‘I’m as grumpy as the next man’
Nicest Man in Britain turned 75 in North Korea and is as genial as ever
Michael Palin’s 75th birthday celebrations might not have suited your average pensioner. No party for the ever-youthful globetrotter. Instead, he packed a case and headed for North Korea.
On the day itself, last May, you would have found Palin tilling soil alongside a peasant woman in a workers’ collective — all part of his latest documentary for U.K. TV broadcaster Channel 5.
“When we finished, the director asked if she’d give me a job and, without pussyfooting around, she said, ‘No, he was completely useless!’” Palin says. “It was refreshing because, out there, most people know nothing about documentaries and couldn’t care less. My value to her was zero.”
It’s a different story in the U.K., where Palin is the most esteemed of polymaths — comedian, writer, actor, presenter. He’s been a bona fide national treasure for five decades. Do people behave peculiarly around him?
“I don’t think so,” he says, “because, hopefully, I’m just the me I’ve always been. I’ve been married to the same woman for 52 years, and we’ve lived for 50 of them in the same north London street. I travel to work on the Tube and if I’m bothered by anyone — which is rare — it’s always in a genial way.”
The only thing that’s off limits, he says, is “a quiet beer in the corner of a pub. People who’ve had a few drinks will suddenly become rather loud and want you to do Monty Python sketches.”
“But, otherwise, I just carry on. I’d never want to be a prisoner of my own fame.”
Accordingly, Palin has arrived at a London hotel under his own steam, joking with the photographer that his “best side” is probably his “backside.”
How disappointing if — despite the Nicest Man in Britain label that makes him groan when mentioned — he had turned out to be grumpy. “I’m as grumpy as the next man. It drives my family crazy that I’m always referred to in glowing terms,” he says. “I think it started as a kind of joke and stuck.”
If he wants to shake off the reputation, he might call his old friend John Cleese. Despite their many differences — Cleese, for example, is on his fourth marriage, while Palin has been with wife Helen since the age of 16 — they’re clearly close.
“John still makes me laugh,” Palin says. “We’re interested in each other’s lives, although if I mention my travel shows, John will do one of those big, stifled, stage yawns. It’s a standing joke between us.”
Palin groans against the mention of Shane Allen, the former BBC head of comedy who recently said that, in the name of diversity, the corporation would never commission Monty Python (featuring six Oxbridge-educated white men) today.
“Yes, the world has changed and there may well be a lot of people writing comedy who are, say, from a black minority, who are not getting a chance. And they should be,” Palin says. “But it’s barking mad to single out a group like Python and say you wouldn’t commission it because, manifestly, Python has continued to be popular.
“I’m all for diversity, but shouldn’t that mean everyone — including Oxbridge-educated white men, who happen to be funny? To shut the door on anyone seems utterly crazy.”
Just as well Palin has so much else up his sleeve. He’s currently starring in ITV’s adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and is publishing a new book, Erebus, an account of one of the great 19thcentury exploring ships.
Then, of course, there’s the North Korea documentary. With perfect timing, Palin and the crew landed in Pyongyang just days after surprise talks between the North and South Korea leaders, Kim Jong-un and President Moon Jae-in, respectively. “Unbeknownst to me, the half-hour time difference between them had been cancelled. So, I was late for filming on the morning of my birthday!” he laughs.
Who better than Palin, who wears his geniality as others wear a flak jacket, to penetrate the basic humanity of North Koreans? Where others might have brandished microphones and demands, he ingratiated himself by showing pictures of his grandchildren.
He has four, by the way, from two grown sons and a daughter. “Everything they say about being a grandparent is true,” he says. “It just seems to melt you a little bit.”
It’s the icing on the cake of his relationship with Helen, a former teacher, who has been with him, he says, through the good times and bad. “Maybe our marriage has lasted so long because Helen didn’t marry a celebrity. She married someone with a shared sense of humour, who mucked about and didn’t have much of a job at the time,” he says. “What we liked about each other then we still like now. I can’t imagine life without her.”
The bad times include his older sister Angela’s suicide in 1987.
“You don’t just get over someone’s suicide: It reverberates throughout your life,” says Palin. “I still miss her and am happy to talk about her because, otherwise, I’d be treating her like a victim or someone defined by her death — whereas, for me, she’s defined by her life.”
The same goes for his old Python pal, Terry Jones, whom he has known since they were at Oxford. Jones is now stricken with a form of Alzheimer’s that has robbed him of his ability to communicate. “It’s particularly cruel, because words, humour and self-expression defined him,” he says.
Palin takes Jones to the local pub. “There are moments with him that are still so valuable. He will squeeze my hand or laugh at something I say, or a recollection of someone we both knew. And although, in the end, the prognosis is that even this will go, I would never want to stop seeing Terry because I’m just so fond of him.”
Hardly likely, then, that Palin is going to lose the Nicest Man in Britain tag any time soon.