INTERVIEW:Monty Python were the Beatles of comedy, reinventing their form with repeated ease, but no one from either troupe has remained as relevant, or as well-regarded, as Michael Palin. He talks to Laurence Mackinabout finding his feet in Hollywood and embarking on his travels.
RUMMAGING AROUND IN the minibar of his hotel room, Michael Palin is half murmuring to himself. “Where’s the ice? Ah, there’s none. Never mind. This’ll do.” Palin is, unsurprisingly, charm and manners personified, a man who could make diplomats and royalty appear abrupt by comparison. When asked a question, he circles around the answer before alighting on it. It’s all terribly intelligent, and all terribly English in an Oxbridge sort of way, and when the responses roll out in that familiar, genial British accent, you can’t help but agree with what’s being said.
At the same time, I have a constant sneaking suspicion that he’s on the verge of breaking into some unhinged routine, that he will quite calmly reach under the table to find a fish to slap me with, or douse me with a verse of the Lumberjack song. Sadly, it never happens, but the threat of comedy is always in the room.
Palin is in Dublin for a book signing to promote the second volume of his diaries, Halfway to Hollywood, which covers the bulk of the 1980s, a time when the Monty Python group was beginning to disband and solo projects were surfacing. Writing and acting took over much of Palin's life and the book ends with him nervously preparing to leave his home to make the TV travel documentary that would take his career in a new direction.
But it is also soaked in the anxiety of the 1980s, the combined bleakness of Thatcherite and Reaganite politics, and the everyday fear of the local threat from the IRA. There are frequent entries on the hunger strikers, and Palin shows an unusual level of understanding at a time when Irish republicanism and indeed Irish people in general were receiving little sympathy in Britain.
“I had read a bit of history and knew where the anger must come from,” he says. “I hated the fact that people would kill innocents or anybody else just to make a political point. A great deal of the obvious vilification was for the republican cause because it was anti-British; that wasn’t a good enough excuse. I hated both sides for doing what they did.”
One particular entry, surrounding one of the Palin family’s frequent trips to Ballymaloe, describes a grim day trip to Cobh on October 29th, 1981, where, he writes, there was a “definite frisson of hostility in Cobh.”
Palin grimaces slightly at the memory. “You feel uncomfortable in a place for being who you are, and it happens very rarely in the world. What struck me when I was in Cobh was they just saw us and they hated us for what we represented, which was being British, without really finding out what our view was – they were assuming we were against them.”
Palin writes his diary each morning, for roughly half an hour, and admits that “how you feel about all the things you’ve done, that’s probably the area where I sort of edit out”. In this volume, perhaps the most emotional event is intact – the months leading up to May 29th, 1987, when his sister Angela, who suffered from depression, took her own life. That morning, she had left Palin’s house, where she had been staying. “She never seems well in the morning and, once again, before she leaves, makes it clear that we can never understand how awful she feels,” he writes. In the afternoon, she killed herself.
“I always felt I wanted to leave those passages in, there was no doubt in my mind,” Palin says resolutely. “The press know about it and they have at various times got rather pious about it, done the over-sentimental thing of you know, ‘this comic’s terrible tragic loss’. So if I’m going to do it, I’d like to tell the story my way.”
An entry on May 29th, 1988, more than a year after her death, reads: “Cannot forget that Angela took her life a year ago. Everyone seems to have coped with it, though my hopes of talking about her, her life and death and the whys and wherefores with the family haven’t materialised.”
Did publishing these entries help in some way, even 21 years later, to do this? “It’s a while now since I wrote that entry and we have talked about it,” he says. “But it’s still quite awkward. I think putting it in the diaries helped.What I wanted was for her memory not to be airbrushed out of history because of the means of her death, which is still seen as something awful and something guilt-ridden and all that. Why should you forget the 52 years of her life that had gone before?”
For every paragraph of sadness in the book, though, there are easily a few pages of wit, and Palin's seeming hypochondria and litany of trips to various members of the medical fraternity is the stuff of comedy sketches. One particularly apocalyptic entry from 1984, a full two decades before Gillian McKeith started prodding around in our poo, reads: "Worried about my stools. The current fashionable indication of good health is that your stools float. Mine sink like so many Titanics."
Palin cracks up a little at the memory. “People say ‘Oh you’re very candid about your medical examinations.’ Well, that’s what you worry about. You talk about having a sigmoidoscope stuck up your backside and then people say ‘oh I’ve had that’. There are so many memoirs that smooth down the process of someone’s life and I feel that’s not interesting.”
A good deal of the interest in Palin’s life in these years comes from his acting career. He may not have actually married the idea of Hollywood, but he certainly consummated the relationship. However, it seems like an absolutely tortuous process, and you can’t help but wonder how he seemed to go from finishing one difficult film to almost immediately making another.
“Film-making is like a club and once you get in there and know a few people and make a movie, unless it’s been a complete disaster, people will want you to make another one,” he says. “Making movies is a very seductive thing and it’s rather glamorous in a way to say ‘I’ve had a meeting about my new movie’. The movies have that echo of the world I loved when I was growing up.”
