Aubrey Malone recounts the extraordinary exploits of TV presenter, author and actor, Michael Palin
‘I packed my bags more times than Michael Palin.’ So wrote Jimmy White in his autobiography as he documented the frequency with which he left the family home when his marriage hit the rocks and his wife Maureen told him to sling his hook.
Michael’s marriage with Helen Gibbins was somewhat happier. That meant the bag-packing was done with some reluctance every time he hit the road for a book or a TV documentary he was making about the far-flung locales he made a habit of visiting during his action-packed life.
Michael Palin with his wife of 57 years, Helen
Helen died last year. It was a huge trauma for him. She’d been his soulmate ever since he met her when holidaying in the seaside town of Southwold in 1959. He was 16 and she 17. He attracted her attention by knocking her hat off with a beach ball. It wasn’t the most conventional courtship routine but it worked. They married in 1966 and had three children, Thomas, William and Rachel.
Michael is an actor as well as a globetrotter. He didn’t have showbusiness in his blood, his father being an engineer, but the performing instinct was in him from childhood. He appeared in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at the ripe old age of five in a school production. At ten he recited a medley of Shakespearean fare he composed for his mother. But he discounted pursuing an extended career with works by the Avon Lad. ‘I was always more ham than Hamlet,’ he admitted.
History was the subject he chose to study at Oxford University but as soon as he met Terry Jones his orientation turned towards comedy. Anarchic comedy to be precise. It was far from the future his father had envisaged for him.
Michael also met other off-the-wall folks at this time – Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman, Terry Gilliam and the inimitable John Cleese. When David Frost gave these loopers a chance to spread their wings on “The Frost Report” on BBC, the ground was already laid for Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1969.
This was a time of great comedic ferment in England. It was shaking off the shackles of convention with a vengeance just as America was. A man walked on the moon. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda rode their way into hippie history. Scott McKenzie put flowers in his hair and went to San Francisco.
Michael laughed himself silly at Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers in The Goons. He realised there was another kind of life out there than that of an engineer punching a clock for forty years. In 1975 he co-wrote Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Four years later the Python era reached its apogee with Life of Brian.
Michael laughed himself silly at Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers in The Goons
But there was more to Michael than this. He was, after all, a shy lad with many different kinds of interests. He didn’t want to pull down the pillars of conservatism altogether. A part of him loved the history he’d abandoned at college. Thus it was that he made Great Railway Journeys of the World in 1980, a series that celebrated his childhood habit of trainspotting.
‘I gave up my love of trains when I started going out with girls,’ he revealed, ‘but now I would settle down happily with a nice steamer and raise three small shunters for the rest of my life.’
His life afterwards dovetailed these two sides of himself. He oscillated between projects like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in 1983 with 1987’s East of Ipswich, a BBC drama that fictionalised his relationship with Helen. A frustrated attempt was made to recreate the sunny summer when they first met. That wasn’t easy with the unpredictability of the English weather. ‘Even the dogs were wearing overcoats,’ Michael recalled.
The following year he made Around the World in Eighty Days, a travel series in which he re-traced Jules Verne’s footsteps. It set the tone for his future.
He felt bad leaving Helen but she encouraged him to up sticks, telling him that if he didn’t, someone else would and he’d beat himself up about that. Love meant letting go. ‘Absence,” Michael said relievedly, “made the heart grow fonder.”
The following year he won a BAFTA as Best Supporting Actor in A Fish Called Wanda, one of the funniest films ever made in England. He played a character who had a stammer. His father had one so he knew what it was like. He didn’t want to make his performance too funny as that would have been disrespectful to his dad. ‘It frustrated him,’ he recalled, ‘resulting in the fact that he could never tell a joke with confidence.’ Michael went on to set up a centre to help others with the problem.
In 1991 he went on another journey for a series, this time from the North to the South pole. It wasn’t too far, was it? Why do things in half measures? His energy was incredible. He was now nearly fifty and still pushing back boundaries.
But it wasn’t roses all the way. His only sibling, Angela, took her life in 1992 after a long battle with depression. He couldn’t understand the condition. ‘It was ironic,’ he said, ‘She was supposed to be the balanced one – versus me with my madcap comedy routines.’
He did an audio rendition of Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot in 1994 which didn’t go down well with Dahl’s wife. Her disappointment with it hurt him deeply. In the same year he came to this country to search for the roots of his great grandmother, Brita Gallagher. She’d escaped the Famine by getting a boat to England, thereafter being adopted by a wealthy family.
In 1995 Michael circumnavigated his way around the lands around the Pacific Ocean anti-clockwise. Well why not?
His acting career hit a bump in the road in 1998 when a part he’d been offered in the Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks vehicle ‘You’ve Got Mail’ was cut out of it. Other actors might have moped. Not Michael. He got back up on his horse for one of the biggest projects of his life.
