Michael Palin’s career spans five decades, from Monty Python to Around the World in 80 days. Somehow he has managed to condense his years of writing and performing into three volumes of diaries.
At a Guardian Live event in London, he talked about his ritual of diary-keeping that started at the beginnings of Monty Python and has continued ever since, and how some of the best things in his life just ... happened.
“My diaries started when I had this great willpower after giving up smoking for my son,” he says. “It’s become as much a part of habit as brushing my teeth. I don’t write on the same day. If you write the next day, you’ve got your best chance to remember what you want to record about the previous day.”
Nothing is off limits. “It’s essentially a personal thing,” he says. “That’s what makes a diary so valuable, it’s just you writing your thoughts not for anybody else. When I wrote my diaries, I didn’t think of publishing them at all.”
However, when Palin was asked to write his autobiography, he naturally thought of his diaries as the primary source. He recalled that due to the frequent appearances of food and drink in his entries, he was advised during edits of his autobiography to cut out the mentions of every meal.
“I couldn’t do that because almost everything that ever happened to me in my life happened over a meal or afterwards,” he says. “The diaries are – on a good day – a celebration of what you’ve done. The fact I put in a particular bottle of wine or a particularly fine risotto was important to that day.”
As chance would have it, Palin began writing his diaries two weeks before he had a meeting with John Cleese to discuss a new project - a project that would become Monty Python.
“People think Python was put together by a lot of people who were stoned all the time,” he says. In fact, the team honed their skills fastidiously at university revues.
“You had to write and perform your own material for an audience,” he says. “You only got one go at it. You had to know your material, perform it well and you had to do it crisply. So, we were all actually efficient.”
In his view, the best days of Python were the early days when nothing was expected of them. “I’d go back to that first summer when we were writing Python. No one had any expectation of it, but nearly all the sketches that people now quote again and again were probably written in that summer.”
“The key thing about Python was that it was never really popular with everybody,” he said. “The people who really picked up on it were very loyal to it. They were told by others it wasn’t funny, but you have to say: ‘no, it is funny.’ So it’s like your little protest against the world.
We wanted to do little things that would irritate any broadcasting company that would put us on, like we’d turn the set off halfway through. They said: ‘you can’t do that again, please, because people will think we’ve broken down. We get lots of calls and all that.’ Little things like that were mischievous things that we did. The feeling was ‘will we get away with it’, not ‘this is groundbreaking and is going to change everything.’”
Since Python, Palin has always followed the same anarchic approach to his film roles and parallel career as a broadcaster.
“I wouldn’t know where a plan would begin,” he said. “Everything that’s happened in my life has happened because someone’s said: ‘Michael, you’re funny, have a go at this.’ I’m not very good at starting things myself. There’s been no great plan, it’s whatever’s around. Saying ‘yeah, alright’ could be the story of my life.”
Michael Palin was in conversation with John Crace at an event for Guardian Members. Find out what other events are coming up and how to sign up for membership.