But despite his success in his various spheres, he returns repeatedly to the idea that he’s not quite sure what he’s qualified to do, and in an entry as far back as 1981, Palin worries that he has become “a permanent addition to a gallery of famous British people. It’s all very worrying and offers me little comfort, for I know I am still the same bullshitter I always was.”
Is this still the case?
He gives a delighted grin, like a schoolboy trying to charm his way out of trouble. “Yeah absolutely, absolutely believe it. It’s not that I felt what I was doing was bullshit, I think a lot of the things were worthwhile and interesting, but you become someone who is sort of on tap as a figure, whose opinion can be asked on all sorts of things and treated respectfully. I try and only talk about things I know something about. Otherwise, I bullshit.”
But Palin admits that he must have some talent, given that he was part of the most influential comedy troupe of all time, has a colourful collection of large-scale Hollywood productions on his CV, and his travel shows and books are enjoyed by millions, not to mention the fact that no person in the history of the planet has ever knowingly gone on record as saying they disliked Michael Palin.
“I can talk to people about things and my enthusiasm comes across, and I approach things with a certain amount of humility. But they seem great obvious virtues that should be there in most people,” he insists, exasperation creeping into his voice. “I get this strange thing which journalists have of calling me nice.”
I swiftly put a big fat line through my next question.
“It’s almost as though everybody else is completely nasty and it’s just ridiculous.”
But for all Palin's inability to offend, Monty Pythonwas revolutionary in terms of the vast swathes of the chattering classes it managed to horrify. So were there any subjects that they felt they couldn't touch?
"Once you've done jokes about the crucifixion I suppose you have to say there's not much we couldn't approach, in the right way," he chuckles darkly. "The initial response to Eric's idea, Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory, was, 'Come on, we can't do that,' but we worked out a way of doing it.
“Could you do jokes about concentration camps? Probably not. Could you do jokes about Irish republican terrorists, sorry, freedom fighters or whatever? Probably not, because at the time people were laying bombs here and there. Just like now I don’t think I’d particularly do a comedy series about Islamic jihadists. I’d love to, but I think it’s maybe something you’ve to be a bit careful about.”
Indeed, it's hard to imagine some of their sketches or pranks taking place in the current environment – on April 1st, 1981, after a rather silly Pythonlunch, the group put a small ad in the London Times: "Nuclear Missile wanted, with warhead, London area." This, perhaps, is the secret to Python's success – the sheer anarchic pleasure in creating nonsense.
"There's a certain joyfulness in being silly," Palin says almost dreamily. "We constantly ask why did Pythonsurvive and part of it was after seeing a Pythonshow people felt oddly happy, they felt happier than when they went into it, there was nothing in there to make you feel too much about the human condition. The Life of Brianwas kind of tough stuff, but most people came out of it humming Always Look on the Bright Side. I think joy is quite important in comedy; the joy of being funny and being silly."
This, and a group of strong personalities who had no trouble shooting down each other's ideas, meant the quality of their comedy was consistently high. In the wake of The Life of Brian, there was a thrilling suggestion that they do an Old Testament follow-up, but several members decided it was unwieldy.
"I suppose in a way I was the most conciliatory of the group in the sense that I wanted to write a comedy and perform it and didn't really want to get into a huge argument," admits Palin. "Terry Jones and John [Cleese], particularly, had very strong ideas about what we should do. It may come across in the diary as constant arguing and bickering but everybody wanted to do something really good. We felt we owed it to people who love Pythonto keep doing something that was different and find something different to say."
Python's continuing influence, though, stretches far beyond comedy. At the height of Sarah Palin's campaign for the US vice presidency, one brilliant spoofer began a campaign for Michael Palin as vice president, pointing out that they both shared similar attitudes: what more pro-life evidence do you need than the Pythons' musical number called Every Sperm is Sacred?
“That was one of the nicest things that happened out of that whole dreadful business of another Palin coming along who was the most reactionary, untravelled person you could imagine,” says this Palin. “She’s slightly sort of the dark side of me or maybe I’m the bright side of her, who knows?”
The end of the diaries sees Palin prepare to leave home to begin recording Around the World in 80 Days, as the third-choice presenter. It was first offered to Alan Whicker (whom Pythonsatirised in a sketch, and whom Palin went to meet before leaving on his trip, a meeting recounted in somewhat bitchy if very funny and affectionate terms), and then to Miles Kington. "Miles was a friend of mine and sadly died a year ago, a very good journalist, and he was asked to do it and said 'no, it's a bit boring'. He never let me forget it after that."
Then followed his latter-day career as a travel journalist, something that has lead to his recent appointment as president of the Royal Geographic Society. “I just love the society for what it represents and the fact that it’s been there since 1820, with Shackleton and all these people,” he enthuses.
“It has always been the heart of geography and exploration. I think we can try and rally the subject of geography out of being a rather nerdy, boring sort of association and make it what it is, the one subject that covers all the big problems of the world at the moment. And also I get to walk into this wonderful place. It’s not the same place Shackleton left from in 1913, but it’s the same spirit of the society.”
And so begins another chapter in Palin’s career, which will no doubt go another step towards making him even more of a British institution. And for the record, he’s definitely not nice.
Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980 to 1988: The Film Years, by Michael Palin, is published by Weidenfeld Nicolson, £20 Photographs: Matt Kavanagh