ‘I don’t remember this, he wasn’t there’.

“John’s a bit, ‘Was I really like that, did I do this?’ John’s a difficult one because he’s quite complex. I have a great relationship with John but sometimes you have to put down what it’s like working with everyone and John was always the one who had to go, looking at his watch, but he was also the funniest of the lot, so it balances out.”

Palin also made the decision to leave in his diary entries on the depression and suicide of his only sibling, his sister Angela. “I thought if I don’t include that then this just perpetuates this slightly awkward idea that you don’t talk about uncomfortable things, especially suicide in your own family.

“With all those accounts of a sudden unexpected – well it wasn’t unexpected actually – but a death of that kind . . . everyone always has their own experiences and I always found I read anything about suicide because of my sister. I’m very comforted by other people’s reactions and also by the fact that no one quite expects it to happen where it does. So I hope I’ve contributed to that source of material for people who want a bit of comfort.

“My sister’s condition was deep, deep depression and you just can’t understand quite why it can be so deep that you want to leave this world, so that’s the intriguing thing really. I don’t understand it but I respect what she did.”

When writing about the death of his sister, or the death of fellow Python Graham Chapman, Palin avoids sentimentality, but his descriptions of the world around him become defiantly lush. “Maybe that’s the way to deal with it. I very much value life and I get very energised by it. I enjoy things very very easily. And I think that’s so completely opposite to what my sister must have been feeling. And yet how can we be that different. That’s a riddle.

“Someone said, you’ve got to find some point of delight every day. It’s quite a good thing at the end of the day to say what delighted you.”

Critics

In the latest volume of diaries, Travelling to Work, we see Palin embark on his first travel programme, Around the World in 80 Days. He is full of doubt and watchful of his reviews. "I honestly do not understand people who say they've never looked at their reviews. I think that's a dereliction of duty."

He has a knack for succinct character portraits, which are scattered throughout the diaries: Roald Dahl, Jeremy Irons, Kingsley Amis. “A couple of reviews took me to task for just making a list of famous people I’d met,” he says, easily recalling the reviewers’ names. “I felt, God, you’ve just got it wrong. I still have this wretched sense of wonder. If we go to an event where Princess Diana and Charles were coming around to meet us, I want to say what it was like. But to say that this is just a chronicle of his gawping celebrity life; I was really sort of upset about that.”

Perhaps the problem is that Palin sees himself as a giddy outsider, whereas to others looking on, he’s as much an insider as one can be. He is a comedian, an actor, a novelist, a presenter, yet Palin is reluctant to admit a preference.

“Writing is something which I wish I could do better. I know that the solitary experience is what it’s all about because you’re trying to dig into your own imagination but at the same time, there are insecurities, you’re terribly anxious for approval from an editor.

“But acting is just the same. I can remember doing a day’s work and just desperate at the end of the day for someone to say, you’re really good. It’s about telling a story and a story needs an audience.

“I suppose that, despite the fact that I like my own company, I can be quite solitary, I’m not a publicity seeker, but I do need an audience.”

Palin on Python

While Palin insists they’ll never do a reunion show on a large scale again, “We’ll carry on, because Python’s legacy has surprised us all. There’s no point in doing it if you’re feeling resentful. John quite blatantly says, ‘I’ve got to get the money cos of my divorce settlements.’ And yet I know he actually does quite enjoy testing himself as a performer. He loves people laughing at him.”

Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988-98 is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Michael Palin's Thirty Years Tour is at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on October 29th; ticketmaster.com