Making sense of crazy times
Marcus Berkmann
DIARIES, 1969-1979: THE PYTHON YEARS by Michael Palin
Weidenfeld, £16.99, pp. 650, ISBN 0297844369
✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is a huge book. Crikey, it’s a whopper.It’s impossiblenot to wonder, as you hold it in your hands and try your damnedest not to drop it on your foot, whether its author, for all his fame and eminence, is quite worth all this ink, paper, attention. And this is just the first volume. If, as seems reasonable to assume, several more collections are plan-ned, we could well end up with four such breezeblocks, between them covering 40 years of Michael Palin’s public and private life. It could take nearly as long to read them.
Nonetheless, to comedy obsessives of a certain age, Palin remains an intriguing figure. The best actor of the six Pythons, and the peacemaker in the group, he has also enjoyed the most successful career after and apart from Python. True, John Cleese did Fawlty Towers and A Fish Called Wanda, but those were 30 and 20 years ago, and Terry Gilliam has directed several fantastic films; but only Palin, I would suggest, approaches the status of national treasure, which enables you to publish books like this one. His popularity is broader, if not deeper, than Monty Python’s once was. And yet it will be Python fans who buy this book.
For the mystery remains: how on earth did Python work? It seems extraordinary now that this shambolic, often staggeringly amateur series of unconnected sketches should have held several generations of children, teenagers and students in its thrall. Three decades have passed since the ability to quote the Dead Parrot sketch verbatim became the most embarrassing thing anyone could do socially with their trousers still on. (Trousers because no girls ever quoted it, only boys.) The TV series ran for just four seasons, and reading this book you realise how young they all were; frighteningly young. Every 5 May, Palin records dismally that another birthday has arrived: 27, 28, 29, 30. Next year he may feel more cheerful about being 64. Only someone at ease with himself would publish these diaries. As no autobiography can, they show him as he was when he was young: ambitious, bright, quite serious, already deeply embedded in family life, endlessly curious, slightly naive, conser vative with a small c, Socialist with a large S. One reviewer I read compared this book unfavourably to Alan Clark’s diaries, which are certainly a racier, more pyrotechnic read. But Clark was bonkers, Palin palpably is not. These could have been subtitled ‘Diaries of a Sane Man’, in what were clearly crazy times.
What we are apt to forget is that the six Pythons were writers, and therefore prey to the usual writerly neuroses. Even when astonishingly successful and universally loved, they fretted constantly about money and wondered what they were going to do next. Palin doesn’t dwell on the group’s internal rivalries, but he does inadvertently chronicle them, as he does Graham Chapman’s slide into alcoholism. In between, many large meals are consumed, and Eric Idle is always nipping off to see a film in the afternoon. Children are born and grow up, parents fall ill and die. It’s all thoroughly, reassuringly normal, which may be why the newspaper excerpts have seemed a bit dull. They misrepresent the book, which is a slow burn, revealing its pleasures only gradually, and allowing readers the warm glow of hindsight denied its writer.
But why is it so absurdly long? Chopping the last three years would have saved around 300 pages, and no one would have felt cheated. Even so, this book will make the perfect present for those comedy obsessives of a certain age, who will know exactly what it is long before they have unwrapped it.
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