Forty years have passed since Monty Python’s Flying Circus hit the screens, back in the days when most people still watched black and white TVs. But our fascination with the Pythons never seems to fade, and here we are with Michael Palin publishing the second volume of his diaries – a 600-page tome devoted to his enviable lifestyle in 1980s London. It goes roughly from Monty Python’s Meaning Of Life to A Fish Called Wanda, a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
Michael Palin is that rare creature in British
public life: a celebrity who isn’t hated for it. Comedians such as him have become a kind of showbiz royalty, accorded exaggerated respect, love even, everywhere they go – even from members of the real royal family, who exchange jokey asides at command performances and other engagements. Members of the pop aristocracy, like the late George Harrison, pressed money on Palin because they wanted to be a part of the church of comedy. Harrison largely financed Handmade Films which propelled Palin, as the title puts it, Halfway to Hollywood.
BBC executives such as John Birt and Will Wyatt fawn over him; famous actors ring him up to say how good his latest film is; Labour politicians like Neil Kinnock rub shoulders. Palin goes on university tours of America where adoring students give him silly awards. On a New York street a woman passer-by exclaims “Oh my God. I’ve just seen a myth”. He has an asteroid named after him, and several locomotives.
Yet, Michael Palin was never the funniest of the five Pythons. I can only really remember him acting as dumb proletarians, like the Gumbys or jobsworth shopkeepers selling dead parrots. He didn’t have John Cleese’s depressive genius or any great acting ability, but he has arguably been the most enduringly successful of all the Pythons, with his endless travel series, books and art documentaries. Palin is now president of the Royal Geographical Society, for heavens sake.
A Python’s life means an endless whirl of parties, limousines, VIP receptions, expensive hotels and very expensive meals, surrounded by rock stars and film people, and he clearly revels in it. If Palin is troubled by the conventional pressures of celebrity – the loss of privacy, the stress of exposure – it doesn’t show. Apart from a few worries about over-work and whether he is doing the right thing moving from straight comedy to acting, he sails along buoyed by his own natural optimism and charm.
A lot of Palin’s charm is his down-to-earth style. He’s an all-round good egg. Sends his kids to comprehensive schools, hates Thatcherism, helps impeccably liberal causes like public transport, the anti-apartheid movement and Amnesty International. He worries about nuclear war, the miners’ strike and the NHS. And reading this you remember just how much there was to worry about in the 1980s, with superpower confrontation, the Falklands war, Chernobyl ... but Palin is insulated from it all by his humour and his work ethic. Even when his sister Angela kills herself in 1987, it doesn’t seem to knock him off balance – or else most of his personal grief has been edited out of these diaries. All this makes it sound as if Palin’s diaries would be pretty tedious – there’s no kiss and tell here, and Palin is much too nice a guy to start dishing the dirt that spices most celebrity memoirs. He didn’t do drugs, remains married to his childhood sweetheart and didn’t get involved in fraught romantic entanglements. But somehow I couldn’t put the book down. It’s nice to read for a change about someone who isn’t an egotistical monster, but just a very decent man in the great English tradition.
Palin may not have been a comic genius but was an essential part of the Python mix. John Cleese was an anxious hypochondriac always trying to get away from doing what he did best, which is write and perform comedy. Graham Chapman was an alcoholic and promiscuous gay for most of the Python years; Terry Jones a frustrated academic; and Eric Idle – who seems curiously absent from most of Palin’s memoirs – a bit of a showbiz wheeler dealer. Terry Gilliam – the “other” Python – is a manic film producer making a succession of eccentric epics like Jabberwocky, Time Bandits and Brazil which never quite got the recognition they deserved.
You are reminded that the 1980s really was a golden age of British cinema, with films like Wanda, The Long Good Friday, The Mission and Chariots Of Fire.
Palin emerges as the sensible one who makes sure the Pythons actually get things done. Palin is a hard worker, jetting across the Atlantic in Concorde, endlessly rewriting scripts, delivering speeches, helping charities. He and the other Pythons are still a firm during most of this book, though they are all spinning off, pretty amicably, into their own projects. Palin may have been a little dull compared with the rest of the Pythons, but looking at his CV, he certainly had the last laugh.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article