Michael Palin on parting ways with the BBC, turning down Strictly and plans to keep travelling
Ahead of the release of his latest volume of diaries, the broadcasting great speaks to Radio Times about personal loss, future hopes and the days he's not so nice.
“Ah yes,” says Michael Palin. “Fingers up bums”.
Britain’s nicest man, like it or not – and he doesn’t much, as we’ll find out – is talking about his newly published volume of diaries, There and Back, which covers 1999 to 2009.
It doesn’t skimp on personal detail, not least the indignities of GPs’ prostate checks or the moment in April 2005 when, sitting on the loo at home, Palin hears presenter John Humphrys mistakenly declare the end of his documentary-making career on Radio 4’s Today programme. This, Palin writes, leads him to “wander round in T-shirt and underpants, like some confused old pensioner” before calling the BBC to protest.
Today he’s not confused at all, although, at 81, he qualifies as a pensioner. “There are a lot of bathroom moments in the diaries,” Palin says, speaking in the book-lined sitting room of the north London home he shared with his wife of 57 years, Helen. “Sometimes Helen and I will be there at our two wash basins, I’ll be saying something about someone, and Helen will be raising her eyes heavenwards.”
Helen died of kidney disease, aged 80, in 2023. In such moments many widowers might put life on hold, prepare for their own end. Not Palin, who remains phenomenally busy.
Apart from travel documentaries which, despite Humphrys’s announcement, he continues to make, there is the near constant writing. There and Back is the fourth in a series of published dairies that began with The Python Years in 2006. Then there are 23 other books, 11 of which are connected to his various television travel series, but why does he keep writing and publishing the diaries?
“It’s a rambling way of giving an account of myself,” he explains. “Which is terribly arrogant.” How is it arrogant? “Well, why me? I’m not a sports reporter talking about a game or an anthropologist talking about a certain tribe, so you’ve got to think, ‘Well, I’m interesting enough for people to want to read about what I was doing on the lavatory the other day.’ That’s what I mean by arrogance.”
Chunks of the diary concern his erstwhile Monty Python companions, whose lives he remains inescapably enmeshed in, as they consider reforming or a making a musical version of The Life of Brian. John Cleese and Eric Idle are mostly in LA, Terry Gilliam constantly away trying to get movies made. Terry Jones, who lives nearby to Palin (they meet for contemplative pints), has a textbook mid-life crisis, leaving his wife for a much younger woman.
“He says he knows the whole situation makes him look rather foolish,” notes a perplexed Palin. His friend’s foolishness, his own fears, the minutiae of preparing for an overseas expedition, Palin writes it all down, so we know what happened and so he does as well. “A diary gives you a memory,” he says. “Which is a wonderful thing.”
Particularly wonderful to Palin, perhaps, because Jones lost much of his short-term memory to frontotemporal dementia before dying in 2020, aged 77. Illness and death shadow these diaries. Palin’s friend George Harrison, who saved Monty Python’s The Life of Brian by finding $40 million when EMI films withdrew their support in 1978, died of lung cancer in 2001.
“George was a great shock and a great loss,” he says. “In the diary, there’s a feeling of the curtain slowly coming down. Terry Jones is not quite what he was before. We’re all getting into the departure lounge, and we’re trying to work out how to deal with this. That’s what makes this diary different; the feeling of time running out, a feeling of loss.”
The most painful loss for Palin would come later, marked in a diary we are yet to see. Helen died in a hospice in 2023 after a long and painful struggle with kidney failure. Here in the diaries, very much alive, she happily acquiesces in her husband’s plans to go away for travel documentaries. Palin writes of their marriage, “Love grows in direct proportion to the time I spend away.”
Does he still think that, or now regret he didn’t spend more time with Helen? “I don’t have regrets really,” he says, then pauses. “Perhaps towards the end, when I was doing the later travel journeys like North Korea. Helen was then less well, less good at looking after herself, unfortunately, and that was a slightly difficult time. I don’t think she particularly wanted me to go away then, but she knew that my interest in travel and other people was very deep-seated. It wasn’t because I wanted to get away from home – it wasn’t that at all.”
