Palin on Python... and the itchy feet that led him to Brazil

Put it to Michael Palin that he is a globe-trotter, an adventurer – plus a TV presenter, and a best-selling author, and he starts to look just a little uncomfortable, embarrassed even.

He’s not a man easily disposed to self-promotion and he also knows that for all his various careers, he’s still known first and foremost as a Python, a member of that team which brought us 45 anarchic, surreal shows in four series between 1969 and 1974.

It was the same out in Brazil, where he was filming earlier this year for a new BBC series which starts tonight. Palin might have carved a successful niche in documentaries, but he knows that many of those he meets along the way really want to talk about Python.

“When we made the very first series, we were all of us pretty fresh from university, and if we had been asked back then if the Cult of Python would be still going strong in 2012, we’d have thought that you were being very silly. Very silly indeed.

“I think that one of the things that saved us from slipping from memory was that we were the very first BBC sketch show that was filmed in colour and we were very different – we were competing with a lot of very good, but very conventional sitcoms. I think that the only other people who defied convention were Pete and Dud, the people doing At Last The 1948 Show, and dear Spike Milligan, who was a complete law unto himself.”

If Palin’s occasionally bombarded with lines from the dead parrot sketch, he also knows that he only has himself blame. When he and the rest of the Pythons heard the BBC was planning to wipe the original tapes clean, they smuggled them out of TV Centre and re-recorded on “a rather ancient Phillips VCR.” The BBC was to thank them later, selling the series to the US and perhaps more surprisingly what was then Yugoslavia, still under communist rule.

“Many years later, when I was filming in Croatia, they told me watching Python had been considered to be very brave, it was sticking two fingers up to the establishment. I have never felt constrained by Python, or that it was a burden to have success so early in our careers. Far from it. We had control of it, rather than it of us – and to think that half a century on, people are still laughing, well, what a compliment.”

It has been a busy year for Palin, who turns 70 next May. As well as the Brazil series, and another novel (The Truth came out earlier this year), he has also contributed to an animated film based on fellow Python Graham Chapman’s book of reminiscence, A Liar’s Autobiography.

“It is,” he admits, “probably the nearest thing that you’ll be getting to a Python reunion – ever.” The remaining Pythons – with the exception of Eric Idle – have all taken part, with Palin voicing Chapman’s father, and Terry Jones playing his mother. John Cleese delivers some of Chapman’s dialogue, and Terry Gilliam is his psychiatrist.

“We discovered that Graham (who died in October, 1989, from cancer) had made recordings of much of his book, and that they were sitting in an archive in Los Angeles,” says Palin. “Liar’s Autobiography was hugely successful and it is the most glorious nonsense – interwoven with quite a few nuggets of truth and fact. Only Graham, God bless him, could have written it. So when the idea came along to make a film of it, using some of Britain’s best animators, we all said ‘yes’. I think that Graham would have loved the idea – and his partner, David Sherlock, was only too happy for it all to go forward.”

Remembering Chapman, Michael says: “He was a very complex man, and a highly educated one (he was a fully qualified doctor, you know) and I never fully understood him. But then, I don’t think that he ever fully understood himself, either. He was a complete alcoholic, and said so himself. Until, one day, he just gave up the drink. Bingo, that was that.

“Watching in the morning sometimes, when he’d been on the booze, was harrowing, because he had terrible DT’s. And he was always late for everything. But we all loved him.”

Before he gave up drinking in the late 1970s, Chapman was often unpredictable and with a glass never far from his hand, occasionally frustrating.

“We all went to Canada to promote the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Graham became completely sloshed.

“We then flew on to LA, and he rolled up to his hotel in the same condition,” says Palin. “He couldn’t remember his name when he tried to check in, and had to ask if he was with a group of people. And then he decided that he wanted to go to his very, very favourite restaurant. He insisted on a limousine to take him there.

“It arrived. And he got in, and the driver turned on the ignition, did a complete U-turn in the traffic, and dropped Graham off at the restaurant – which was directly opposite the hotel on the other side of the street. There’s no doubting that he was eccentric. Utterly and totally.

“While we were filming Holy Grail, up in Scotland, we were all billeted at a hotel near the set. Graham would be in the bar until he fell over, and then he’d stomp back to his room in the small hours bellowing two words over and over again – ‘Betty Marsden’, ‘Betty Marsden’.

“Betty, if you remember, was a wonderful character actress who was in things like Round the Horne and for some reason Graham had picked up on her name. One night I really put my foot down, yanked open my door, and told him to shut up. The next morning I got up, and there, pushed under the door was a piece of paper, with two words written on it. They were, of course, ‘Betty Marsden’.”

Chapman’s drinking may have resulted in endless anecdotes, but what Palin will always remember is a man who was a comic genius.

He says: “He was a man of unconstructed silliness. But he could also be very serious. We’d all be writing away, throwing ideas around, and Graham would say nothing for half an hour. Totally quiet. Then he’d just say something like ‘Norwegian Blue…’ And you knew he was off on something.”

For all the silliness which came with being part of Monty Python, Palin never appeared to have his head turned by the fame which followed. He and his wife Helen have been married now for 46 years, and have three grown-up children and two grandchildren. He still goes out for a run at least twice a week, up and down the hills of Hampstead, where he lives in London.

“I watch what I eat, I drink in moderation, and I keep pretty fit,” he says, “I think the mountains of Sheffield, where I was born and raised, have helped me in later life to cope with the hills of Hampstead.”

However, while Palin is happy to lead the quiet life, he has lost none of the energy which made his first travel show for the BBC such a hit. Since Great Railway Journeys of the World aired in 1980, he has travelled the world in 80 days, trekked through the world’s largest desert and followed in Ernest Hemingway’s footsteps from America to the Caribbean. His latest destination, Brazil proved just as fascinating.

“It’s so big, and there is certain edginess to some of the towns and cities – especially Rio, where the police and the state organisations are trying to clean up before the World Cup arrives in two years, and the Olympics in 2014. You don’t just wander into one of the shanty towns. You have to get permission to film there – so that they know that you aren’t from a rival drugs gang – and you leave the windows of your truck open all the time, so that they can see you.”

Next, he’s off to Australia and New Zealand, on a book tour to promote his novel, and after that, who knows?

“I still have itchy feet,” he admits, “and I love maps, and airline schedules, and guidebooks. There is something about the lure of the open road. I love being at home with the family, of course, but then I do get these urges to get away and explore, and the BBC, gawd bless them, seem to want more from me, so...”