MICHAEL PALIN, the seemingly most normal of the Pythons, is to be commended for his grafting – for his determination never to fritter away a single morning.
Or a single penny. “My little single room is £51, a half-bottle of champagne is £10.25. And this is Croydon,” he records in January 1984 when on location for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Where John Cleese disappears up a gum tree for years, spending “an inordinate amount of time thinking about himself”, or where Graham Chapman drives Aston Martins, installs gyms and swimming pools in his mansions and then declares bankruptcy, Palin, by absolute contrast, is proudly “tight, controlled, careful”.
He has remained in the same Gospel Oak terrace for decades (admittedly he now owns the rest of the street). Of all the Pythons, he is the one who is “an intuitively stable character”, so tidy and thrifty he’ll start the day by vacuuming the stairs. On holidays he reads “mind-improving” books, goes for runs in the rain and retires to his desk to polish his screenplays, children’s stories, voiceover commentaries and to write up his diaries.
Palin lacks the brutal ego to be a conventional star
If the discipline seems obsessive consider the opposite. Angela, Palin’s sister, quietly unravels during the period covered by the book, sinking into depression before comitting suicide. Palin’s bright smiles and good-sport demeanour are a bit more complex once we know this and he writes about it with powerful simplicity. By being sensible, he is keeping his knowledge of pandemonium at bay – and with Python, he was making pandemonium funny.
In the eight years covered by these 600 dense pages, Palin worries about proving himself and establishing a solo identity post-Python. He writes and co-stars in the gentle comedy The Missionary with Trevor Howard, “a great bear just hit by a tranquillising dart”.
His life is less filled with “the glorious impetus” of creativity, however, than with long business meetings and “just keeping the Python name up front there”. He is aware that a new comedy establishment is on the rise, “the quite frenetic energy of the Mayalls and Henrys and Edmondsons”.
And the money is excellent. Universal pay the team $3million up front to appear in Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life and $700,000 each is on offer for Python television specials. His bonus points from A Fish Called Wanda earned him $350,000 in the first few months after the film’s American release alone. Playing inadvertent dog assassin Ken Pile, Palin co-starred in that picture with Kevin Kline, whom he clearly didn’t much like. Kline treated lesser mortals as if they were “tins of condemned beef.” As for Ben Kingsley: “I think power has made him mad.”
Palin lacks the brutal ego to be a conventional star. Though every other week he is packing his bags for Hollywood and New York and though he cheerfully endures meetings with idiotic studio executives, nothing ever works out with the half-offer of roles Dudley Moore and Richard Dreyfus have already turned down.
The book concludes with the diarist about to embark on his replication of Jules Verne’s global circumnavigation. His success, he says, is down to the fact that there is “in my personality something which the viewer will like and identify with”. Around The World In Eighty Days was a series rejected by Noel Edmonds, Alan Whicker and Clive James. For Palin, however, there was to be no turning back.
