And Now for Michael Palin
Dave Weich, Powells.com
Oh, to approach this introduction objectively. To pretend that I'm not just another
guy who has nearly passed out laughing at Michael Palin saying the word shrubbery.
"I had this huge helmet on," Palin recalls, "and I remember complaining that
no one could see my face. I could barely see the camera. I had to stand on a
ladder, which was quite unsteady, and do comedy. I thought, 'It's like doing
comedy while being chased by the bulls at Pamplona! How do you do it?' And yet,
to many people, it's one of the things they remember about Holy Grail.
You just have to say 'Ni!' to people and they break up."
The Pythons:
Autobiography is a lavish, first-person account of the mind-bending hilarity
that is Monty Python: Graham, John, Eric, Terry, Terry, and Michael; their sketches,
their shows, and their movies. A coffee table book, a museum of all things Python.
Page after page of oral history alongside hundreds of candid photographs, film
stills, cartoons, playbills, album covers, and other memorabilia.
Sir Galahad, the singing lumberjack, Pontius Pilate... It's not simply how many
memorable roles Michael Palin, the actor, immortalized as part of the troupe,
but how many Palin, the writer, conceived and scripted. So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that he's been busier than ever since the end of the troupe's time together. As the host of five extraordinarily popular travel series (a sixth, Himalayas,
is due later this year) Palin has roamed from Pole
to Pole, explored the Sahara,
and circled the globe in 80
Days. When the Python alumnus the nicest one, they always said
published Hemingway's
Chair, his "engaging and accomplished first novel," the Washington Post
was moved to ask, "Is there anything that Michael Palin can't do?"
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"His showbiz observations are so absorbing.... Palin is an elegant and engaging writer." William Cook, The Guardian (UK)
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Graham Chapman and John Cleese and Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle and Michael Palin and Bob McCabe
"Fabulously big and revelatory...a coffee-table book that comes with its own caffeine. (Grade: A)" Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly
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"Is there anything that Michael Palin can't do? Now, with Hemingway's Chair, he's produced an engaging and accomplished first novel. It makes you wonder when we'll be hearing the premiere of Palin's First Symphony." The Washington Post
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"Readers looking for engaging, detailed insight to the Sahara will hit paydirt here." Publishers Weekly
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"Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure works on many different levels: There's Palin's charm and self-deprecating style. There are his keen insights on life, balanced nicely by pure silliness from time to time? A delightful travelogue." The Baltimore Sun
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Palin steps away from the big screen for a while to write an adventure about the exploration of the diverse cultures and varied landscape surrounging a 20,000-mile stretch of the Pacific Rim.
Dave: Did you have a nice New Year's?
Michael Palin: Yes, I did actually. New Year's Eve was a party, and since then
it's been quiet. I've been working away because I've got a book to write for
this new travel series. It's a bit of working and a bit of celebrating at the
same time.
Dave: I spent the holiday saddled with one of the more taxing research
projects I've had in a while, having to sit through any number of Monty Python
videos, one after the other.
Palin: Well, think of us having to get the
book together! Old files full of bits and pieces, scratching and scribblings
of early Python... It became quite a task.
Dave: One thing that surprised me in reading was how little time you had to film the
shows.
Palin: There was considerable pressure because we didn't have a big
budget. We were expected to get thirteen shows written and performed within
a year, or less than that sometimes.
We had a very brief turn-around. Once we'd written the shows, we'd go out
and film them. That had to be done quickly because we had to move on. Then we
came back to London and we had two or three days of rehearsal before we were
into recording. We didn't use any idiot boards or auto-cues; we learned all
the material. So it was tight, but we were young. We were so happy to be doing
the shows at all, really. We were so pleased just to be given the break to do
them.
Dave: But the limited studio time didn't leave you time for improvising,
for example. You had to be ready when the camera started.
Palin: The improvising came when we were writing. What I remember as
the most exciting moments were when the various writing groups within the six
of us would come together and read new material to each other. That's the first
time you'd hear any of it. Like "Dead Parrot": the first time I ever heard "Dead
Parrot" was when John read it out at a meeting. The first time I heard "Always
Look on the Bright Side" was when Eric got his guitar out and played it at a
little group meeting. The first time anyone heard "Lumberjack Song" was when
we tried to sing it to the group around the table. Those were great moments.
That's when we made our first decisions about the strength of the material.
