An Englishman Abroad
How Michael Palin went from selling to be coming britain’s most loved dead parrots travel guide
WORDS BY ANDREW HUMPHREYS | PORTRAIT BY PEROU
I AM AT MICHAEL PALIN’S COVENT GARDEN OFFICES. They are modest and homely, with the show-offiness limited to a set of black-and-white photographs on the staircase, all famous images of Ernest Hemingway, with a cheeky, grinning Palin Photoshopped into the scene. The second-floor room I’m waiting in faces the kitchens of a brasserie over the road where, framed in the window, a chef is attending a grill, topless, possibly even naked – a perfect bit of silliness that seems entirely appropriate, and which tickles Palin when he arrives a few minutes later.
This is, of course, the man who gurned, larked, minced, pranced, buffooned and goose-stepped his way through the 1970s as part of the Monty Python team, alongside fellow very naughty boys Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle and Terry Jones. Since then he’s also become an award-winning film actor (a BAFTA for Ken in Cleese’s A Fish Called Wanda), a novelist, a diarist, an author of children’s stories, TV screenplays and travel books, and, most famously, presenter of travel programmes.
He is, he tells me, ‘happy to talk about anything’. Dead parrots? Transvestite lumberjacks? The knights who say ‘Ni’? Absolutely.
‘I love talking about Monty Python,’ he says. There are no no-go areas. But some of it, he winces, is just such a long time ago.
Palin is 68 years old and he looks it, the boyish face that reinforced the perception of him as the most benign of the Pythons is now weathered, creased and fringed with grey. But age doesn’t seem to have impaired his memory, and he is meticulously precise on dates, ages, places and names. For someone who built his reputation on subversive lunacy (and saying the word ‘bum’ a lot) and who, in his own words, has never in 46 years (another very precise figure) had a ‘proper job’, he has a very ordered mind.
‘One part of me is a little nerdy man recording the days going by,’ he says, ‘and the other half is free doing what I want and working with who I want.’
That nerdy half has been busily recording the minutiae of his daily life for more than four decades, providing the raw material for two recently published volumes of diaries, The Python Years: Diaries 1969- 1970 and Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988, with another one in the works. Both books run to over 600 pages, which means that Palin the Python and Palin the actor are extensively documented lives.
The final entry in the diaries to date is Sunday 24 September 1988, which, he records, was a day spent carefully packing before a farewell meal in Soho and bed at two. The following day he was due to set off on a trip that would begin the third act of Palin’s life.
The journey was an attempt to follow the route taken in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days for the BBC. When it was screened in 1989, the series was a massive ratings success and, as a result, Palin has not stopped travelling since, going from Pole to Pole (1991), circling the Pacific (1996-1997), tracking Hemingway (1999), crossing the Sahara (2001-2002), trekking the Himalayas (2003-2004) and discovering a ‘new’ Europe (2006-2007).
His desire to travel started early. ‘I was a very restless baby,’ he says. ‘I liked to be on the move. If I was in the pram and I was put out in the garden, I’d just take my clothes off one by one until someone came along and moved the pram.’
As a child, growing up in the Sheffield of the 1950s, Palin was fascinated by atlases and the names of places: the North Pole, South Pole, Suez Canal, Grand Canyon… ‘I read Biggles, like all boys of my generation, and Biggles was often in very strange places, such as the Gobi, and I liked that. I was really disillusioned later to find that Major WE Johns wrote them all without ever leaving his suburban home in Teddington.’
Success came quickly after finishing university (Palin studied modern history at Oxford, which is where he met comedy-writing partner Terry Jones) and any travel ambitions he had at the time were sublimated by the demands of earning a wage. ‘I didn’t travel outside the UK until I was 29, after the second series of Python was finished. Terry and I were fascinated by America – American politics, American music, American theatre, American movies – and we had to go. We took about three weeks and it was great.
‘But after that all my foreign travel was business, which meant studios, airports and hotel rooms, until out of the blue along comes Around the World in 80 Days.’ Still best known at the time as a former Python, Palin wasn’t the BBC’s first choice. Several other TV-friendly faces had been asked, including veteran travel journalist Alan Whicker and humorist Clive James, but they’d said no.
‘I’m so glad they did,’ says Palin, ‘although I was a bit terrified on the day we were going to leave. I thought, “What are we going to get out of this? Where are we going to get the stories from?” I really got a mild sweat of panic.’
