Michael Palin and his journey into the known

Michael Palin’s live show will mix tales of his travels with memories of those halcyon days with Monty Python, writes Noel Baker

MICHAEL PALIN is off on his travels again, but this time, it’s a trip down memory lane.

Live shows in Dublin, Cork and Belfast coincide with the publication in paperback of his third and latest volume of diaries, Travelling to Work, and while the book covers 1988 to 1998, the shows promise to cast a longer look back over a truly extraordinary career.

Palin says the preparation is going well, and that organising the shows — the photographs, footage and archive material — has allowed for rare moments of reflection; a unique situation for a performer seemingly always looking ahead to the next project.

“It’s rather odd because it’s really just me,” he says, a little bashfully. “We have got together some great archive material, we have gathered together a number of stills of my travels, so I think I have got all the elements together, so it’s looking okay at the moment.”

As for the chance to look back, he says: “I find myself thinking, well, if I hadn’t done this, would I have done that? Should I have agreed to do this?” He recalls being offered “a very good script” for Gulliver’s Travels at one stage, but he was just too busy.

By turning it down, ironically he ended up doing more travelling anyway. “I have learnt from almost everything I’ve done, and I think that is something I am very very pleased about really. And in the end I think by saying yes to everything to everything largely in the end I made the right decisions,” he says.

A LIFE IN SHOWBUSINESS

As someone who “likes to have stuff going on all the time”, his CV won’t come as a surprise — at least to anyone with the time to read it. His life in showbusiness has been incredible for its variety and its longevity.

To even call it ‘showbusiness’ seems a bit disrespectful when discussing someone who wrote for the groundbreaking Frost Report, was a key player in the seminal Monty Python series and in the ensuing films. That’s not to forget his central role in the Bafta-winning drama GBH, his stellar comic turn as the stuttering Ken Pile in A Fish Called Wanda, or the two well-received novels he’s written.

And, of course, the travel. By god, Palin gets around. This writer can remember watching his series Around the World in 80 Days not long after it was first screened, and how much of a revelation it seemed at the time. Palin was a switched-on and knowledgeable travel companion, effortlessly interpreting his surroundings as he follows Phileas Fogg’s circumnavigation of the globe.

It set the the template for the successful series that followed, from the Himalayas to New Europe.

“I didn’t have to be pushed into it”, he says of the series which effectively opens the last volume of diaries. Then again, he only got the gig after others, like the venerable Alan Whicker, had turned it down. Yet now, it’s hard to imagine anyone else having done the job.

Around the World in 80 Days became an instant classic, and had a reflective, fly-on-the-wall element that was strangely gripping.

Michael Palin: ‘I am very much in control of my own life and that’s a great thing to be.’

“There were long journeys on board ship, like the Pacific, which didn’t actually deliver a lot of material”, says Palin.

“But on the other hand, the famous journey on the dhow from Dubai down to Bombay, that was allotted about five minutes in the script. In fact, our editor looked at it and said, ‘so much is going on here, but at a very quiet pace’. You can’t rush it. He re-edited it up to 55 minutes so we had an extra programme,” he says.

Palin seems like the type of man who might always be busy, but who knows how to take his time. For someone who has racked up the air miles, his daily commute is to his bedroom, where he works, and he also tends to look askance at his role as a ‘personality’ and instead focus on the task in hand.

REAL PERSON

“It’s kind of an odd existence because you become slightly self conscious after a bit,” he says.

“You are aware of this thing of your name being built up, people saying ‘oh you know, Michael Palin, Michael Palin did this and that’, and that can get in the way a bit. I’m not particularly interested in that Michael Palin, the celebrity that everybody knows. I mean it’s great that I’m well known for my work, but as a sort of mythical character? The real Michael Palin is still someone thinking, ‘Why, why am I doing this? What have I got to say? And how shall I say it next?’”

He talks about it being hard to “being hard to resist the tide of nostalgia which laps around us at the moment”, but he accepts that he and his old mates in Python helped stimulate that when they reformed last year for a string of soldout shows at London’s O2 Arena.

“There are an awful lot of calls on the past now, from the past”, he says. His more recent career as the king of the TV travelogue means he can feed his unending interest in people. It also gives him a unique perspective on some spots — including those close to home — where trouble and turbulent times are nothing new.

“That does give you a king or angle on news from all over the world, whether it’s Muslim-Hindu rivalry in India or whether it’s local tribes in Brazil protesting against the building of a huge dam,” he says. “Having been to those places, now I can see that every issue is quite complicated.”

His own life seems to have unfolded as if to some grand plan, and he admits to feeling “incredibly lucky”.

“A lot of it is having control of your own life,” he says. “I don’t have people telling me to ‘stop this, don’t do that’; I don’t have people making outrageous demands or saying you can’t have a holiday here or there, I am very much in control of my own life and that’s a great thing to be.”

Michael Palin’s The Thirty Years Tour will play at the Cork Opera House on October 28, Dublin’s Olympia Theatre on October 29 and Belfast’s Waterfront Hall on October 30. Travelling To Work is out now