Michael Palin

Travelling To Work

Read extracts from the latest volume of Michael's Diaries, 1988 to 1998 below.
(New entries added regularly.)

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Thursday, November 23rd, 1995 : Century Riverside Inn, Hue

The rain which began as persistent drizzle this morning is now coming down in a series of increasingly heavy downpours. The silhouetted figures, hunched beneath capes, riding bicycles and scooters and pedalling cyclos, look like the stragglers of some retreating army.

The room is fairly shabby and small and has no bath or river view, but the bed’s comfortable and I rather like its cell-­like intimacy.

Vietnam is the most demanding country we’ve yet filmed. Though there are signs of accelerating modernisation and change it is still a modestly equipped Third World economy.

Filming in the monsoon is not to be recommended. Hue Station, Vietnam, November 23rd, 1995.
Filming in the monsoon is not to be recommended. Hue Station, Vietnam, November 23rd, 1995.

Beggars wait at all tourist pick­up points, extending bony, withered hands, or shuffling legless torsos towards the steps of the bus. Wherever we go where tourists are seen, there is a nudging at the elbow and an imploring look. Chil­dren, often beautiful and irresistibly bright-­eyed, hold out their open palms, or demand pens or chewing gum. Along most of the inner­-city streets there are open drains, and in Hanoi many ponds and canals clogged thick with rubbish and human waste.

One of the advantages of the raw, unpolished, Third World feel of Vietnam is that almost everything you point the camera at is interesting – and Roger has found a good number of English­-speaking Vietnamese to be my companions.

This is good, purposeful travelling. Rough and ready, unpredictable, demanding but full of character and incident.

Friday, October 27th, 1989 : London–Stocks House, Hertfordshire

Clem calls with the best news of the 80 Days transmission thus far – the viewing figures actually built, on the second episode, to 8.6 million.

Back home and into a hectic hour of packing for JC’s 50th birthday party. JC’s present, a 1939 bottled Armagnac arrives, as well as his Margaret Thatcher plate. Neat timing in view of Lawson’s resignation.*

John with a few deceased parrots I gave him for his fiftieth birthday.

Leave for Stocks at 7.15, arrive at the house less than an hour later. We’ve been given a room with a waterbed. Already guests gathering in the hall with their obligatory funny hats on.

Jeremy’s sheep on my head is easily the biggest and silliest and most inventive. David Hatch later says it’s a hat which grew more silly as the evening went on.** Every time he looked up and saw me talking earnestly or toying with white wine and smoked salmon, the sheep on my head, wobbling and nodding, gave him more and more pleasure.

The ‘entertainment’ works extremely well. All my props, especially the parrots and the spangly jacket I found at the last moment, are greatly appreciated, and I read the This Is Your Life joke intro smoothly, despite this being the first time I’ve worn my specs in public. David Frost, John Lloyd, David Hatch (very, very funny in a deadpan BBC way), Stephen Fry (‘Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness faxed through to them’) and Peter Cook – not as good on his feet as he is at table – make the awards, and Shamberg shows some video tributes, including one from Jamie who is seen at home greedily apportioning her Wanda money – ‘house’, ‘education’, ‘divorce’.

It’s all a great success and it’s a quarter to two before Helen and I climb aboard the waterbed, bringing on distinct memories of the dhow.

*Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s government since 1983, resigned over the role played by Sir Alan Walters, the Prime Minister’s economic adviser.

** David Hatch was an ex-Cambridge Footlight and close friend of John’s who rose to become Head of Radio at the BBC. He died in 2007. The upturned sheep on my head was made for me by my nephew Jeremy Herbert.

Saturday, November 29th, 1997

Last day of my out of London signings. A week in which I estimate, conservatively, that I’ve signed five and a half thousand books, and in which we hit the No. 1 slot on the Sunday Times list in some style, with figures of 31,700, 11,000 more than Bryson in second place and considerably more than even the big Christmas paperbacks – Pratchett and Francis and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Sunday October 8th, 1989

Tom’s 21st birthday.

Rachel makes a 1968–1989 poster and Will does some very silly things on the photocopier with Tom’s head and other bodies.

Show some early film of Tom which is riotously received. It’s almost un­cannily appropriate, too, that one of the Super 8 films shot in the very first days of Python shows Tom as a baby at Remenham climbing over a sleeping, supine Cleese and Connie whilst Graham does handstands in the background, and wanders across frame smoking his pipe!

Thursday, June 16th, 1994

Nothing can really ‘rout the drowse’ (V. Woolf) today. Have to go up to Hampstead to buy some lunch. Whilst walking back to my car I’m greeted by the amiable grey­bearded figure who runs the Rainbow Alliance – George Weiss. He complains of how difficult it was to get publicity for his recent can­didacy in the Euro­elections. In the end he got himself arrested. ‘I walked into Hampstead police station with this huge spliff, took a puff and offered it to the sergeant in charge – well, they had to arrest me.’ His party are committed to free public transport.

