Michael Palin

Palin's Posts

Nights in Belfast

Wednesday, January 26th, 2022

Ken Branagh’s film Belfast is an overwhelming and moving experience. It reminds us that the human spirit is resilient. That there is a flame of goodness and decency and compassion in all of us that can flicker and fade but will never be blown out.

Because of the events that Branagh deals with, the vicious sectarian violence and the heavy handed military response which followed, Belfast became a city to avoid. A city synonymous with grief and anger, with lives and hopes cut short.

In 1981, when I was asked to put on a one-man show at the Arts Theatre Belfast during the Festival, I readily agreed. Friends were guarded about my decision. There were bombs going off, and killings and reprisal killings were still a regular feature of life in the city. But the rationale for my travels has always been see it for yourself. If you want to know what people think you have to meet them.

Nights in Belfast
The Arts Theatre, Botanic Avenue, Belfast, birthplace of my first-ever one-man show. It doesn’t look much, but it meant a lot to me. The end of the railway bridge can be seen rising on the left. Noise from passing trains could kill a joke. It’s not there any more. Photo credit: Northern Ireland Historical Photographical Society

This was the first time I’d ever done a one-man show, and I’d loaded myself with a paraphernalia of costume and prop changes which I knew had to be done fast otherwise I’d lose my audience. So well-rehearsed was I that I ran out of material after 35 minutes. I threw myself on the audience, announcing an early interval (‘ Drink as much as you like’) and a whole second half of Q and A.

The response was fantastic, including a suggestion I try and break the Arts Theatre record for running from the stage, round the auditorium and back onto the stage again which I was told had been set by Sir John Gielgud at 19.5 seconds. ( I beat it by three seconds !) I learnt a valuable lesson in Belfast that night. Listen to the audience. Hear what they say about where they live.

I returned to the Festival two years later with a show called More Than Thirty Five Minutes with Michael Palin. I went back there throughout the 80’s. Though I was offered the Grand Opera House I always preferred the shabby intimacy of the Arts Theatre. It was twenty years before I ever felt the need to do my one-man show anywhere else.

Thank you Belfast.

On Squatting

Monday, November 29th, 2021

For me, one of the most impressive sights in Premier League football  is the ability of Marcelo Bielsa, the Leeds United manager, to squat for long periods of the game. Whilst most managers pace up and down, or throw water bottles, Bielsa will be down on his haunches, watching his team from about three foot off the ground. Leaving aside the question of whether or not this is a good vantage point to follow the game, he does display an almost nonchalant talent for a position most of us couldn’t easily hold for more than a minute.

The sad truth is that we in the West have lost the art of squatting, which must have come as a sixth sense to our forefathers, and which still comes naturally to much of the rest of the world. I blame the chair. In The Complete And Utter History of Britain series Terry Jones wrote a sketch in which a man goes to the patent office with the very first chair. When asked what it’s for he replies that ‘it’s for sitting down, higher up’.

The Python Years
Complete and Utter History of Britain 1969. Terry Jones demonstrating  (to Wallas Eaton) how to sit down higher up.

And once you can sit down higher up, you can look down on those below you and chairs become thrones and pretty soon you’re bossing people about and getting them to kneel. Squatting is not just an egalitarian activity, it’s also proven to be a much better position for emptying your bowels. Lavatories offer a greater control of waste disposal but a much less effective way of waste expulsion.

On my travels, especially in what we rather patronisingly call the less industrialized countries, I found that squatting is for many the default position not just for defecation but for conversation too. It requires no paraphernalia other than strong quads and pliable hamstrings. And it does away with ticket touts.

I think we could learn a thing or two from Marcelo Bielsa.

Perfect Matches

Monday, October 4th, 2021

I’ve been having a clear-out of long-untroubled shelves and dark cupboards, with the help of my grandson Wilbur, who is amazed that I have so much stuff. I explain to him that I’ve had over seventy years to accumulate it and that I’ve always been very bad at throwing things away. Among the things he found most mystifying were two shoe boxes full of book matches, which I’d collected from bars and restaurants and hotels all over the world.