We relied very much on a gut feeling. Some of them, like the three I just mentioned,
were put on the A list, the gold, top pile: those are fine; they don't need
to be changed. Other material had good sections and some bits that didn't work,
but they excited or lit up someone else at the table to take it on and move
with it.
It was electrifying, when ideas came out. Why don't you do this? Why don't
you call him that? On a good day, the air was crackling with ideas. I think
I said in the book that if you went out to make a cup of coffee you could miss
six wonderfully funny gags. No one had any coffee on a good day; we just got
on with it.
There was a feeling of pressure, but it was so fresh compared to what we'd
been doing before and what the alternative was at that time, which was to write
for other British comedians, very good though they were: Marty Feldman and The
Two Ronnies and David Frost, people like that. But writing for somebody else,
what we were therefore doing was in a sense preventing our own self-expression
from coming to the surface. With the six of us round the table, you felt everything
could come out. Anything you ever thought was funny could be tried, oblivious
of bad taste or whatever. Throw it all in there, let's see how it works.
Dave: Watching the shows now, the transitions between sketches strike
me as one of the most peculiar and compelling aspects. When people think of
Python, they probably think of the individual sketches first, but in fact there
was always a larger scope. Each show was structured very deliberately.
Then ABC wanted to edit the shows for American audiences, and there was obviously
a lot of resistance to that.
Palin: Structure was very important, which is why we were so upset
when ABC cut so much out. They were all integrated, all the ideas, with lots
of little running gags. It didn't make sense if one was taken out. We thought
very carefully of the shape of the twenty-nine minutes we had to fill; we'd
insert little references to things that were coming later and so on.
You really had to show the program as a whole if you were going to get the
full benefit. It wasn't just that we threw a lot of ideas in that were completely
disparate and had no connection. We made little connections to hold the
disparate material together. Very often the connecting material was some of
the stuff we were most pleased about. That's why we were reluctant to let anybody
re-edit our shows.
Dave: There weren't existing templates in comedy or television that
you could draw from, but similar experiments were cropping up in other forms
of entertainment. The Beatles played around with pastiche and surrealism
and abrupt transitions but at its core their music always had that pop sensibility.
Were you drawing inspiration from those types of sources?
Palin: Well, certainly there was no template. There was no previous
pattern we could use, but we didn't mind that.
Partly, it was accidental. Five of the six of us had been to two English universities,
both of which had a tradition of doing reviews and cabaret where you could stand
up on stage and perform your own material. But then Terry
Gilliam came into the equation, from America, from New York, having worked
with top cartoonists and that sort of thing; and the fact that Terry not only
liked what we were doing but enhanced it by what he was doing....We didn't look
around and say, "We've got to have a cartoonist to do this." He just came in
and it really worked.
John
Cleese was a big star in 1966 and 1967, before Python, and I honestly didn't
think that he would come and do a purely experimental show where he was getting
paid £100 a week. He could have gone off and made movies; he was given
plenty of opportunities to do that. So the fact that John liked this and was
intrigued by doing something completely off the wall...
We were encouraged by what was happening in Britain in the sixties. The
Beatles, you rightly say, were doing this in their music, doing things that
were popular but unusual. Everyone was applauding the fact that it was something
new. Fashion designers were producing a look that was different. The
Stones were out there producing their brand of rock and roll. There was
a real feeling that you were almost obliged to try something new now; it was
time. Without meaning to deliberately, we all took some sort of comfort from
each other's experiments and were determined not to compromise.
I suppose our childhood was a time of compromise, of behaving, of learning
the old things in the old way about the British Empire and the church and the
army and the schools. Suddenly all that didn't apply anymore. The straight jacket
of respectability had been loosened. We were losing the Empire. We'd made a
complete cock-up of Suez
in 1956 and we were giving most of the countries in Africa and around the world
their freedom in 1960. That's not irrelevant to Python. It was in the early
sixties with people like Peter
Cook and Dudley
Moore and Beyond
the Fringe and all that that a more daring and risk-taking form of comedy
emerged. I think it was because everything was changing at that time.
Dave: Why does Monty Python appeal to younger generations? Comedy doesn't
generally enjoy such a long shelf life.
