Michael Palin is tanned and as sleek as a greyhound. He has specified a battered club in London’s Soho for our meeting, and looks at home as he poses for photographs on the weathered staircase. He likes a hint of decay. He doesn’t, as I discover later when we talk about his foray into Hollywood, like the slick, the superficial, the fiction that life is anything other than messy.
Palin is also a bit suspicious of interviewers, especially those who, as he has complained in the past, “think they’ve cracked you in half an hour [when] I’ve spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses”. Lucky I’ve got an hour and half. As a comedian, actor, film star, screenwriter, playwright, novelist and television traveller, at 71 he is still asking himself what he really is.
The other thing he objects to is being described as nice – “terminally nice”, according to the Independent. It’s a way of patronising him. But despite having more steel than people perhaps give him credit for, he is unquestionably a decent chap: the sticking plaster over the open wound that was the later Monty Python; a man who has been happily married to the same woman and lived in the same house in north London for almost 50 years; patron of many charities; and a lifelong Guardian reader to boot.
We are meeting to discuss the third – and, Palin insists, final – volume of his diaries. The first, covering the 1970s, was mostly Python; the second, dealing with the 80s, traced his flirtation with Hollywood; now we are into the 90s, in which he establishes himself as the nation’s favourite guide to exotic destinations while making the odd film and writing a novel and a West End play. It’s breezy, meeting-filled and, when he describes the deaths of his mother and of fellow Python Graham Chapman, rather moving.
The death of Chapman, the anarchic heart of Python, in 1989 comes early in the book, and is closely followed by that of Palin’s mother. “I was there when they both died,” he says. “I’m unsentimental about death. It’s just something that happens. But I think it’s important to describe loss and the actual act of dying.”
“The great thing about a diary is that it’s about a day,” says Palin. “It’s not about a life. An autobiography is about a life. You look back. You work out how it was and see patterns. A diary is about that day, and the next day will be a completely different you.” Diaries are essays in juxtaposition. “The thing I always remember,” he adds, “is my dad dying in a hospital in Suffolk and the football results were on in the background. The number of times my dad and I used to listen to the football results: ‘Aldershot 3, Huddersfield Town 0.’” Death during Division Three – a Pythonesque exit.
“My view of the world, really,” Palin says, “is that if you screw your eyes up and look at the world, it is an absurd and extraordinarily silly place, with everyone taking themselves very seriously.” That may be the clue to the Palin screen persona: the little man bullied by self-appointed autocrats who fights back. By all accounts, his engineer father could be something of a martinet; his relationship with John Cleese (who calls him “Mickey”) appears to be that of headmaster and errant pupil; and several of the characters he has played, notably Jim Nelson in Alan Bleasdale’s TV drama GBH, have been seemingly insignificant men who respond heroically when faced with a crisis.
In Python, he was often the put-upon fellow towered over, physically and sometimes intellectually, by Cleese. But in the end, he gives as good as he gets. As Mr Wensleydale in the cheese shop sketch he is brilliantly unembarrassed despite having no cheese to offer the posh, patronising, sesquipedalian customer played by Cleese; and in the dead parrot sketch – the most famous Python turn of them all – he again holds his own against Cleese’s bullying, offering another spirited defence of the indefensible. The words are now as imprinted on the British public mind as a Hamlet soliloquy: “He’s not dead, he’s resting! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue. Beautiful plumage!” He played another variant on this little man who ultimately wins through in the highly successful 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda. The role netted him a Bafta.
This volume of diaries finds Palin at a crossroads. “Python had been done and finished; where exactly was I going to go now? I knew I could act, so maybe I should do that. I thought my future would probably be in comedy, but there were no good scripts around. I wrote a novel; I had a play put on in the West End. Then the travel – Around the World in 80 Days – came completely out of the blue.”
The series was a huge success, and Palin was reborn. Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle (around the Pacific), Hemingway’s Adventure (following in the footsteps of his literary hero), Sahara, Himalaya, New Europe, Brazil – he’s been everywhere, man. “After each one I’d debate whether I ought to do any more, and say ‘No, that’s it’.” But that was never it. Palin became an accidental traveller, a caring, sharing version of Alan Whicker (who, as the cynics liked to point out, was the butt of many a sketch in Python).
Cleese is one of those cynics – he always yawns when the travel programmes are mentioned. “It’s terribly effective,” says Palin. They made a joke of it at this summer’s Python reunion show at London’s O2. “I encouraged him. There’s a bit where I appear on television, and he does a huge yawn, which much to my chagrin got a big laugh.” But doesn’t Cleese have a point – wasn’t it a diversion, a waste of Palin’s creative talents? “80 Days was the single most successful thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he counters. “Python is now seen as hugely successful and important, but the returns weren’t great. The show was never a ratings hit. Around the World in 80 Days – the book was top, we got 12.8 million viewers, you have to take that on board.”