He looked at me pityingly. ‘Why, Grandpa ?’

‘Because as you get older you begin to forget things. Your memory needs a nudge, and that’s what they give me’.

So here’s a selection of my Ten Best book-match memories.

 

Box Tree Restaurant, Ilkley Yorks

Whilst filming A Private Function, we celebrated Alan Bennett’s fiftieth birthday here. A wonderful meal was only slightly marred by Maggie Smith discovering a piece of glass in her Mixed Salad. “A very mixed salad’, as she described it later.

 

Furnace Creek Inn and Ranch Resort

Hardly needed matches here. Furnace Creek is at the heart of Death Valley and the day I stopped there with my two sons, the temperature was well-over 100F. Even the heart of the Sahara was cooler.

 

Watergate Hotel, Washington DC

One of the great locations of American political history. The Watergate break-in in 1972 led to the disgrace and resignation of President Nixon two years later. When staying there with my fellow Pythons in 1975 I scooped up anything with Watergate written on it, including the Room Service menu, which made Graham Chapman very cross as he hadn’t ordered his breakfast.

 

Hotel d’Angleterre Copenhagen

Smart hotel in the Danish capital. Amazed to find a large painting in the lobby by William Palin, a Victorian relative. Didn’t stay there but grabbed the matches and left.

 

BBC TV Centre

Quite a surprise. Had forgotten that there was a time when the BBC spent licence-payers money on book matches. But I’m glad they did, if only for this aerial reminder of the building where Python was born.

 

Jimmy Ryan’s

A fond, if scuffed memory of one of those brownstone basement bars which used to be dotted around Manhattan. Live music long into the night. To me, the essence of New York. Most have been squeezed out by developers.

 

Regina, Saskatchewan

One of the venues on an ill-fated Python tour of Canada in 1973. Regina was in the middle of hundreds of miles of flat prairie. When being shown round the city Graham Chapman asked our guide, “Why didn’t they put it over there?’

 

Tokyo Japanese Restaurant 

The first time I went to a proper Japanese restaurant in London I and a friend saw a line of shoes laid out at the entrance, and assumed they were for us to change into. As we shuffled uncomfortably towards the table in these tiny slippers we passed a tableful of Japanese who looked up in horror. We were wearing their shoes.

 

Utah Parks Company, North Rim Grand Canyon

In 1972 Terry Jones and myself made our first visit to the USA. We tried to see everything as fast as possible, and Terry suggested that we run down the Grand Canyon and up again in a morning. It was not until the way back up that he collapsed. Worst of all, the lodge where we found these matches had run out of beer.

 

Europa Hotel Belfast

This is where I stayed on the many occasions I played The Belfast Festival. In the 1980’s Belfast was in the midst of the Troubles, and yet they were terrific audiences. Someone told me the Europa has been bombed 28 times.

Things To Be Proud Of

Tuesday, September 21st, 2021

Back in 1968 when the world was in an upheaval of riots and protests, Terry Jones and myself sat down to write songs for a lovely man we’d met called Barry Booth. Barry had been the pianist for the Royal Household Cavalry. As it had proved impossible to fit a piano on a horse he’d had plenty of time to himself, and after his national service ended he began to build a career arranging and accompanying big touring acts.

One of them was the matchless Roy Orbison. Barry encouraged us to write something which he could play to the great man and we would all be millionaires. I’d just married and our first child was on the way and I could have used a million. Or even a hundred. Which is how I came to write The Last Time I Saw You Was Tomorrow. Barry played it to Orbison in his hotel room, but Orbison didn’t see its potential. The potential to ruin his career.

But Barry wasn’t put off. He asked us to write more songs which he himself would sing. The result was an album for Pye Records called Diversions. Nobody was interested apart from John Peel who played He’s Very Good With His Hands on his legendary radio show. This boosted sales to around 200.