And when Helen died, he continued the diary? “I think it helped. Helen was ill for a couple of years, so it wasn’t a sudden death, and I was helping her and caring for her through a lot of pain. Writing this down helped me to deal with it. Some days were better, some worse, I needed to remember all that.
“After the moment of her death, it seemed absolutely important to keep the diary going. If I had stopped, it’s almost as though I were saying, ‘Right, my life’s over, that’s it’. I felt I was keeping going for her and the family. If they saw my diary, and it stopped at the day of Helen’s death, they’d wonder how I dealt with it. They were difficult entries to write.”
Perhaps that’s why diaries are such an engaging literary form. Like our own lives they veer between the everyday and the profound; between which socks to pack and losing the love of your life.
“There are moments where I felt I had to be very honest,” he says. “There’s a lot about my sister Angela, who committed suicide in 1987. I deal with that because I don’t want her to be forgotten. I don’t want it to be, ‘Oh, we don’t write about that, because of the way she died.’ In the same way I wouldn’t want to stop writing about Helen because, ‘Oh, she had terrible illness, we don’t want to hear about that.’ Every human being deserves to be heard and noticed and accepted and understood, however ill or sick they are.”
And so he goes on, still wandering the world and telling us all about it. His last series was Nigeria, which followed recent documentaries on Iraq and North Korea, and also made for Channel 5, his broadcasting partner since some BBC commissioner decided viewers didn’t want old, straight, ex-public-school boys (Shrewsbury in Palin’s case) as travel guides. “The last series for the BBC was Brazil [2012],” he says.
“There was the feeling that the BBC wanted to interfere a little more. They wanted to control it a little more. And they had this new way of presenting shows – which I would get absolutely, desperately frustrated with – where they would show, in the first five minutes, all the great moments of what was to come. Because this captured viewers. Otherwise, as soon as they see Michael Palin, they’ll switch off. The BBC were going in a different direction, and presentation was going in a different direction.”
Ask him to name a good TV traveller and he picks ITV’s Joanna Lumley. “She travels the way I travel, to find out what it’s like in another country and what the people are like there.” Will he keep travelling? “In the diaries I talk a lot about being in my sixties. Well, I’m now 81, and I’m planning another series.”
What comes across in the diaries is the sheer amount of things he does; planning trips, book tours, public appearances for charities. “I’m constantly banging on about the emails and number of people asking me to do things,” he says. “But I’m not going to live on a desert island anytime soon, so one accepts that people are interested. But it’s limited for me, because I don’t do a lot of other stuff on television. I don’t go on game shows, or Strictly Come Dancing... well, I’ve been asked.”
He must have thought twice about turning down Strictly? “Not at all, I just said no. I thought there’s another pathway there, and that pathway is being a warm, joyful, much-loved celebrity who will join in public life generally. And I realised I’m not that. I’m a bit of a loner, really. Just being a celebrity or being a personality doesn’t interest me that much.”
If he can sound a little grumpy, in conversation and on the page, who’s to blame him after all those years of being told how lovely he is. “Michael Palin, nicest man,” he says with a touch of weariness. “How do you deal with that in a diary? Well, you’ve got to say some days you weren’t really nice. You write about them and you accept them, and that’s it. I am quite contrary; I don’t like being pushed in a certain direction. I don’t like doing what seems to be the ‘proper thing’.”
And what about the man he finds in the pages of his diaries, does Palin like him? “I’m a friend of his, put it that way. I give him the benefit of the doubt when he needs it, and I’m embarrassed when he’s embarrassed. But in the end, do I like him or not? I suppose I do really, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone on day after day writing this stuff. The point is, do other people like him?” I think we know the answer to that one.
A condensed version of this feature appears in the latest issue of Radio Times – subscribe here.
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