Michael PaLIN
Perspective Magazine, November 2024
It’s not a test – which cake Michael Palin will choose from the assortment I've brought as a gift – but reveals his appetite for mischief. There’s the decadent chocolatey thing, the one with a pleasing texture dusted with icing sugar, and the woefully overdone scone, studded with burnt raisins. Palin chooses the scone. "I like dry and uninteresting," he riffs, with a mouth full of crumbs. "This is like eating something out of the archaeological museum. Oh, this scone has history!"
I'm visiting him at home with Perspective's editor Rowan Pelling, and as Palin fixes us coffee she reminds him that last time they met she interviewed him on the floor, ostensibly so she could balance various bits of recording tech, but also not unhappy to be sitting at the feet of the genial ex-Python and nation's favourite TV traveller. She flashes us the headline that accompanied that 2015 piece in the Telegraph. "Michael Palin: how to stay married for 49 years (sex has nothing to do with it)." He prefers this to a recent article in the Times in which, he laughs, "they had a picture of me looking pallid" alongside a header reading: "Michael Palin: I don’t fear death. It will come soon."
Palin seems less upset by premature rumours of his demise than by any suggestion that his national treasure status makes his books some sort of fount of wisdom. "I don't want to impose anything of mine on anybody else," he tells us. "I want to encourage readers by writing about why one needs adventure... why one needs to get into areas where you actually don’t know what's going to happen."
The fourth volume of his bestselling diaries, There and Back, 1999-2009, has just been published and the room we’re sitting in is where much of his writing takes place. Three sides are neatly crammed bookshelves containing thousands of titles (though we note that when Palin goes searching for a slim volume of World War I remembrances to show us, he locates it almost immediately). It's an expansive, uncluttered room that's flooded with light, with an intriguing array of artefacts and pictures, and a small regiment of BAFTA awards conspiring in an alcove. Photos occupy the narrow section of wall behind his computer: there's one of Palin sporting the Green Man’s magnificent grey dreadlocks from the Worzel Gummidge children's series he starred in, but mostly it's framed family occasions, kids, friends, fellow Pythons, and, most significantly, his beloved wife of 57 years, Helen, who died in May 2023. These are his support team and the main subject of his latest volume of diaries.
There and Back gives an entertaining account of Palin's life off camera, a mix of the everyday and the exotic, whether it's the day-to-day ideas and discussions that arise in everyday domestic life or the glittering industry events where he's gulping down champagne with the likes of British actress Emily Watson. Though he doesn't leave out the days when he's feeling grumpy with the usual irritations and banalities of living. There are pithy asides, and the odd sliver of delicious bitchiness. What sings for me are the episodes of casual anarchy that remind you of his early career as a Python, such as the visit to a primary school [in UK?] when he challenges teachers to balance on an awkward African stool, while delighted children giggle uncontrollably.
Palin earned global fame as part of the Monty Python comedy troupe in the 1970s, but developed his successful alternative career as a TV explorer when he hosted BBC’s 1980 series Great Railway Journeys of the World. Then, in 1989, "they asked if I’d be interested in a new project – Around the World in Eighty Days – I’d be followed by camera all the way around the world. And I said yeah, absolutely! I only realised later that four people had turned it down before me."
Among them was the traditional, blazer-clad broadcaster Alan Whicker. "Well, he liked to be well pressed and nice suits and cocktail parties. And all the places we went… imagine him going into the capsule hotel! Where do I hang my jacket? My theory is that [he and the] others probably turned it down because among other things – like being away from home a lot – it didn't fit their image of themselves and what they felt the public wanted of them. I didn't have any problem with that at all. I had been doing comedy and films. To me, it was just a chance to do something impossibly attractive that I had always wanted to do."
Did the fact it was unscripted give him pause? "It frightened me the morning we were leaving. I suddenly thought, I'm just going to have to go around and talk to people. And try and be interesting and ad lib, and I wasn't confident with that at all. It wasn't the ideal way of travelling. And for the first or second episodes going through Europe, I felt very slightly awkward. You know: what am I supposed to be? Am I acting?"
But by the time Palin and his crew had arrived in the Persian Gulf and loaded themselves aboard a small local sailing vessel with livestock and laxatives, something interesting had evolved.
"We were on the dhow and everything had gone wrong. They didn't have any English speakers and took us seven days to reach Bombay and there were no cabins. You slept on deck with the cargo and there were these very poor Gujarati fishermen on whom the success of our project depended. All this BBC money. But these guys were so lovely and I just enjoyed being with them. I forgot all about what I had to be and my image. And that sort of worked. And once I got off the ship in Bombay, I realised: all I have to be is me. There's no point in trying to play a part or fit into some role which someone else has created for you. And that suited me fine in the end."
Of course, the most memorable moments are when things don’t go to plan, and it turns out Whicker had offered Palin advice about how to avoid the inevitable delays and unexpected tribulations. "He said to me: I'll give you a card. Ring this number at any point in your journey, and you will be airlifted out and taken back to London." But I had accepted the job because I wanted it to be an adventure. I didn't know what was going to happen and the last thing you want is to be plucked out [just because] you've got no hot water."