Barry Booth – Diversions!

Terry and I went back to writing jokes and forgot all about Diversions. Until recently, when Barry had some CD’s made and I realised how good some of those old songs sounded. Quirky, pre-Pythonic lyrics delivered by Barry with musicianship of great delicacy and feeling. 

Terry died in 2020 and Barry just over a year later. If you have any curiosity about their work then do try and listen to a copy of Diversions. The album, of sad and surreal ( and funny ) songs shows that good things live on. And it makes me realise just how much I miss my two fellow Diverters.

Change Of Heart

Monday, September 6th, 2021

Mid-morning in London. Sun at last pushing aside the drab grey cloud-cover that’s subdued the spirits this past week.

Two years ago today, I was losing consciousness in the body repair shop at Bart’s Hospital. When, four and a half hours later, a kind anaesthetist returned me to the world, I had two new devices inside me. No longer could I say I was made entirely by Mr and Mrs Palin. I was now made by Mr and Mrs Palin and Edwards Lifesciences of Irvine, California, whose valve and annuloplasty ring I now sported.

I became a little emotional when I was told this news. I wanted to fly out to Irvine California and grasp the hand of whoever it was made the bits that were keeping me alive.

Moth Of The Year :  Jersey Tiger Moth on one of our chimney pots.

But convalescence and Covid put paid to all that, and I have not yet taken myself and my new attachments anywhere at all.

Though touted on television as the Great Traveller, the furthest I’ve been in the two years since my surgery is just south of Cambridge.

It’s nothing physical. Thanks to my transformed ticker, I have never felt better or stronger. It’s that travelling anywhere further than just south of Cambridge has overnight become not only less easy, but way less appealing. There was a time when jumping on a train or even an aeroplane was to be plucked from the everyday mundane world and taken somewhere magical. Now there’s far more process to go through. There are rules about travelling. Forms and jabs and internal debates about masking or not masking and flying or not flying. And as soon as the rules are relaxed at all, everyone makes for the exit.

I found myself wanting to get away from people who were trying to get away.

So I’ve stayed at home. Working on a new book about my Great-Uncle Harry, re-visiting and relishing old journeys, walking over Parliament Hill, reading, taking pleasure in the change of seasons, enjoying the company of my family and realising how blessed we are to have Archie and Wilbur and Albert and Rose growing up around us.

I know my feet will itch again sometime, but for now, taking things slowly means enjoying them more.

The Bishop’s Finger

Wednesday, July 28th, 2021

There are epiphanic moments in every life and I had one a week ago in Smithfield in the heart of London when the Bishop’s Finger beckoned to me. It was the evening of ‘Freedom Day’ and by chance my son Will and I found ourselves in front of the ancient gate of Bart’s, the hospital where nearly two years ago I had my ailing heart re-juvenated.

One thing I’ve missed since then is a pint in a pub on a hot summer’s day. And that’s when I saw, on the other side of the square, The Bishop’s Finger. And it was pointing at me. And the next thing I knew I was in the cool dark interior, standing at the long polished wood bar, watching Fiona, the owner, draw a beautifully cleansing glass of Whitstable Pilsener.

I’ve spent time in plenty of pubs I’m only too happy to forget, but the Bishop’s Finger was different. So much so, that I burbled on about it, with the enthusiasm of a freshly released prisoner. Fiona must have though I was on something. We sat and despatched our Whitstable Pilseners and talked about nothing much, which is what pubs are for. In a way I had Covid to thank for keeping me away from places like this for so long that the joy of re-discovery was doubly glorious.

With Fiona McCann

Occasionally things like this happen which can’t ever be repeated or re-created. All I can say is that that drink in The Bishop’s Finger will always be special. It was more than just a drink, it was a return to life. 