Things did go wrong, right from the first day. The Orient-Express didn’t go to Venice, as it had done every other day that week. It ended up in Innsbruck because there was a strike. A planned boat journey between Oman and Bombay was scuppered, leading to hasty improvisation and some replacement transport in the form of a creaky old dhow [traditional sailboat] boarded in Dubai. ‘It turned out to be a real blessing in disguise because that journey on the dhow produced the most memorable programme of any I’ve done. We were really there stuck on a boat with no radar, no radio. The captain spoke only broken English, the rest of the crew no English at all. You slept on deck and the toilet was a barrel hung off the back.’
‘When I started 80 Days I was thinking, “I’ve been chosen to do this job because I can act a bit, so I should be Phileas Fogg”, this fictional character, the English buffer abroad. But after a few nights on the
dhow, feeling very ill and clambering over a barrel- toilet at the back, I thought it was all irrelevant and it would be much better if I could just be myself. The humour comes out quite incidentally. You don’t have to pour it over the top like sauce.’
After 80 Days came the question of a follow-up. ‘Jules Verne wrote only one travel book, so we had to think of something else. We eventually decided on Pole to Pole, and decided to build in what were, I have to be honest, contrived time constraints: “Will Michael get to this place in time?” We were worried that no one was going to watch a straight travel programme.’
The worries were unfounded. The figures for Pole to Pole were every bit as high as for its predecessor. ‘I kind of realised then,’ says Palin, ‘this was what I wanted to do a lot more of.’
There was a role in John Cleese’s second film, Fierce Creatures in 1997, but otherwise the acting was more or less shelved. The vast numbers of people involved in making films and endless hours spent hanging around waiting for things to happen couldn’t compare with the freedom of being part of a small freewheeling team out on the road.
An exception was made for a week of night-filming with Meg Ryan on the streets of the Upper West Side in New York for You’ve Got Mail. ‘Just fantastic,’ he recalls. ‘Flown over on Concorde and all that.’ Palin played a reclusive author who visits Ryan’s bookshop, then hangs around after hours revealing himself to be a bit of a sleaze. ‘Afterwards the director, Nora Ephron, rang and I said “How’s it all going?” and she said “It’s going fine, apart from your bit, which is gone”.’ He breaks into a fit of giggles. ‘My friend Basil Pau, who is the photographer on all my travels, always calls it You’ve Got Cut.’
Palin’s last major series, his seventh in 18 years, was New Europe. ‘We’d been to all the continents apart from Europe, and it seemed odd to me that we had excluded our own continent. No one really went to places like Hungary or Moldova or Romania, so I felt we could get something out of that, and we did. Each country, however small, had a story to tell.’
Over the years, he says, the approach has changed. The travel is no longer escapist and he is no longer the eccentric Englishman abroad. Instead, programmes focus on the people he meets along the way and their lives and stories.
It is an approach he will maintain on the next trip. In three weeks time, he says, he is taking his crew to Brazil. It is just the one country this time around for the simple reason he didn’t want to do a long series that was going to keep him away for too long.
For someone so associated with travel, Palin is very much a homebird. He has lived in the same house in North London since 1968, where he and his wife have brought up their three children (all now in their 30s).
‘The stability of home is important and I’m resigned to the fact that, basically, I am happiest here.’ Also, there’s the matter of stamina. ‘We’re all getting on a bit now,’ he points out. ‘Brazil is enormous, the fifth largest country in the world, and it deserves at least three or four programmes to do it justice. It means we can do four distinct areas of Brazil, and stay in those areas rather than try and crisscross the country.’
Beyond Brazil, he has a second novel (the first, Hemingway’s Chair, came out in 1995), which is already written and with his publishers. There is also the third part of the diaries. That one, though, will have to wait. ‘There’s no way I’m going to get to it before 2013, which will be my 70th year. I think that, actually, the longer the gap between the diaries and the events the better. If they’re too close together, it’s almost like telling tales.’
After all this time, he can still say that he doesn’t know what he’s cut out to do. ‘I just think I’m extraordinarily lucky to be as curious and interested in life as I am. And to have a very good group of friends and contacts, who are always sort of there to suggest something. I never feel I’m stuck. I feel that each year something quite different can come up. And I would take it at face value and say either yes, I will do it, or no, I won’t.’
Along the way, his meandering through an unplanned life has garnered him all sorts of awards and accolades, including having two trains named after him, a CBE from the queen and a term as president of the Royal Geographic Society.
Palin is also frequently referred to in the media as ‘Britain’s nicest man’. He groans. ‘No, that’s awful! It’s a terrible cross to bear, I tell you. Just so unfair. People say, “Oh, he’s the nicest Python.” But I mean look at Terry Jones. You can’t get nicer than Terry. He’s a lovely man. Even Cleese could be nice.’
