michael palin. comedian, actor, writer and presenter. in the mid 19605, he was a founder member of the ground—breaking comedy troupe monty python, whose television series and subsequent films drew both acclaim and controversy for their anarchic humour. he's also taken on serious acting roles, often playing affable yet complex characters... we have to behave with dignity... ..and with honour. and above all, without corruption. ..and has become known for his globetrotting as a presenter of many travel series. i'm standing on the top of the world! in this episode of this cultural life, the radio 4 programme, michael palin reveals his formative influences and experiences, and how it was at university that he first saw a future for himself as a performer. this completely changed my life because there i was,

with a slight worry about performing in front of large audiences, performing to full houses every night. suddenly, there was a little glimpse that perhaps there was a future in just writing and doing comedy. it's cosy. some pieces to bang your head on. yeah. we have a grand piano if you'd like to entertain us. a grand piano? yes. i can open it, but i couldn't play it. john laughs. michael palin, welcome to this cultural life. thank you. you were born in sheffield in 1943. what are your earliest memories of childhood, home life? um, i think it was shopping in the ration book era.

um, and i can remember going with my mother to get... i think we were given free orange juice at that time. really, this must have been... i must have been three or four. and watching it being filled up and handed over. your father was an engineer in the sheffield steel industry. yeah. what sort of man was he? what was he like? he was...he was quite a difficult man in a way. he was a little bit sort of... could be quite cantankerous. and i think a lot of this went down to the fact he had a stammer all his life. he was a man with a good sense of humour, but probably unable to tell jokes because of the stammer. so i think there was a bit of frustration there. and did his stammer make him angry? i think it did make him angry at times, yes. i'd say, he was a bit...he was a bit short—tempered. and my mother, who must have lived with it all her, well, heradult life, was very good, just carried on doing whatever had to be done.

she was, um... she had a terrific sort of practical, pragmatic, functional way of doing things, but was lovely and funny, too. so...there we were. many years later, you played a man in a film called a fish called wanda. yes. a man with a severe stammer. yes. were you drawing on your father then? consciously? oh, yes. um, john cleese had asked me if i... very early on, he was writing this heist movie, and one of the people in the gang had vital information, also had a stammer, which, of course, you know, whatever you may think, it's a very funny idea. do you know where they've gone? eh... fine. the c... ..hotel. the hotel? which hotel? ca... the ca... the... and he said, "look, iwant

the stammer to be...to sound "right and realistic." and he said... he knew my father, and he said, "can you...can you sort of deliver that?" and i said, "well, yeah, i think i could." and i wanted to make sure that the stammer wasn't a sort of "ba—ba—ba, da—da—da—da", um, comic stammer, butjust a kind of frustration when you have... ..very important things to say. and there'sjohn on the other side. "yes, come on, come on." ca...! oh, come on! i'm sorry. was your father still alive when the film came out? no. no, he... i wouldn't have... i wouldn't have done it. mm. i wouldn't have done it if he'd still been alive. it would have just been a bit too...too painful. mm. what sort of cultural upbringing did you have at home? was it an artistic household? musically, yes. my father played the piano a lot, um, and big stuff — bach and all that sort of stuff — before supper. it was a fairly sort of conventional

middle—class household. a few books, but not a lot. i loved reading, and i actually used to go to the sheffield city library with my father, and he would go upstairs and i'd go downstairs to the children's library, and i just thought that was absolutely wonderful. and what about your mum's influence? what was. . .what was her influence on your creative imagination? she was just very sympathetic to anything. if i wanted to tell her a story about something, she'd listen rather than be too busy. she was very nice that way, and was very encouraging about my work at school. i can remember... i remember it was my father used to go... he was a bell ringer at the local church. so he'd go down and do bell—ringing on friday night. and that was a bit of a relief because he was out of the house and we could do... and i remember my mother was so... she was so indulgent. i would read shakespeare plays to her, playing all the characters. at home? yes, yes. and she never told me to stop. which wasjust nice.

she made me feel i could sort of express myself at home in a way which my father wouldn't have had the patience to allow. and when you were reading those characters, i presume they came with voices and distinct characteristics, then, did they? oh, yes. yeah. i was a terrible old ham. that was your first experience of performance, then, i guess? uh, yes. i was in a couple of plays at school. i was a little nervous about acting in front of an audience. it was a different sort of experimenting on characters and parts for my mother on friday night, but, uh, it was much later on that i actually sort of became comfortable in front of audiences. taking you back to home life, mid �*50s, what about radio comedy? how important was that? radio comedy was very important in ourfamily, and it was a nice thing we could... all of us, my mum, my dad and me and my sister,

if she was back from work, would sit round and listen to much binding in the marsh, programmes like that. and there was a real... we could all enjoy that. it was one of the few things that as a family, wejust all enjoyed. on the other hand, the goon show, which i really, really liked, i could only listen to on my own. even my mother was goon show—proof. my father thought that, you know, the radio had broken when he came in and... high-pitched gibberish. like that. he speaks gibberish. he couldn't understand it at all. at all. heavy knocking tinny knocking laughter who is it, eh? who is it? quickly: open this door or else we break it down, so heaven - help me as i live and breathe. however did you get a name like that? laughter. i have influence. open up, mr crun. it's me, eccles. 0h, eccles, it's me, mr crun. 0h, mrcrun, it's me, eccles! the goon show was actually the first time i had discovered something on my own.

