Travelling treasure Michael Palin brings new show to Oxford

Yes, it is an evening with me. There certainly won’t be anyone else on stage,” Michael Palin says, his unmistakeably honking laugh echoing across his home in Hampstead Heath, taking you straight back to the days of Monty Python and A Fish Called Wanda.

You’ve got to love Michael Palin.

He oozes all those innate British qualities that we love so much; decency, fairness, humour, modesty, adventurousness and friendliness, which is why as a nation we have embraced him so collectively.

Throw in his prolific work ethic, an inability to sit still and a low boredom threshold, and it meant that Palin had moved on from Monty Python with a film career, travel programmes, plays and novels before the others could say biggus dickus.

All of which has manifested itself into his own live show – The Thirty Years Tour – an amalgamation of his three volumes of diaries, the last of which Travelling To Work 1988-98 has just been published, with Michael going it alone on Sunday night at the New Theatre.

So what brought this on?

“I just thought it would be more interesting than a book signing,” he says, with another honking laugh.

“And after completing the Monty Python reunion at the O2 (which sold out in seconds), it reminded me what a joy it was to play to a live audience rather than being on TV.”

How were the 02 shows? “They were kind of essential and had to be done.

“We had talked about doing them for years and had to address it at some point, although none of us had envisaged a mega stadium in front of 15,000 people,” honk honk. “And we had a ball. We had the audience right behind us and everyone was enjoying themselves which I thought was pretty impressive for a bunch of 70-year-old guys.

“It broke up the repetition of the sketches that get unearthed again and again like a record that keeps playing.

“ I loved going over the Python days because they were so fast and frantic at the time that it was easy to forget all the things that happened.

“But while it was great to get back together and see each other, I couldn’t do that all the time. We can now go back to doing different things. The Americans would call it closure. And as much as I loved the Python years, it was always important to do our own stuff as well .

“Python is a huge part of my life and gave us all the credibility and success we needed to go on and do other things. We are all comfortable with our legacy,” he says.

I remind him that all the Pythons have performed at the New Theatre, most recently John Cleese on his divorce tour and Eric Idle with Spamalot. “Yes, John made an industry out of divorce,” Palin jokes. Having been married to Helen since 1966, with three grown-up children, it must seem rather extravagant.

But back to the new show. What can we expect? “Well it’s a collage because the diaries brought back a lot of memories that I had otherwise forgotten, and it is quite interesting to see behind the scenes sometimes.

“For example, I was full of doubt about whether I was the right man for the job on Around The World in 80 Days and that everyone would rather have someone like Alan Whicker. Afterwards I thought ‘phew, I got away with it’, but I loved the travelling. It was a great project.”

The show also enables Palin to return to Oxford, always a pleasure, because it’s where he realised his true potential and never looked back.

“Oxford was so liberating. It was full of like-minded people and I was a very conventional chap from Sheffield with middle-class parents who lived an orderly life until then.

“ I loved Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers and was good at writing, but it wasn’t until I got to Brasenose that I realised I could make friends with like-minded people like Terry Jones. We wrote shows and went to the Edinburgh Review and it offered me a glimmer of hope which kept me going for the rest of my life.

“It was Terry actually who encouraged me to act as well as write. He said we could make more money that way and comically we were very well matched. In fact we performed our first cabaret at the Oxford University Psychiatry Department’s Christmas Party,” honk honk, Palin laughs, “which was probably the prefect place for it. We even had a show in the West End, so as long as I wrote my history essays on time, it was fine.”

And with that his phone starts ringing, the doorbell starts going and Palin is gone. My time with a legend is up.

SEE IT
Michael Palin The Thirty Years Tour is on Sunday at the Oxford’s New Theatre. 
See atgtickets.com/oxford or call 0844 8713020