I ONCE shook hands with Michael Palin, in the queue to a cloakroom: he genially polite and crinkly-eyed, me sweaty-palmed and silent. It was easily and giddily the most famous skin I have ever touched. Mr Palin, on the other hand, seems to have gone cheek-to-cheek with many of the world’s most feted and celebrated: royalty, Hollywood greats, fellow comic geniuses and cultural and political bigwigs. This latest collection of his diaries, Travelling to Work, written when he was in the full flight of his globe-trotting celebrity, is breathless with encounters with the famous.
So there’s Princess Diana, whom he meets in April 1989 at the London Palladium, and whose skin is “quite beautiful — pale, but just tinged with a soft, attractive pink”; in 1994, at a Literary Review party, he is kissed by Marianne Faithfull; in 1996 he sits behind the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at Bafta - within touching distance of the royal seats, marked by “fudge-coloured antimacassars”. December 17, 1997 sees him jaunt off “to the Ivy for one of TG’s [Terry Gilliam’s] ‘celebrity in town evenings’. Tonight it’s Johnny Depp... He is a Python fan, needless to say.” In March 1998, he picks up both BBC Personality of the Year and BBC Series of the Year from Baroness Thatcher who is, he notes, “small, bony, her face white and waxy, her handshake cool but a little damp at the same time”.
It would be churlish to dismiss this door-stopper as merely cashing-in, just months after Palin has performed, aged 71, in suspenders as part of the Monty Python reunion show. But I confess it is exactly what I thought after the glib introduction — “Even as I’m crossing the oceans filming Around the World in 80 Days, I’m hearing snatched messages suggesting that A Fish Called Wanda could be the most commercially successful film I’d ever appeared in.” How was this 563-page volume going to amount to more than the daily musings of a man who is the pin-up for mothers-in-law everywhere?
Thankfully, Travelling to Work, in spite of the endless name-dropping, is not an entirely shallow affair. (Palin leaves out his previously published overseas adventures.) The entries are trim and to the point, but the effect is still warm. And Palin can often feel like a puckish schoolboy — in a restaurant, for instance, when John Cleese, sitting at another table, sends over a half-drunk bottle of mineral water “with the compliments of table 1”, and Palin responds with a half-empty salt dish.
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Yet, this was the decade that Palin branched out of comedy. He found his feet as a television presenter and writer. He went Around the World in 80 Days, wrote and starred in his own film American Friends, and published his first novel, Hemingway’s Chair. He also dined out with Gilliam and Robin Williams (“conversation is possible, but everyone is waiting for the fire to start blazing” ), found himself in a lay-by eating fish and chips with Alan Bleasdale when Thatcher resigned, was called by David Frost in 1993 and told, “If you fancy running for parliament just give me a ring”, and tootled off to spend a weekend with Paul and Linda McCartney. He also took part in a conker contest on the Isle of Wight.
Palin shows himself in these diaries to be an acute observer as well as a champion curator of an anecdote. So we learn that Beryl Bainbridge once slept with a banana in her bed to cure her verruca; and that Cliff Richard “is the most extraordinary 50-year-old I have seen. Only a trace of tightening skin indicates that he is any more than 13 years old.” Brian Keenan has a head “shaped like Enoch Powell”, and Germaine Greer for a split second looks like “John Cleese in drag”. At a literary party, “Melvyn [Bragg] and Salman [Rushdie] move around with the world-weary ironic smile of senior prefects”.
Palin never seems to have a dull day. When he goes to the recycling centre he bumps into Bill Oddie. When he goes to the gents, Roy Hattersley offers him tickets to the Sheffield Wednesday v Southend FA cup game, and even his window cleaner — an alcoholic with vertigo — has a whiff of a Python sketch about him. This makes for the best sort of convivial read, like having a gossip with an old friend over a few drinks.
So are there any revelations? Not really, unless your knees tremble on learning that Palin tore open the letter from his old Oxford college to his eldest son, Will, to see if he got in (he did); that, aged 47, he had the prostate of a 21-year-old; or that he was considered a sex symbol by blushing girls at a posh private school. He reveals an almost aggressive competitive streak, especially when it comes to how many books he sells, and he also rails against being thought of as nice (a perennial complaint).
The book does raise a few questions, though. Read between the entries and where is the time for serious thought? One suspects that comes in the next decade of instalments. For scattered throughout the pages is a mounting sense of loss. Graham Chapman, Al Levinson, Peter Cook and his mother all die, there are memorials and funerals. And 1997 was the 10th anniversary of his sister Angela’s suicide, a year after his wife Helen’s diagnosis with a (benign) brain tumour. “The decay all around seems more real than any of the success,” he writes.
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Nevertheless it is because of, rather than in spite of, his personal celebrity that Travelling to Work is a delight. It is a book you find yourself devouring in a great greedy sessions.
Orion £25/£12.99 ebook pp563