A Day For The Diary

Wednesday, May 12th, 2021

I just heard on the radio that May 12th is National Diary Day, or National Dairy Day as it always comes out in my emails. It was with rather a shock that I calculated that I’ve been a regular diarist for over fifty years. Monty Python hadn’t been heard of when I made my decision to give up smoking and keep a diary instead.

“National Diary Day, or National Dairy Day as it always comes out in my emails.”

I wavered a bit on the smoking front. Five years after I’d ‘given up’, I found myself one of Three Men In A Boat, spending a lot of time in the middle of the Thames with two generous smokers – Tim Curry and the late great Stephen Moore – as we waited for Stephen Frears to make up his mind what he wanted us to do next. A regular visitor to the set was our screen-play writer Tom, now Sir Tom Stoppard who tempted us with very long, very smart, ciggies which looked irresistibly sophisticated. I was soon on ten a day and was saved by a severe cough, which frightened the ducks off and reminded me why I’d given up in the first place.

Keeping a diary was one habit I never kicked, and I still put pen to paper most mornings to record what has happened in my life the day before. It’s been especially useful during the Covid months when there was often a tendency to give up on the day and spend long hours staring out of the window. For the diary’s sake I had to learn how to make identical days feel different, even if all I did was come up stairs backwards.

I always thought it was odd that the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919, when more people died across the globe than in all the battles of World War One, was almost perversely ignored by the writers of the time. Hardly a mention from the likes of Hemingway, or Scott Fitzgerald.

I’d love to have known how they got through it. How close it came to them, how scared they were of the future. So to all of you who may be encouraged to start a diary on National Diary Day, stick with it. Make it National Diary week, or National Diary Year, and the next thing you know you’ll be celebrating National Diary Half Century. And a word of warning – to all those of you getting out pails and butter churns tomorrow, check the spelling.

Walk, Don’t Run

Monday, March 1st, 2021

It’s just over a year and a half ago that I gave up running, after 40 years. Taking up regular running way back in 1979, when Life Of Brian had just opened in the cinemas (apart from those which banned it ) was one of the best things I ever did. At the price of a few pulled muscles I kept myself lean and fit. There were so many cold, wet days when all I wanted was to stay by the fire or under the covers, but I’m so glad I persevered. I ran in streets and parks and beaches all over the world, from Saudi Arabia to Sierra Leone, but my regular patch was Hampstead Heath, close to my home in London. Just the right mix of hills and woods and off-piste tracks and paths.

After my heart surgery I scaled down from running to walking, and have come to value the Heath even more. It’s still a challenge, but now I have more time to take it all in. The bird life, the trees, the woods, the mix of secret places and some of the finest views of London. I walk some days to Kenwood House and back. It’s a great goal to aim for, offering you the chance to stroll around the grounds of your own mansion. I love the changing moods of the place. This morning an early mist gave the house a ghostly, spectral presence and I’m glad I had my iPhone with me.

Kenwood House in the early morning mist.

In between long walks and bird-spotting, I have been whiling away the days by making a start on the book about my Great-Uncle Harry. He died young, 31 years old, and in a bad place, the mud of northern France, but I’m trying to give his life some value, so he’s not just another name on the wall of a memorial. This involves a lot of detective work, but it also brings into focus a blood relation who has been consistently ignored and whom I now feel quite close to.

My friend Basil Pao described pandemic life as feeling like the world has pressed the Pause button, and to try and break up this sense of being in lockdown limbo, I try hard to keep in touch with friends and there are always surprises, and when Paul Whitehouse told me his daughter’s a Clangers fan, I was happy to oblige.

With Mother and Tiny Clanger.

Hope you’re all going to have a jab as soon as you get the chance. For me having the vaccine was a no-brainer – if only to get me out of the house.

Here’s to the light at the end of the tunnel, or the needle at the top of the arm.

