Michael Palin Diaries, 1969-1979: The Python Years

Michael Palin is a scriptwriter, comedian, novelist, actor, and playwright. He also happens to be one of the funniest people on the planet. From The Washington Post Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley In April 1975, at the London opening of the film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," an acquaintance approached Michael Palin and told him, "You were great." Palin was delighted: "I'm so used to being anonymous in Python that it's nice to know someone noticed." That's Palin, all right: the Python cast member whom almost nobody noticed, at least during the 1970s when Python was still new and finding its audience. Even now, at the height of an enormously successful career as actor, and star of travel documentaries, Palin remains in the shadow of John Cleese, Eric Idle and the late Graham Chapman. This doubtless will seem a pity to those who believe that the proper reward of success is celebrity, but it has permitted Palin to lead what is, considering his circumstances, a remarkably normal life. He is busy all the time and away from home more frequently than he would like, but he has been married to the same woman for more than four decades, is a devoted father to his three children, and in his corner of London is just one of the neighbors, indeed is an active member of the Oak Village Residents' Association -- or at least he was in the last year of this exceeding long yet (to my taste) not long enough 10-year diary. Palin tells us up front that "I have kept a diary, more or less continuously, since April 1969," when he was 25 years old, married with a six-month-old son, and "had been writing comedy with Terry Jones since leaving university in 1965." He has continued the diary for "nothing more complicated" than "to keep a record of how I fill the days." A diary, he says, "is an antidote to hindsight," and continues: "It seals the present moment and preserves it from the tidying process of context, perspective, analysis and balance. It becomes history, but quite unselfconsciously. What proves to be important over a long period is not always what a diarist will identify at the time. For the historians' sake I should probably have noted every detail of the birth of Monty Python, but it seemed far more important to me to record the emergence of my new family than the faltering steps of a comedy series that would probably last no more than two years. And that, I feel, is as it should be. Legends are not created by diaries, though they can be destroyed by them." This is slightly misleading. Though the emergence of the Python show and the subsequent phenomenon is traced here in fits and starts, there is more than enough in these 600-plus pages about the show, its cast members, its ups and downs to satisfy all but the most ravenous Python addicts. Not merely is there a lot of Python, there is a lot of show-business maneuvering, infighting and gossip, much of it immensely entertaining. We have no way of knowing what was cut from Palin's 38 notebooks -- "five times the amount of material reproduced here" -- but presumably cuts were made out of discretion as well as for length, and perhaps some tart nuggets about people who crossed Palin's path were left on the cutting-room floor. Still, readers who enjoy the higher gossip -- mea culpa -- will find much here to amuse them, and readers interested in the inner workings of a highly successful troupe of actors, writers and eccentrics will also find much to their satisfaction. Python began inauspiciously, early in 1969, when Cheese phoned his old friend Palin and suggested it was time to "think of something new." The BBC took on the new show and apparently was unenthusiastic about it at first, programming it late at night and giving it little support, but gradually it caught on. The original cast -- Cleese, Palin, Chapman, Idle, Jones and Terry Gilliam -- got swept up in it almost immediately. The first filming was in July 1969, and by the following February Palin told his diary: "Somehow, since Monty Python, it has become difficult to write material for more conventional shows. Monty Python spoilt us in so far as mad flights of fancy, ludicrous changes of direction, absurd premises and the complete illogicality of writing were the rule rather than the exception. Now we jealously guard this freedom, and writing for anyone else becomes quite oppressive." Though there were, inevitably, moments of tension and disagreement within the cast and crew, Python seems to have been a genuine collaboration from the beginning and to have remained one even as its members drifted their separate ways, reuniting ever less frequently for shows, movies, tours and other events. It's difficult to imagine Python in the beginning absent any one of the original six, yet it can't be said that a single person was absolutely essential to its success. The closest to that was the immortal Cleese, but Python rolled on without him as his movie career began to take off, though it is my considered opinion that no one on earth is as capable of a silly walk as he is. To be sure, my enthusiasm for Cleese is not solely aesthetic. It happens that he and I were born on exactly the same day in the autumn of 1939, and thus I feel entitled to a measure of reflected hilarity. He casts beams in other directions as well: "John is a good traveling companion in so far as he is nearly always recognized by stewards and stewardesses who pamper him blatantly; and Eric and I were able to catch a little of this reflected blandishment." Like many exceedingly funny people he can be difficult -- "he can be incredibly self-centered, and, if he wasn't so charming with it, I would have told him so" -- and insecure: "John is still tense and unrelaxed with people, which compounds his problems. He has more defenses than Fort Knox." But Palin's affection and admiration for him are self-evident: Once a Python always a Python. Other members of the troupe are given similarly candid but affectionate portraits. The most troubled, and in some ways the most interesting, was Graham Chapman, "the high priest of hedonism," who reluctantly acknowledged his homosexuality and "seems to feel that having stated his position he now deserves the good life." When he "is faced with the extraordinary complexity of his private life it seems to sap his energies totally," a problem for the rest of the cast when Python went on tour. Yet he rather heroically stopped drinking, and by the late 1970s "he's now become a model of co-operation and efficiency, and his avuncular presence is calm and reassuring. In fact John today suggested that Graham was reminding him more and more of a vicar." Python quickly became a mainstay of the BBC -- the bureaucracy of which is well roasted here by Palin -- but it wasn't until the show caught on in the States that its immense success was assured. Being a Python devotee but scarcely a certifiable lunatic, I had not known that it was first discovered by a public-television executive in Dallas, and only after it found an enthusiastic following there did PBS take it on, making it available to "far away places with strange-sounding names -- to Pensacola, Florida, to Utica, Illinois, Syracuse, NY, Athens, Georgia and so on. It sounds as though there's been a mistake and we've sold it to Greece." Soon "the news from America daily lends an extra air of unreality to the situation for, by all accounts, Python is catching on in the States as the prestige programme to watch." For Palin it has been one hell of a ride, but he seems to have maintained his equilibrium all along the way. "My life is here in London, with my family," he writes in 1977. "I love travel, but I love them more." That may be a slight oversimplification, as these pages show business in various aspects taking Palin away from his wife and their kids frequently, occasionally for long stretches, but his heart always has been at home. It also is worth noting, and not merely in passing, that he is a constant and ardent reader. He loves the work of Vladimir Nabokov, "one of my literary heroes," and Charles Mingus's autobiography, Beneath the Underdog. He wants to "read more German novels -- for here if anywhere is a chance to try and prove Solzhenitsyn's point that art and literature are the only spiritual ambassadors between countries." He's "acquiring an enormous taste" for authors he found "heavy, worthy and boring" when he was younger -- Dickens, Austen, Eliot -- and he gets "vivid impressions of South East Asia in Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar." In sum, it's tempting to call him a Renaissance Man. But that, as any Pythonite would be quick to tell you, would be silly. Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.