THE MARVELLOUS MICHAEL PALIN
INTERVIEW + PODCAST
Monty Python member, travel presenter and poor parrot salesman Michael Palin is bringing his first ever one-man show to Cardiff. He tells Heather Arnold about his terrible ideas, recruiting film extras from their cars and reuniting with the ‘old farts’.
If you don’t fancy reading our interview with Michael Palin you can listen to the whole thing in our Buzz Podcast.
Where to start with Michael Palin?
He’s the youngest member of the iconic comedy team Monty Python, of course, but he’s also an iconic travel show presenter (there is a term in the tourism industry called the ‘Palin Effect’, where a certain country gets a boost in travellers shortly after Palin makes his mark there), a BAFTA award-winning actor, an activist and a writer.
Such a long list of job titles is hard to fit on a business card, so Palin decide to put his life into a book instead. Several books actually, in the form of his diaries. The latest diary, Travelling To Work – Diaries 1988-1998, is the third Palin has put in to the public sphere.
But why did he decide to publish his diaries in the first place?
“In about 2006 people were asking if I would write my autobiography,” explains Michael. “I thought if I write an autobiography, most of the material will come from my diaries. Rather than doing an autobiography, which can look back on history, I could just get some living history and use the diaries, which have an account of what I thought on that particular day and that particular time. When I started reading the diaries back I was quite surprised how up and down my life was, how one day you would think how wonderful this idea is and then the next, it’s a terrible idea.
“In the last diary I talked about A Fish Called Wanda, the first film I was ever in, and in there is the day when John [Cleese] sent me the script. I’m looking at it thinking ‘is this going to work? I don’t like this, this isn’t for me, how do I tell him?’ Reading the script then it seemed quite hard to find where the laughs were, but reading it back a few days later I thought ‘this is terrific!’”
It wasn’t only the judgements that surprised Palin when he looked back through his diaries, but how the star-studded events of his life were interspersed with everyday activities.
“The way things happen is not how we remember them – we tend to remember a steady flow,” Michael explains, “but looking at the diaries I can see just how many contradictions, how many bad decisions, how many errors of judgement there were on the way. I think in the end I’m happy with all the things I did, I learned from them all, but just looking at days rather than a life just seemed interesting to me and I like other people’s diaries too because of that.
“I think they show little bits of details – the fact you went to the swimming bath and it was closed may not seem terribly interesting but it’s a little thing about that day and it gives you a little insight in to how a very ordinary life is lead. You might be heading out to Hollywood to get some award but the day before you’re waiting for the plumber to come and the wife’s gone out shopping. The mundane life goes on and I quite like that mix.”
Travelling To Work covers just one decade of Palin’s life but includes so much: he got a play on the West End, starred alongside Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in 90s rom-com You’ve Got Mail (no need to try and spot him – his role was later cut) and he made the career changing decision to host the BBC travel documentary Around The World In 80 Days.
“The story of how I was conceived
is a good one”
“This particular decade was the one I turned 50 halfway through it. So there was definitely a determination to try things I’ve never tried before. I’d done Monty Python and that all finished. I’d done various films including Time Bandits and A Fish Called Wanda and that finished. So what was I going to do next?
“Then out comes this offer to do a documentary called Around The World In 80 Days in which the camera would follow me around the world. A guy came and talked to me about it and he said ‘you’ll have a camera there all the time; we’ve never done anything like this before. It could be quite fun, but you’ll just have to fling your hammock where you can’. He said, ‘if you have to think about it, let me know in three days’ and I rang him back in three minutes!
“I realised I was 45 years old and the chance to see the North Pole or the Carioca Mountains or the Betong River was quickly disappearing so I think that’s why I just said ‘yeah, I’ll do it’. That filled me, as the diary shows, with panic just as we were leaving. I thought ‘can I do this? It’s not just a jaunt, it’s six hours of television you have to put together’ but we did it and my gut instinct paid off because it was very successful.”
Now, 25 years later and at 71 years young, Palin is far from planning his retirement.
“I feel very lucky to have a life like that, where I could choose what I want to do and the sky is the limit, there’s no retirement age or anything like that. I’ve just done 10 shows with a bunch of fellow 70-yearolds at the O2 Arena and no-one ever expected we’d do that. I quite like that feeling of surprises because I realise I’m not very good at planning the exact thing I want to do, working it all out and checking on my strengths and weaknesses. I tend to positively go into things and, occasionally, I do lead myself down a dark alley and get mugged but then I get up and carry on
after that.”
The bunch of 70-year-olds Palin refers to are his fellow Monty Pythons members who, after a 25 year break, recently did a 10-show-only reunion performance.
“I thought ‘we’re old farts now, will we remember this?’ But it just gave us a terrific burst of energy and we kind of forgot we were old grey heads and that was really fun”.
With the shows’ 15,000 tickets selling out in 43 seconds, any hopes for those of us not lucky enough to nab a seatto ‘try again next time’ are fairly small, as there isn’t another reunion on the books.
“We won’t be doing any more Python shows because that was the idea,” Michael explains. “We went out with a bang. Quit at the top. I don’t think we’ll do any more like that, no.”
Though we might not be treated to another live Monty Python show, we will be blessed with a live Michael Palin show – as he brings his Travelling To Work stories to the stage.
Instead of doing the usual book tour and shop signings Palin decided to use his sense of showmanship and create his own tour. “I thought this time, rather than going to the odd festival here and there, let’s go and get together a little tour of our own. Get the content right, get illustrations, get little clips on the bill, and basically make it into a little show.
“There’s a huge amount of material. Twenty-five years of travelling with 70 fantastic pictures that I’ve got taken by my photographer, so that’s the first half of the show. The second half is the story really of how I got into comedy and to Monty Python, with the O2 show as the end. There’s a lot to say and I talk about stuff that a lot of people don’t know.
“The story of how I was conceived is a good one in there. Also the filming of Monty Python And The Holy Grail, there’s lots of good stories about that. We were filming up in Scotland and we had to recruit people coming past in their cars to be extras whilst they were on their holidays. It’s not really believed but it did actually happen!”
Though Palin’s tour around the UK is a little less exotic then some of his other adventures around the world, is there anywhere on his route that he’s most looking forward to passing through?
“Apart from the fabulous centre of the universe that is Cardiff?” he laughs. “I’m just looking forward to getting on the road and getting it on the way and seeing what it is like. I haven’t been on the road with a one man show before, and I’m doing 21 gigs in a month so I’ll be quite busy, but I like that. I’ve also been told the audiences in Cardiff are very friendly.”
For someone who’s just done a sold-out show at London’s O2 Arena, you would think that he wouldn’t worry about filling seats St David’s Hall in Cardiff, but the last thing Michael says to me is: “Bring lots of friends because it’s a big place to fill!”
Michael Palin: Travelling To Work,St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Sun 21 Sept. Tickets: £29.50. Info: 029 2087 8500 / www.stdavidshallcardiff.co.uk