London Lockdown

Last week came the sad news of the death of Albert Roux, one of the titans of French cuisine, brother of Michel and father of Michel Roux Jnr. Apart from the excellent meals I’ve knocked back at their signature restaurant, Le Gavroche, I’ll always be grateful to the Roux brothers for letting the Pythons film the Dirty Fork sketch there in 1970. To let a film crew anywhere near a place that you love is always a risk, but when Monty Python is involved the danger to life, limb, tables, plates and glasses, lobsters and oeufs en cocottes must be drastically increased. So thank you Albert and Michel for being great sports and if anyone is interested, our day in Le Gavroche can be seen in “And Now For Something Completely Different”, and captured in the publicity still taken that day, which has become a bit of a classic.

Dirty Fork cast, outside Le Gavroche, London 1970.

This is as close as you’ll get to Le Gavroche right now, as like every other restaurant in London it’s closed in order to save lives. How did we get here and when will we leave? Answers on a postcard please.

Though I have not spent a night away from home since February last year I’ve done more travelling on television than for a very long time thanks to the recent Travels of A Lifetime series and re-runs of the original series on BBC Four. I‘m not that keen on watching myself on screen – I always see the mistakes – but I’ve been reminded how much of the appeal of my travel shows lies is in the professionalism of those I worked with, and particularly the superb camera work of Nigel Meakin. Whilst I was waffling away he was building up a visual scrapbook of each location which in these stay-at-home days reminds us what a rich, exciting and exotic world is still out there.

Apart from a carefully patrolled and distanced studio appearance on the J Ross show, my TV work has been confined to Zoomland, which saves on transport and trousers but is strangely un-intimate. I wanted to have a drink with Robert Lindsay after we’d done our excerpt from Waiting For Godot and with Tennnant and Sheen after doing Staged, but all I could do was press ‘Leave Meeting’, and wonder whether it had happened at all.

Now as I gaze at the pristine pages of my 2021 diary I do at least have some writing to do. Without giving the game away more than I already have, I’m researching the short, enigmatic life of my Great Uncle Henry – Harry to everyone – born in the heyday of the British Empire and died in the muddy shambles of the Somme at the age of 32. If all goes well, it will hopefully materialise in bookshops in two years’ time. 

Ahh…bookshops, restaurants, trousers. So much to look forward to.

Inspirational Eccentricity

Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

This weekend two people who I admired very much died. Jan Morris and Hamish MacInnes. Both were in their 90’s, both had lived quite extraordinary lives, and I was fortunate enough to spend some time with both of them. Jan Morris was the author of Venice, one of the best travel books I ever read. It made me want to go to Venice and when I went there, with Helen, in 1967, it made being there even better.

Before she underwent gender reassignment (or ‘changed sex’ as Jan always called it) she was James Morris, the reporter for the Times on the Everest expedition of 1953, and it was he who not only broke the story of Hillary and Tensing’s success, but made sure the news got through on the day of the Queen’s coronation. 

With Jan and her partner Elizabeth, filming for the BBC at their Welsh home in 2016.

The other, more personal loss was my old friend Hamish MacInnes, who could have been a member of the Everest expedition in 1953, but didn’t like big expeditions, and went instead to climb an equally dangerous mountain nearby.

Hamish MacInnes was a true adventurer, whose life embodied many people’s dreams, including my own.  A climber of great skill and daring who would choose the awkward and difficult route precisely because it was awkward and difficult. A man who led mountain rescue teams but also advised the directors of Monty Python and The Holy Grail how best to throw bodies into gorges. If climbing equipment wasn’t up to the job, he’d not only invent something that was, he’d build it himself. He wrote stories and doubled for Clint Eastwood. Hamish was a free spirit, who made his own rules and went his own way, and lived many lives in one.

With Hamish and Terry J, filming for Holy Grail Revisited, Glencoe, Scotland 2000.

In this increasingly regulated world it is very sad to lose two people who embodied such inspirational eccentricity. 

But the good news of the weekend is that Terry Gilliam is not at all dead and turned 80 years old on Sunday.  Inspirational eccentricity lives!