Palin: I think it's up to those who watch the shows to give the answer, but I've
gleaned one or two clues from people I talk to. Python is something quite difficult
to typify. You can't say, "It's about this." It's about lots of things. It's
about splinters of information; it's about slapstick; it's about cartoon; it's
about bits of British culture; it's about things that are completely abstract;
it's different styles, different sketches in each show. It's hard to pin down,
and I think people like that lack of discipline and the fact that you can open
up this little box of Python and in there you'll find something in every half-hour
to make you laugh. It comes from all sorts of directions, and I think that's
what gives it its life. Some things won't work for you, but there's something
that makes you laugh.
Also, I think it's because it's done in an absurd and surreal way. It's the
subversiveness and the mischief and the breaking of rules that our audience
like. It's not heavily satirical; it's not all geared to attacking people or
politicians or news, generally. I think that Python, essentially, deep down,
is quite good-natured. It's good fun, so I think it's good for group watching.
Dave: You say "good-natured"...
Palin: Well, that's my view. I don't think all the other Pythons would
agree. They'd probably say, "Michael, come on!"
Dave: You're suggesting that the others would disagree with you publicly?
Palin: Well, it has been done.
Dave: The philosophers playing soccer or "The Summarize Proust Competition"... Python can be silly and highbrow at once. All of Life of
Brian really...
Palin: I think Life of Brian
works I'm very proud of that; I think we all are. There's a
lot in that movie that is in a sense quite sweet, really: Brian, himself, and
his mother; they're just people trapped in this little world. But underneath all that, there's a very strong point: By what authority are
these people telling you to do this or that? That was a very basic worry
and concern that we all had then. Dave: It's so strange to read that the preview of Holy
Grail flopped. I know it was a different cut of the movie, but it's so popular now that it's hard
to imagine people not falling over laughing.
Palin: With comedy, very often you don't need much to get it wrong.
You get the timing slightly wrong, or in the case of a film you get the edit
slightly wrong; you use the wrong kind of cut; you just miss the joke by a whisker...
I think maybe that was happening when we were doing the previews of Holy
Grail. We learned from those previews and changed things.
Despite that, there are things in some of the movies and some of the shows
that I just don't think worked terribly well. And yet, I look back now, and
even things like the three-headed knight, which I never really liked that much...
I liked the idea of it, but for some reason, probably because we were working
very fast at the time we only had half a day to shoot it, and it was
cold and wet up in Scotland it hadn't really worked. And yet I look at
it now, and I think it's fine. It's a nice idea, quite silly, and on to the
next.
I don't see things in quite such black and white terms as we did then. And
remember, we were just starting. We didn't have a big following. Python wasn't
popular around the world. We were very critical. Now it turns out that for whatever
reason quite a lot of what we did then is seen as funny by people. We could
probably find and produce sketches that we never even put on the screen and
people would say, "Hey, that's a funny idea!" But we were quite tough
with ourselves at that time. And we were very close to the material. I think
if you're very close to the material you sometimes only see what's wrong with
it; you don't see the general picture.
I think I say in the book that I used to find watching the shows quite agonizing
because some of them just weren't up to standard. There were things that just
weren't good. I'd think, Oh, damn, we've missed it. Comedy works on absolute perfection of timing, getting all the elements
right. We all knew that, so to get it wrong was either lazy or it was just some
kind of failure.
I think that colored a lot of our thinking about Python at the time, this
fear of failing to be funny. We wanted every minute of the shows to be funny.
Sometimes it just didn't work. And yet now people are very indulgent with it.
The things people come up with as being their favorite things, I think, That?
God!
The Knights Who Say "Ni!" for instance. Again, that was done on a very cold
day. I had this huge helmet on, and I remember complaining that no one could
see my face. I could barely see the camera. I had to stand on a ladder, which
was quite unsteady, and do comedy. I thought, It's like doing comedy while
being chased by the bulls at Pamplona! How do you do it? And yet, to many
people, it's one of the things they remember about Holy Grail. You just
have to say "Ni!" to people and they break up.
Dave: You say in the book that the fish-slapping dance is one of the
things you're most proud of in your entire performing career. Why?
Palin: Well, I did an almost suicidally good fall, but the reason I
did it was not because I was masochistic. It's just that we were filming this
dance on the side of a canal lock, and when we were rehearsing it, the water
was within about two or three feet of the top of the lock. Quite nice, you know,
no problem. When we actually came to shoot it, the lock had been emptied. And
for some strange reason, rather than say, "Can we wait until the lock is filled
up again, please?" I just went ahead with it.
I look at that fall... I keep my helmet on, and I go vertically straight down
into the water. It's like I'm a piece of Gilliam animation, a cutout, going
into that water. That's what I mean, being very proud of it. I wouldn't do it
now.