I can’t, though, help feeling sympathy with that Cleese yawn. Surely Palin was a bit peeved to have swapped the Hollywood movies of the 80s for the travelogues of the 90s? “I loved going to LA, but none of it was really me,” he says. “I like things that don’t quite function, things where you have to use your imagination to make it all work. In Hollywood, it’s got to work.” He had been hot in the early 80s, thanks to The Missionary and Time Bandits. “Being feted in Hollywood is quite irresistible,” he admits. “They are very warm and very generous. But as soon as the takings go down and you have a bad third week, the calls aren’t returned.”
Palin says he and Hollywood never really clicked. “All these big power brokers seem to know very little in the end. They were desperate to find a good script, and yet when they found it they took it over and fed into it what they thought were important elements like the fame of the actors.”He worked for years on the 1991 film American Friends which, he says ruefully, “was probably seen by about three people on the planet”. He wanted Connie Booth to play the lead; the studio suggested two US stars. He got his way, but it was a hell of a struggle – and the film bombed.
Did Palin consciously withdraw from the battle? “Yeah,” he says. I point out that his fellow Python Terry Gilliam has kept up the Hollywood struggle. “But Gilliam is a battler,” he says. “He’s like some sort of samurai warrior; wherever he goes, there are corpses.”
Did the Pythons watch what each of the others did after their run of films ended with The Meaning of Life in 1983? “We all pretend not to be interested in what each other is doing,” says Palin. “There’s a certain detachment, as if we’re saying: ‘It’s an open marriage, OK, we just don’t want to know.’” So they don’t want each other to fail in their solo careers? “No ... well, probably yes,” he says. Open marriage is spot on. Palin’s wife Helen hardly features in the diaries – he protests that she’s there in the uncut version – in part because he’s having a passionate, if occasionally acrimonious, relationship with a bunch of strange blokes.
“Python brought us together and is intense when it really works,” he says. “Yet beyond that, there wasn’t really unanimous agreement on anything. We wrote good stuff and could perform together well, but we also knew when it was over. The Meaning of Life was hard to write. Life of Brian and the Holy Grail had been easy, but with The Meaning of Life we hadn’t been able to find that magic formula of getting an idea for the narrative. We all felt it was a slog.”
How, then, was this summer’s reunion? Was any of the old passion left? “The decision to get together was made last November,” says Palin. “Python needed funds. People were saying it was the most wonderful comedy show ever, but nothing was really being done with it. It was shambolically marketed. Then there were personal reasons – John always talks about his alimony, Terry [Jones] about his mortgage, and they’re only partly joking. Jim Beach, a friend of Eric’s from university days who manages Queen, said: ‘Why don’t you do O2? A couple of shows there, you’ll probably clear your debts.’ And within 45 seconds – almost less time than it took to sell the tickets – we agreed to do it.”
Eric Idle put the show together. “He kept in touch with us about what sketches were going to be in it. When we got together in June – two weeks before we were opening – everybody agreed there had to be a spirit of unity.” Gilliam had been the chief naysayer, convinced it would be a disaster, but Palin says even he came round in the end. “There was lots of public grumbling, but everyone agreed to have a go. I was quoted as saying that a lot of Python was crap, which I think I said in response to some interviewer who was arguing it was all wonderful. I just wanted to debunk the legend. But that was all right. It’s how Python should go into these things.”
Palin disliked all the hype, but loved being back on stage. “I had lots of worries about how it was going to work; we all did in private. But on that first night, all those concerns disappeared and doing the shows was rather joyful. I’ve never seen the gang as happy.”
For all their disagreements over the years, he says they retain a bond. “No one else has been Pythons apart from us, and that’s an extraordinary thing. That’s why we have this odd friendship: it’s based on Python, and it doesn’t extend beyond that, because there’s a certain jealousy about what all of us do beyond Python. There’s still a feeling that we’ve created Python, that’s what matters among us all, and anything else we do will be inferior. We know deep down there’s something about Python that is distinctive and indefinable.” Palin accepts that, no matter where his other creative wanderings take him, his tombstone will say, “Ex-Python”. There may be a sketch there.
Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988-1998 is published on 11 September by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. To order from the Guardian bookshop, call 0330 333 6846 or visit guardianbookshop.co.uk