1999 was the centenary of Ernest Hemingway’s birth. I was writing a biography of him that year to commemorate it. One day in the post I received a book from my brother in New York: Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure. While I sat behind a desk pushing a pen, I was now aware that Michael had adopted a somewhat more ambitious plan for the author’s centenary.
He went to Montparnasse in Paris where Hemingway cut his literary teeth. He visited Walloon Lake in Michigan where he had a teenage holiday home. He went to Fossalta, where he was wounded in World War I as an ambulance driver. He visited the Gritti Palace in Venice and drank Valpolicella a la Ernesto. He ran with the bulls in Pamplona. He saw Hemingway’s house in Key West. He went on safari to the green hills of Africa and saw the wreck of a plane where Hemingway was supposed to have died. He even met Gregorio Fuentes, the model for the iconic fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea.
He visited Hemingway’s home in Cuba, the Finca Vigia, where he spent most of his middle years before Fidel Castro’s coup drove him out. And he went to Ketchum, Idaho, where the great man fired a fatal bullet into his head in 1961, thereby bagging his last trophy – himself.
Michael embarked on all these journeys because that’s what you do when you’re Michael Palin: you go into the belly of the beast to become your subject. As he put it: “I would lie in bed and follow retreating armies down dusty Italian roads and feel the heat of Spanish squares and stare up into the wide skies of Castile and sense the cold at night in a pine forest.”
In the early years of the new millennium he diversified himself even further, heading off to the Sahara and the Himalayas for more documentaries. He then dipped into the world for art for a further series of programmes and books.
He’s also kept diaries of his life: The Python Years: 1968-79”, Halfway to Hollywoo: 1980-1998, Travelling to Work: 1988-1998 and the just-published There and Back: 1999-2009.
Michael prefers writing to acting because it involves less waiting time. Patience was never his virtue and a there was a lot of that on film sets. There are never enough hours in the day for this man.
He advocated on everything from the rights of indigenous African tribes to better transport for people in Britain. No cause is too small or big for him.
In 2008 there were more documentaries, this time on war: one on the Armistice and another called The Last Days of World War 1
In succeeding years the Walking Atlas that he became visited places like Brazil, Korea (where he was famous for fish-slapping escapades – don’t ask) and Iraq. All of these journeys were made with his team of trusty aides – most importantly his photographer Basil Pao. There were also more audio books – without him having to worry about Roald Dahl’s wife anymore.
He didn’t appear on the screen much in the noughties until 2017 when he made a welcome return with The Death of Stalin,a fairly typical slice of buffoonery for the whimsically adolescent 64 year old.
He was knighted in 2019, a year that also saw him having open heart surgery for a leaky valve. One can imagine him saying toodley pips to Her Majesty before heading for the operating theatre. All in a day’s work, eh, Michael?
His world collapsed when Helen died of kidney failure last year. She asked for the dialysis machine to be turned off when it was giving her more pain than it was worth. She was resigned to the fact that she was going to die and so was he. But how was he going to cope without her? She’d been the touchstone of his life for so many years. ‘Every reference point,’ as he put it, ‘was connected to her.’
As was the case with every other challenge in his life, he didn’t let her death get him down, jetting off to Nigeria for yet another documentary, Michael Palin in Nigeria. ‘Her spirit guided me,’ he assured people. He knew it was what she would have wanted. She’d proved that from the very first time she encouraged him to leave home for his maiden voyage. Being a bereavement counsellor by profession, Helen was well aware that troubled people needed activity to rehabilitate themselves.
Michael Palin in a typical scene. This is part of his recent BBC TV series on Nigeria
Michael has always been regarded as one of the nicest guys in showbusiness. It’s a tag he hates but it does have its advantages: ‘No jury will convict me if I take up serial killing as a hobby,’ he points out.
He isn’t perfect, he tells us, being inclined to lose his rag when people do things that annoy him, like driving close behind him in traffic. (Here’s the solution to that one, Michael: Let them overtake you and then do the same to them. It never fails to work).
Now 81, he says he’s in the departure lounge of life. But life is still too busy for him to dwell on such matters. Too much is going on in that head of his: places to go, things to do, films to make. Did I mention that he also writes plays and children’s books? He’s had a lust for life ever since he first trod the boards or blackened a page.
Sadly, many of the people he enjoyed working most with are gone now. Graham Chapman died way back in 1989. Terry Jones is also gone. He still meets the remaining members of the Python clan if his schedule permits. When he does, he says, it’s like re-kindling an old love affair. They talk about the good old days – and the (semi) sensible people they’ve become now that time’s winged chariot has started to gain on them.
It’s unlikely that chariot will ever keep Michael down. Even if he’s in the ‘departure lounge’ of life, methinks the affable octogenarian with the itchy feet still has a few planes to catch before he hangs up those much-travelled boots.
