Maybe I could join an all-male voice choir,’ muses Palin – and is on the point of elaborating when the harassed-looking photographer hovering nearby finally pounces and bundles him into the back of a van. I watch it tear out of Christ Church’s Tom Gate, swerve into the oncoming traffic, and disappear down towards the river. Then I walk off.
This unlikely encounter with a fully operational legend doubtless came on one of Michael Palin’s more mundane days. In Oxford on a flying visit to shoot a few promotional scenes for one of the Vice-Chancellor’s access videos, tea in the Cathedral and a jaunt to the river cannot have ranked highly on his list of colourful exploits.
Author, Python, traveller and film star, Palin has had an asteroid named after him and been assailed by bandits, the Vatican, and student journalists. The weight of his experiences shows in furrows and lines creasing his open face – yet he still exudes vitality and energy. All in all he comes across rather like the kind of wise and ancient tortoise a Polynesian community might once have worshipped.
It is this wizened face which causes me to double take as, carefully negotiating tourists through Christ Church cloisters, I brush past a more elegant duffle coat than usual. Ten minutes later, Palin has been tracked down, and I snatch an interview on the move.
It would hardly be like Palin to remain still. For the past nineteen years this son of Yorkshire has been travelling the world, filming for the BBC, circumnavigating it Phineas Fogg-style in 1989’s Around the World in 80 Days, taking the land-based route from Pole to Pole three years later, going anti-clockwise for 80,000 kilometres around the Pacific in 1996, retracing the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway in 1999, and in this century, taking on the Sahara, the Himalayas, and Eastern Europe.
Palin has visited 85 different countries in the course of his travels – 86 if you’re counting Bosnia and Herzegovina as two – and written nearly 375 best-selling coffee table books. ‘The Palin effect’ has played a major part in global tourism; from Cappadocia to Machu Picchu, regions or places featured in his programmes and books have done very well out of the attention.
Certainly this was the intention with Eastern Europe – to open up the old Soviet states to western eyes, and promote everything from understanding to commerce. Yet as the world becomes increasingly aware of the adverse impact of its travel upon the environment, is foreign tourism really what a man as popular as Palin should be advocating?
The question is unfair, and I confess I was too embarrassed to phrase it so bluntly. Palin has, after all, always preferred more traditional methods of travelling – hitchhiking, buses, elephants, smelly trains filled with goats and chickens – the personal experience is improved immeasurably. Yet a certain amount of flying is inevitable? Palin agrees reluctantly, and comes out with a slightly shocking statement.
‘I’m not planning any more adventures any time soon. I’ll be staying close to home – I’ve had enough of airports and departure lounges.’ He cites his bones (the man is 65, remarkably enough) as a more pressing reason than carbon footprints – ‘and of course, I have to edit volume two of my diaries…’
I ask Palin what his next step will be – presumably the hermetic life is not for him? And indeed not; it’s the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War this November, and Palin has plans to mark it. He admits that ‘history, and especially television history, is a crowded field’ – but this isn’t about to stop him from walking those crowded fields himself.
A series is scheduled for broadcast in November, shot in France and Belgium. Fewer exotic locations, perhaps, than on previous outings, but Palin is clearly deeply affected by the work; his brow furrows even further, and he talks more sombrely about the tragedies of war – yet more animatedly too.
The project has certainly grasped both his imagination and his conscience. And he has something like the requisite training; he read History at Brasenose back in the early ’60s. It was there that he struck up a fruitful comic partnership , writing for Cherwell no less.
He points out that ‘I had a comedy column going for ages with Robert Hewison,’ the man who pushed him into comedy as a career. But did he ever read the rest of the paper? ‘Of course – I read Cherwell avidly. Before wrapping my chips in it!’
Irrepressible as ever, we clearly haven’t seen the last of Palin yet. His personal ambitions are yet to be fulfilled – I ask him if there’s anything that, in such a long and varied life, he still feels the need to achieve. After chuckling contemplatively and talking about other things for a while, he finally comes out with two. Both are as simple and worthy as you’d expect from such a man.
‘I’d love to play trombone in a brass band.’ A noble goal indeed. Perhaps feeling this wish a little too simplistic, and unable to elaborate further, he advances a second desire. ‘More than anything else, I’d like to learn a new language.’
This seems more logical. Having spent the first few decades of his life advancing the boundaries of his own in surrealist and comedic directions, he has spent the past two decades exposed to a bewildering variety of other tongues. But which to choose? Swahili – very useful across Africa? Or something more niche – Mongolian?
No; ‘Something like Welsh.’ Trying not to seem taken aback, I make encouraging noises. But why Welsh? ‘It’s an extraordinarily beautiful language – I heard the most beautiful Welsh song yesterday.’ Palin seems to be exhibiting that whole spur-of-the-moment whim that apparently lies within all great travellers and improvisers.
He continues earnestly, ‘It’s essential to understand the native language to really understand any country,’ logically enough, before pursuing his logic to its inevitable conclusion. ‘I could join an all-male Welsh choir!’ Do I sense another television series in the pipeline? ‘Well, perhaps’, he demurs.
In wrapping up such a piece, it is customary to draw out some unique insight into the interviewee’s psyche. Yet Palin leaves me facing one very stark conclusion: he really is every bit as lovely as we’ve all been led to believe.
Always the housewife’s favourite Python and the very model of a favourite uncle to all, the man is charming, entertaining, interested and humble. It is entirely in keeping that he reveals his favourite Python sketch to be, not something as hackneyed as the Dead Parrot, but the scene towards the end of Life of Brian where he plays the obliging centurion – ‘line on the left, one cross each.’
He seems delighted with the most prosaic of my questions, exclaiming ‘brilliant!’ or ‘aha!’ at each new line of enquiry. Best of all, when asked whether he’d mind being featured on the Icon page, he responded, with the greatest sincerity you could possibly wish for, ‘how lovely!’