Even his office – "a very good team of people who look after me when I travel abroad" – can make him feel too nannied. "They watch the plane and know exactly when it's taking off. They say, oh you're half an hour late. But I want to be the one who says I'm half an hour late!"
He finds it understandably frustrating to be watched over because the ultimate freedom for an explorer is unpredictability; the discoveries are made when things going awry.
"Algorithms seems to militate against the adventure, the not knowing, working something out, changing your mind, going a different way," he says. "The huge companies controlling our lives. We'll make you be able to get around the world but we will know where you are at all times. And that's very, very useful for a lot of companies who will want to send you stuff about underpants and God knows what else." But not useful for the explorer.
Maps are a passion for Palin, especially when they show still-undiscovered country. "I’ve got an atlas, which goes back to 1851 or something like that. And it has Central Africa and they're desperate to sort of get as much in as possible but they haven't heard from Burton and Speke, so they just put in in pencil and the rest of the world is beautifully illustrated. But it's pencil marks because they don't know yet what's there. And it's late Victorian. It was the age of adventure. We've coloured it all in now. Everybody knows where everything is."
He remains a lover of maps. "It's a bit like books as opposed to audio books. I like to have a book, the actual thing. So when I look through it, I don't go straight to the point and immediately start reading. I thumb back and say, oh, I missed that bit. It's the same when you unroll a map – you know exactly where you want to go, then you say well, this river goes there and that waterfall is so close." It's about having the freedom to choose the best route.
The lure of the unknown echoes back to Palin's childhood, when the countryside around his home town of Sheffield tugged at his imagination. "We made our own adventures. I would ride my bike across the golf course, and then there was a sort of escarpment with big tall rocks. It was just like being in a Western with the river in the valley and we used to go out there and imagine these games."
Unsurprisingly, he was a boy less likely to put his hand up in class and more inclined to indulge in daydreaming out of windows – a habit, he says happily, that resulted in him meeting his beloved wife, Helen. Aged fifteen, when Palin was on a family holiday in Southwold, he spied Helen from the breakfast-room window and felt instant kinship with her rebellious nature. That holiday romance became the great love of his life.
"There were these girls with this big man with a towel around his neck, who was the uncle striding out heroically. And two of the girls were following on smiling doing their best and the third didn't want to do it at all. I thought that's great, that somebody who wants her freedom not to go to the North Sea at eight o’clock in the morning. And I think that's why we stayed together and why we had a successful marriage, we were both reluctant conformists, with a slightly mischievous approach to things. Now I'm generally conformist. I live a well-ordered life, pay my bills, but there's always a side of me that's attracted to something outside other people's imagination and inside my own."
Perhaps one example of this is when he was filming in prison, "the first time I'd seen what prison life was like," and it led directly to his involvement with the Prison Reform Trust. "There was real apathy in prison and I felt that wasn't right. You know, you deprive people of their liberty but [if] you put them in chains, they don't seem to be able to be interested in anything. I chatted to them and after a bit they started to ask questions. I thought, you’ve got to treat people as human beings."
In There and Back he describes judging entries in the Trust’s essay competition on the theme of failure in 2002. It was "a vindication of the act of writing and the exercise of the imagination," he tells us. "Two or three of them just cut through. I thought, Wow! the ability to see that in yourself and express it on paper and tell somebody else about it. They really had something."
Palin is delightful company and so open that at certain points in our conversation he looks close to tears when he talks of missing both Helen and his fellow Python Terry Jones, who died early in 2020. We ask if he can tell us more about what makes for a long and successful marriage? Apart from deep love and affection, it was vital to accommodate each other’s preferences, he says. "I don't think I'm getting this wrong because we talked about it a lot. She didn't mind looking after the family while I was away. In fact, in many ways it was much easier without me there getting in the way!" This gave him space to indulge his love of travel, adventures that were all the more satisfying knowing he'd be able to slot straight back into family life on his return. For his part, he was happy knowing that during his absences Helen would be enjoying her life in London, busy with family, friends and her enriching work as a bereavement councillor. It's easy to imagine, from the way he talks of her, the joy for both of them when he came home from his wanderings. As he says in his diaries: "Time can’t stand still, but families can make it seem that way." And they clearly managed to navigate empty nest syndrome together after their daughter and two sons had left home. One entry reads: "Just H and myself. Both sexagenarians now. And still up at midnight."
Now it's just him, an octogenarian who's still planning his next escape. "I’d love to go to Murmansk," he enthuses. "I'm kind of fascinated by it. I'm sure it's a pretty bleak and hard place. But that's what that's what makes it interesting." Difficult terrain offers more potential interest than something conventionally pleasant – there's more scope for stories. Palin seems to have a seasoned traveller's tolerance for discomfort and grime, though when we press him for his worst travel experience, he describes the squalid sanitation at base camp in the Himalayas.
"There were sort of triangular shapes where the hole for the loo was, a spiral of frozen poo. And I couldn't deal with that. So I went all the way out into the field and all the paper blew away. And I thought, "God, this is this is the worst, worst moment of my life. This is when I'd least like anyone ever to see me."
Palin eyes us with the mischievous glint that has made him so beloved by viewers around the world. "And then it ended up in a magazine with the headline: 'Michael Palin says poo to constipation'. "