Dave: In 1995, you published a novel, Hemingway's
Chair. That was
years before you hosted the Hemingway's
Adventure program. How did Hemingway become such a central part of the novel?
Palin: A few years before I'd written a novel, I'd started work on
a television screenplay, which was set in a small town and started with someone
finding Hemingway's chair in an antique shop. That didn't work out, but
I went back to it for the subject of a novel and it seemed to be quite a good
story. I knew nothing much of Hemingway, apart from I'd read him when I was
at school.
I explored it a bit more, and it was while I was reading background for Hemingway's
Chair because two of the characters had to be utterly obsessed with
Hemingway and know everything about him, so I had to do a lot of reading in
order to be on top of this obsession I read tons and tons of Hemingway.
I discovered that while I found some of Hemingway books difficult to read,
his life and certainly his traveling life intrigued me, the fact that
he spent so little time in the United States and so much time abroad and yet
he's seen as the great American writer. Hemingway appealed to me as a traveler.
That's how a few years later we began work on the Hemingway Adventure.
Dave: In the introduction to Around
the World in 80 Days you explain that three people turned down the job of host
before it was offered to you. Does that seem rather incredible now, looking
back on how long you've been doing these travel shows?
Palin: It's just quite interesting, really. It's all about timing.
The first guy who was offered it didn't want to do it because he was a very
serious journalist, a bit older than me, and he didn't want the discomfort,
understandably so. Another one wouldn't have been right at all. And the second
one who could have done it rather well was more of a literary journalist and
just didn't want to go off and do the traveling. So I can understand why all
of them turned it down.
I had no illusions about it. I thought, I'll have a go at this
because I wanted to travel. It wasn't that I wanted to be a television presenter
particularly or a star of travel documentary. I just thought, No one will
ever ask me to go around the world again and pay for me to do it.
I'd just finished filming A
Fish Called Wanda, which was the last of about ten movies I'd made during
the eighties, starting I think with the Python Hollywood Bowl and The
Meaning of Life and The Missionary, and all that. In a sense, I didn't
want to stand around in any studios being told to look to the left and look
to the right. I wanted to get out and about a bit. I wanted to be...a lumberjack.
No. I readily accepted it.
Then when we were just heading out, I began to think, What
are we doing here? We have no script. It depends entirely on this time constraint:
eighty days. There are going to be moments when I'm clearly uninspired, fed
up, dejected, or jaded, and the camera is going to be filming me! This is
before we had reality television, all those things where people
go off and are filmed being miserable; there was no precedent for that. I suddenly
panicked and thought, What are we going to do? This is going to be absolutely
disastrous! It wasn't until the end of 1989 when we'd come back, put it
all together, written the
book, and the whole thing went out that I realized it had been quite successful.
So I can understand people not taking it on.
Dave: The next show you're filming is about the Himalayas. I found
a bit on your web site
where you're rather enigmatic about something that happened on location, something
about "rumors of my kidnapping in Nepal." Can you say anything about that?
Palin: I'm saving it to make a story about it in the book! No, what
happened was that we were filming west of Katmandu in a very remote village
about two hours walk from any road. We were filming the recruiting for the Ghurka
regiment. I don't know if you know the Ghurkas. They're a Nepalese hill tribe.
Good fighters. The British have kind of cultivated them over the years as tough
fighters to go in times of trouble to places. They're a very good, disciplined
fighting force. Every year a number of Ghurkas are selected to join the battalion,
and they go off to England for training. With the British Army guy and several
Ghurka officers, we attended one of these recruiting days. There were about
a hundred fifty guys doing exercises, push ups, and all that sort of thing to
show how fit they were. They're really keen.
To cut a long story short, at the end of the day local Maoist guerrillas,
of which there are many in Nepal, came up to speak to the people who were doing
the filming. Although they left us alone, they asked the British Army representative
and the two Ghurka officers to go with them and "meet their hierarchy," as they
put it. They were going to send them back after two or three hours, and they
didn't come back. We were in this little village, and the next morning they
still hadn't come back. That's when we were encouraged to go.
The recruiting business ended and we left. Once we got out, we reported what
had happened. For a couple days, it was quite tense. But then all the people
they had abducted were released. We weren't harmed at all, though, and I didn't
want to get into the position while we were out there of It's Michael Palin's
story. It wasn't. We were ignored by them. I didn't want to do anything
at the time that prejudiced his chances of being released, but he's okay, and
it will appear in the film.
