Michael Palin: Nine things we learned from his This Cultural Life interview

Born in 1943 in Sheffield, Michael Palin was not from a performing household. His father was an engineer and his mother a housewife. Palin says his first taste of performance came from reciting Shakespare to his mother. “I’d play all the characters,” he says. “I’d go through it all… and she’d never tell me to stop! She allowed me to express myself at home in a way my father wouldn’t have had the patience to allow.”

The Pythons' training ground: the 1960s satirical show, The Frost Report, fronted by David Frost.

2. His first day at university changed his life

Palin’s path to Python began on his first day at Oxford, meeting a fellow student called Robert Hewison. “We shared a love of The Goon Show and Peter Sellers,” says Palin. “He said, ‘What we’ve got to do is a comedy act together.’” It was not something Palin had considered, but he went with it, partly because “you could get £30 a night doing cabaret”. He says, “Robert moved me away from the career path my father was thinking of me doing, getting a good job as a doctor or something. Robert moved me… into a world where I met other actors and writers. The most important meeting I had was Terry Jones,” with whom they started writing and performing. “We got along right from the start.”

3. The Pythons didn’t always work as a team

Most of the Pythons met writing on The Frost Report, a 1960s satirical TV show. They went on to different things, then Cleese suggested, in 1969, they make something together. “[We wanted] to carry on the evolution – without wanting to sound too pompous – of television comedy… Generally shaking it up and being quite disorderly,” says Palin. Despite being a team, Palin says they rarely wrote as a unit. “We’d write in our separate groups: Terry and myself; Graham [Chapman] and John, Eric [Idle] and [Terry] Gilliam on their own… We tried breaking away from that, but I knew Terry so well… Writing with John I found difficult. We did try, but John had a different way of working.”

When John Wilson calls Palin “the nicest man in Britain”, Palin growls. “Maybe now’s the time to change that,” he jokes. “Lots of things make me angry, but they’re tiny things that make everybody angry: people who drive very close behind you on the motorway; people who throw litter out the window. They make me very ratty.”

5. His dad partly inspired his role in A Fish Called Wanda

In 1989, Palin won a BAFTA for his performance in A Fish Called Wanda. He played a stammering villain, in part inspired by his dad. “He had a stammer all his life,” he says. “He was a man with a good sense of humour but probably unable to tell jokes because of the stammer, so I think there was a bit of frustration.”

Out of respect, Palin wanted “to make sure the stammer wasn’t comic… I thought I did it quite sympathetically.” His involvement in the film led him to set up The Michael Palin Centre For Stammering.

6. Fish-slapping is his favourite Monty Python sketch

Asked his favourite Monty Python sketch, Palin answers immediately: “The fish-slapping dance.” It involves a dancing Palin repeatedly slapping John Cleese with two small fish, then getting walloped with a giant fish and falling in a canal. “It works everywhere on the planet,” says Palin. “Even in North Korea.”

Palin spent much of the latter half of his career making travel documentaries. “We showed it to our wonderful guide and she broke out in laughter. Then she said to me, ‘So, this is what you do?’”

Palin occasionally took serious acting roles, most notably playing a headmaster in Alan Bleasdale’s GBH, another BAFTA-nominated role. Asked why he hasn’t done more acting, Palin says, “Because there was nothing else like it. Things like that weren’t written very often.” He also says he’s never liked the waiting around of filmmaking. “I wasn’t particularly good at seeing time wasted,” he says. “I thought I could be writing a book. And did write a few.”

Monty Python: the original Gumbys

8. He lives in an “unreal world” since the death of his wife

Palin’s wife, Helen, died in 2023. They’d been together since they were teenagers. “It’s an unreal world you enter,” he says. “Every reference point in your life is connected with that person, then suddenly they’re not there. You kind of fool yourself they are.” He says the hardest element is “dealing with the foreverness of it. You know, that it’s forever.”

9. Monty Python is like an old affair

Two Python members, Graham Chapman and Terry Jones, are no longer living, and Palin says the remaining members don’t see each other often, mostly due to geography, but the connection will never go: “We’re not that close anymore, but we’re close when we get together. When we talk… it’s like a long affair that took place many year ago. You get together and you’re rather tearful.”