"I’m a bit of a loner, really"
Sir Michael Palin reflects on the death of his wife Helen, why he parted from the BBC and how, at 81, he intends to keep travelling the world
Ray Burmiston
- Michael Hodges
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 even the indignities of GPs’ prostate checks. “There are a lot of bathroom moments in the diaries,” Palin says, speaking in the book-lined sitting room of his north London home.
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On the loo or in transit, Palin writes it all down, so we know what happened and so does he. “A diary gives you a memory,” he says. “Which is wonderful.” Particularly wonderful to Palin, perhaps, because his Monty Python friend Terry Jones lost much of his short-term memory
to frontotemporal dementia before dying in 2020, aged 77. “In the diary, there’s a feeling of the curtain slowly coming down. Terry 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 – his wife Helen died last year, aged 80, after a long and painful struggle with kidney disease. Here in There and Back, 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.”
Michael Palin at the RT Covers Party in 2023. Ray Burmiston
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.”
When Helen died, he continued to keep the diary. “They were difficult entries to write,” he says. “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. I needed to remember all that.”
Michael Palin with his wife Helen in 2015. John Lamparski/WireImage
And so he goes on, still wandering the world and telling us all about it. His last series was about Nigeria, which followed recent documentaries on Iraq and North Korea, all made for Channel 5, his broadcasting partner since his last series with the BBC in 2012. “There was the feeling that the BBC wanted to interfere a little more,” he says of his departure.
“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.” Will he keep travelling? “In the diaries I talk a lot about being in my 60s. Well, I’m now 81, and I’m planning another series.”
What comes across in the diaries is the sheer amount of stuff 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. “I was asked to do Strictly Come Dancing but thought, ‘That pathway is being a warm, joyful, much-loved celebrity.’ I’m not that. I’m a bit of a loner, really. Just being a celebrity or a personality doesn’t interest me that much.”
In a diary, you’ve got to say some days you weren’t really nice
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’.”
Does he like the Palin in the diaries? “I’m a friend of his. So I suppose I do, 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.
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Authors
Michael Hodges
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