M

ichael Palin would like us all to believe that he’s not a nice person. Niceness is a charge that’s been levelled at him constantly throughout his 50 years in the public eye; still, he

Interview by MEG MASON

insists, it’s simply a persona foist upon him by others. “I was never really nice,” Palin tells Stellar. “Or [at least] not nicer than anybody else.”

But as evidence to the contrary, he’s perfectly happy getting on the phone with Stellar at 11.45pm – his time in the UK. And rather than being put through via a phalanx of agents and managers, he picks up the phone himself, having passed along his home number. When it’s noted this is a rarity in the celebrity world, Palin concedes: all right, then, perhaps there’s something to it. “I think I just used to avoid confrontations, unlike my father who enjoyed it greatly,” he explains. “That is probably the key to it.”

Before he became a member of the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe, an actor, a writer and an explorer, Palin, now 75, was a typical child growing up in the northern UK city of Sheffield during the ’40s and ’50s; a trainspotter, a lover of atlases, an avid reader of adventure tales and an expert impressionist. Ruminating on that boy, Palin says, “I think I’m rather close to him. Everything I am doing now, I was dreaming about at the time.”

Around the time he finished at the University of Oxford, Palin and fellow alumnus Terry Jones met the other four performers, including John Cleese, and the Monty Python group was formed. (Unsurprisingly, Palin was branded “the nice Python”.) Quickly, they came to be considered the Beatles of comedy; pressed to pick their ‘Hey Jude’, Palin says, “People have their own particular favourites, but Life Of Brian seems to stick in people’s minds.” As Palin points out, of all the catchphrases hollered at him from the windows of cars, it’s “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy!”

A second career after enormous early success is never guaranteed, but after Python disbanded, Palin went on to act – he nabbed a BAFTA for his role in A Fish Called Wanda – and eventually develop

immensely successful travel programs, including Pole To Pole and Around The World In 80 Days. (Comedian Griff Rhys Jones recently joked that developing his own travel program was made difficult by the fact that anywhere in the world he thought to go, Palin had already been.)

Although it meant long stretches on the road – Full Circle took him around the Pacific Rim and away from home for 10 months – his wife Helen Gibbins, a bereavement counsellor to whom he’s been married for 52 years, never minded that Palin ventured off, leaving her to look after their three children. “It must have been very difficult for her and the children,” Palin admits. “Whatever it was, she was sort of understanding because we’d been married a long time, and I think she knows when I’m happy and when I’m unhappy and frustrated. Probably she was only too pleased for a bit of a breather.”

The exception was a trip this year to North Korea. “Funnily enough,” Palin tells Stellar, “she did say, ‘I’m a bit worried about you going there. Do you really want to?’” During the planning stages, “There was a lot of belligerence in the air, a lot of talk of missiles being launched and all that.” Palin ended up spending two weeks inside the closed country. “There was still a feeling that this was an instantly changeable situation,” he says. “We might find ourselves in the middle of some missile crisis and not able to get out, so there was quite a frisson to going there.”

Palin lives the kind of life that can induce whiplash – standing at the North Pole one week, in the queue at his local post office the next. Despite that, he says, “I think I’m reasonably well-adjusted. I’m sort of a mixture of introvert and extrovert, a home lover and a traveller. When you’ve been away for a long time, you have a different view of the comforts of home, the pleasures of the company of your family. In a way, it increases one’s awareness of what you’re really grateful for.”

As for which part of his career he is most proud of – the comedy, travel, books, stage shows, and charity work around prison reform, conservation and literacy – Palin pauses for a moment to think. “I’m most proud of the fact I’ve been able to do a lot of different things; that generally I’ve remained in control of my life and my choices. I don’t think I’ve ever sold out. I still have to pinch myself that I’ve done all I ever wanted to.” Michael Palin Live On Stage tours Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, from December 4 to 6. Visit ticketek.com.au.