Mr O’Rourke came round this afternoon to tell me that he’d heard my play wasn’t doing very well and that I should write a musical comedy. He even offered to find me a backer. A man he’d done some marble ­laying for – ‘a brilliant dancer, an excellent businessman, Wayne Streep’.

Monday, August 8th, 1994

New regime.

Settle myself in at 54 Delancey, check the marmalade and white cat is in position on the top of Dylan Thomas’s green caravan down in the garden below – it is. Soon after 9.30 set about Hemingway’s Chair.

TG, who has been doing Python 25th anniversary interviews at the Studios, comes by, claiming to be a Dylan Thomas fan. I tell him to fuck off (through the intercom and in Welsh) and we walk down to the Delancey Café for lunch.

He says, gloomily, that he’s the greatest living non­film­making director. Claims to have encouraged Tarantino to make Reservoir Dogs.

Friday, August 4th, 1995

Another morning of low­-grade acting. A crowd growing ever smaller behind Kevin who is in his element – playing a big, bold, unequivocally central role – full of physical attack and extemporaneous embellishments.

In marked contrast to the rest of the sunburnt unit K has preserved an almost deathly pallor. He is followed around the location by his stand­ing, Joshua Andrews, son of Anthony, bearing an umbrella like some punkah­ wallah. K drives himself around in one of the buggies.

Jamie regards it all with ill­-concealed impatience.

As Bugsy in Fierce Creatures. With Robert Lindsay and our tiger.
As Bugsy in Fierce Creatures. With Robert Lindsay and our tiger.

We talk more today – Jamie and me. I improvise some great ‘Ifs’ of history – If Joan of Arc had been deaf, If Hitler had been nice, If Shakespeare had been dyslexic, that sort of thing. Jamie insists that I call my agent ‘within the hour’ to sell the idea.

Some of the others are trying on their animal costumes for Monday. ‘I’m giving my beaver,’ shouts Robert L.

Friday, March 22nd, 1996

Papers full of the potentially appalling consequences of the BSE, mad cow affair, after scientists have gone public with their strong suspicion that BSE has leapt a species and infected humans who have eaten beef. No hard facts or advice. Everyone frightened.

As H says, the CJD disease takes ten years to incubate, and so our children, who ate beef in the late ’80s, could, like us, be very much at risk if there is an epidemic. Apocalyptic news which vies with details of a huge increase in airborne tuberculosis, which is already on its way to becoming a new, life­threatening epidemic. There’ll be some reading of the Book of Revelation tonight.

Tuesday, May 27th, 1997

My morning is cheered by a report in the Guardian of a man who fell a hun­dred feet down a hillside trying to avoid a ‘bouncing 8lb Double Gloucester cheese’. Actually, his injuries sound quite severe, so I shouldn’t really have smiled so much.

Receive a fax from Tom Dunne – handwritten, which is his style – to say that he has read Hemingway’s Chair. ‘Good clean fun’ is his three word assessment. He would like to publish it in the US next spring.

Monday, December 28th, 1998

Day of the post ­Christmas river trip, so no long lie­-in. Rewarded by quiet streets and have time to show Granny our new office location in Tavistock Street and Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridge views before gathering with the others for the 10.30 boat from Embankment Pier to Greenwich. Full family turnout. Eleven in all. Onto a barge with chairs and a plastic hood. It’s a quarter full, almost entirely of foreigners, as we turn under Charing Cross railway bridge and head downstream.

Greenwich
Family visit to Greenwich, Christmas 1998. Back row: Will, Tom. Middle row: Helen, Rachel, MP, brother-in-law Edward. Front row: Helen’s mother, Anne Gibbins, and two sisters, Cathy and Mary.

A Cockney commentary, full of jokes of the corniest sort and not even told with any charm, just routine taxi­driver sort of prejudices. Edward and especially Catherine Burd, both architects, made apoplectic by references to the National Theatre – ‘thought by most architects to be the worst building in London’. Piers Gough’s Cascade Towers – ‘they say they were designed to look like a boat under full sail. Well all I can say is he’s obviously never been on a boat in his life’, and the Millennium Dome – ‘biggest waste of taxpayers’ money this country’s ever seen’.

In a way I prefer this batty bigotry to a recorded message, but that’s quite a perverse view to take.

An hour to Greenwich and the changes along both banks are considerable. Housing runs in a broken line on the south bank and an almost continuous line on the north, all the way to Greenwich. Canary Wharf is expanding again, after its dodgy hiatus in the late ’80s and the bombing in the ’90s. London’s eastward spread looks inevitable and unstoppable now.

The Dome, a strange new shape, a blister amongst the strips of housing and the fingers of the tower blocks, looms beyond Greenwich’s elegant seven­teenth­ and eighteenth­ century façades.

We climb up the hill to the Observatory, following an ant­-trail of visitors. There is a space on the wall below Flamsteed’s Wren­ designed building where the zero line of longitude runs. It’s covered in graffiti.