Dave: After all this traveling, is there a part of the world you're
anxious to get back to, anywhere in particular you really fell for?
Palin: No, there isn't really. I suppose I'd have to be corny and say
home is where my heart is, the old thing, but it is, really. I think that's
just to do with familiarity. There are wonderful places in the world, and I've
seen just the most beautiful scenery and been amongst people who are as friendly
and welcoming and hospitable and generally good to be with as any I could wish
for, but in the end you come back for all its imperfections to home, to London,
to busy cities, because that's where I've been brought up not in London,
but in a city in the north of England. I'm an English city boy and I can't really
get away from that.
I'm not one of those people who could go to a small French town, having lived
in Manchester all their lives, and suddenly live there and take on that life.
I've learned that. I love traveling, but I love coming home. So I suppose in
the end I'd have to say the British Isles are where I'm happiest.
Dave: I've heard you compare the idea of travel to acting, in terms
of taking on different roles but inevitably coming out of them and returning
to your own life.
Palin: It is like that. I'm very curious. I'm fascinated by
all aspects of life, different countries and peoples, and I'm incredibly fortunate
to live at a time when I can see all these different parts of the world. I find
it continually invigorating wherever I go. It might be just a slum village somewhere,
but there's something I get out of that. I've been there. I've seen it. It means
something to me now. I've always wanted to enjoy the personal experience of
travel, rather than just somebody else describing it. I get an enormous kick
out of it, and I think it's really quite important for the general balance of
my life and my sanity.
It is a bit like doing Python in an odd way because you're going into an unpredictable
world. It's like hearing sketches for the first time. You wonder, What is
it going to be like? Somewhere I've been recently, the Northwest Frontier,
you wonder, What are the people going to be like? Sometimes it's okay
and other times it's just brilliant. You think, I can't believe I'm walking
down this street in a place where I should be terrified of terrorism and I'm
actually finding people who are being incredibly kind and generous to me.
It appeals to my need to be continually diverted and distracted.
Dave: I'm sure people are always asking you about doing more work with
Python. You mention in the book some interest in doing a film. Can all the people
get together? Will it ever happen?
Palin: I wouldn't give you very good odds on it at the moment, no,
but we never write it out. We all talk to each other. We all still get on. In
a way, I suppose, we all share something that very few other people have. And
I have no doubt that the humor could easily be pulled together again.
It's two things, really. One is you'd have to accept that we're not Python
as it was. I'm a great believer in the fact that all six of Python were very
important to the mix. Take one away and it's like taking one table leg away;
you may have a perfectly good table but it's just slightly unsteady. That's
a bit of a problem. [Editor's note: Graham Chapman died of cancer on October 4, 1989.] The other thing is that I'm not sure really whether you
could get people away from the things they're all doing now to work for whatever
time it would take. Certainly a film would take eighteen months or a couple
years. I don't know whether people would commit that time. Then I think about
myself: I've got another year to do this travel. Maybe Python is something I
did and enjoyed doing and I'm very grateful for, but it's behind me now.
All these things come into the equation, but Python was put together by a
series of lucky accidents. Lucky accidents may happen again, that's all I'd
say.
Dave: If this last question isn't too painful... The
Pythons notes that you are scheduled to die in 2034 while filming a documentary
in the Kalahari Desert. I was wondering if you could talk at all about that?
Palin: Talk about my death?
Dave: If the news isn't still too fresh.
Palin: Well, I think it's very generous that they give me until 2034.
That's a very long time.
Dave: Eric Idle got more.
Palin: Did he? Oh. Oh, well. I haven't read carefully enough.
I think that gives me ninety-one years, and if I'm able to be in the Kalahari
when I'm ninety-one, that's fine. I would actually be very, very happy to fall
off a camel or die of, say, a...lightly-thrown spear in my travels rather than
in some home with other comedians, all of us nodding off with a rug over our
knees. Die in the saddle, absolutely.
I showed Vitz my copy of The Pythons the day I got it. Flipping through the pages, he asked, "Are you going to interview them?" The idea hadn't occurred to me. It's not as if the Pythons were coming to Portland. Then again, our in-store events schedule slows to a trickle during the holidays. Why not try to set something up by phone? So let this be my official admission that Vitz done good, offering that suggestion. Michael Palin spoke from his home in London on January 2, 2004.
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