Michael Palin on a very busy year indeed!

L.H: You’ve had a busy year!

M.P: It has been busy, yet in lots of directions which I least expected – I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do this year. Obviously get my diaries out, get them edited – but apart from that, I was fairly undecided. The Monty Python reunion was really not meant to happen – it only came up at the end of last year. Then this acting job came out of the blue: a BBC three-part series of ghost stories set up in Yorkshire; the script was terrific so I took that on. Suddenly the year’s been gobbled up by things I least expected.

L.H: It’s remarkable that you, and the others in fact, had the time to do the Python shows, because on the reading of the diaries one gets this impression of an incredibly busy life…

M.P: Well the key thing was that Eric [Idle] was very happy to put the show together, sort of produce it and put an order to us,… so without him having the free time to do it, I don’t think we could’ve done the show. The rest of us turned up on June 16th for rehearsal, and the dancers had already done their stuff with the songs; so it was really nice to step into something that already had momentum.

L.H: If you asked people in the street what Michael Palin does, would 50% say Monty Python and 50% say traveller?

M.P: Well, I would think before we did the Monty Python reunion with all the attendant publicity, it was probably more likely 65% travel and 35% Python, because the travel programme’s reached a much wider audience than Python ever did in this country. And the BBC never repeated Monty Python but the travel programmes are always around on some channel or other; I’m always meeting people in the streets “oh we’ve just seen you goin’ round the world and all that”.

L.H: Those people who know you for travel will probably be surprised reading the diaries at how many other things you got to do during those years. It seemed to be a phase of extraordinary energy.

M.P: Yes, some of it misplaced, but all of it done thoroughly. Travelling to Work starts with Around the World in 80 Days, which turned into something I never expected – which was 25 years of travelling. The private diaries show that I didn’t think that I was the right person for that kind of job at all – I had doubts in my ability to do interviews properly and all that sort of thing.

The success of 80 Days was largely because, in the end, we abandoned doing a conventional travel documentary. They just had me, warts and all, get things wrong, getting confused, finding it difficult, trying to learn the language. Putting all this on the screen was the thing that worked. People said: “Oh, this is a wonderful new way of travelling, it’s just the way we would travel. It’s an everyman thing rather than all-knowing presenter telling you about the world.” That worked so well.

And then once we did Pole to Pole which had no Jules Verne-link, just pure travel, I could see that my enjoyment of travel, my enjoyment of seeing the world, my love for being in these kind of programmes, could also be an asset to the BBC and they were very keen to do more.

But at the time I thought well, I’ve got that as a basis of things to do, but I’d still like to keep my hand in with some acting and so I did a TV series, GBH. But also I was coming up to 50, so I wanted to do some things I’ve never really followed through, like writing a novel, and then a West End play came out of the blue. I was going rather wild on trying to close all the gaps in my career, because I was turning 50 – oh God!

And then of course the travel really kicked in right up till two years ago when we went to Brazil. It became much more a theme of my life than I’d expected, but I felt I had to try the other things as well – see how they turned out