of course, my friends at school, some of them absolutely loved it. not all of them. oh, really? people who couldn't suspend their sort of, uh, seriousness, um, found it quite hard. "what's the point of it?" and all that. and i said, "well, there's no point. "that's the point." it's interesting, though, with the absurdity and the surrealism, the goons were clearly paving the way for python. did you end up working with spike milligan ever? yes. um, we did... i did end up getting to know spike quite well, which was an extraordinary thing, really. and, infact, i did a programme for the bbc called comic roots when they filmed sort of your childhood influences. right. and in one of them, i, um... i asked spike if he'd come along and sit with me in a room which was sort of designed like our house at home, and i got the same radio — huge, great radio with three valves — which i used to listen to the goon show on. radio: this is the bbc

light programme. - and, candidly, i'm fed up with it. and just... and play a bit of goons together. and i could not quite believe what was actually happening. here was spike in the room, you know, and wejust played a little bit. spike, i lived for the show. i mean, the day of the week... so i heard. ..when i heard the goon show kept me going for the entire week. but did you know via letters or any feedback at all that there was this generation growing up who had been totally liberated by...? no, the bbc kept...kept england secret from us, totally. we had a good summer. yeah. that's how it was. i thought that was very nice because, you know, spike was a little bit on the manic depressive side. he found it very hard work, writing these brilliant scripts that we all laughed at. so one good summer was... i know what he meant, you know. you look back nostalgically and say, "oh, everything was just perfect." and, of course, it wasn't if you were writing it. it was bloody hard work. that's a lovely phrase, isn't it? yeah, yeah.

on this cultural life, i ask my guest to choose the most important influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. and the first moment you've chosen, michael, is meeting terryjones in 1962 at oxford university. how did you meet terry? it was the first day there, and there was a man called robert hewison, who thought he was very funny. and i thought, "come on, i'm the funny one. "i tell the jokes here." but robert was very funny. and we shared a love of the goon show and peter sellers and all that, and he said, "you know, what we've got to do is "sort of do a comedy act together. "in oxford you can get money, you get £30 a night "if you're doing cabaret at a big party." big money. yeah. big money. very big money then. and maybe it was £3, i can't remember. there was a three in it somewhere. anyhow, um, what robert did, and what was so important,

was that he moved me away from, i suppose, the sort of career path that my father was kind of thinking of me doing — public school, playing sports, getting a good job as a sort of, you know, um, doctor or manager or something like that. i met other actors and other writers, and the most important, um, meeting i had, of course, was terryjones. um, and terry and i got on very, very well, right...right from the start. and he was a marvellous performer, and very, very bright. i was chosen in 1964 to be a part of the oxford university revue at the edinburgh festival. terry was in the revue as well. this completely changed my life because there i was, with a slight worry about performing in front of large audiences, performing to full houses every night. the revue was very, very popular. david frost came to see us, you know, some talent—spotting and all that. who would have been a massive star at the time, because he was hosting... that was the week that was. ..that was the week

that was at that time. yes. were you aware that frost was in the audience? oh, yes. i suddenly realised that there was... ..a possibility of my using the things i could really do fairly well, which was sort of tell stories, um, make people laugh, um, and, you know, act characters. suddenly there was a little glimpse that perhaps there was a future in just writing and doing comedy. so that was why, i mean... and that's the way i went in the end. you mentioned david frost coming to see you that night. it was probably a couple of years later that you ended up writing for david frost on the frost report. so this is one of your firstjobs in television and put you in the room with terryjones, but also withjohn cleese and graham chapman as well. and eric idle. so how did you go from frost report, alongside your future monty python team—mates, to actually forming python? i mean, how was it commissioned? cleese rang me up in... ..i think it would be

1969, april, something like that, and said, "look, we've enjoyed..." there was a series that, um, i'd done with terry and david jason and eric idle called do not adjust your set, which was for children. i'm the fantastic eric idle. and i'm the short david jason. i'm the violent michael palin. i'm the round and cuddly terryjones. john said, you know, "we like what you're doing." and i said, "i love what you're doing." he said, "shall we get together? "let's do something that's fresh and different and new." that was the basis on which we started, which was to try and carry on the evolution, if you like, without sounding too pompous, of television comedy by using film cleverly, by, um, doing away with sketches that

have to have a punch line. generally shaking it all up, you know, being quite disorderly. and that's what python really was. i mean, people say, "oh, it was very, very rude and disgusting" and all that sort of thing, which it wasn't, really. it was just disorderly in terms of... anarchic. ..in terms of comedy. yeah. and we had gilliam, of course, by that time, terry gilliam. terribly important in bringing that quality of the animation. very sharp, very, very funny, very, very good. so we were able to experiment. how did it work in the writers' room, then, with suddenly this group of people who were coming from different comic perspectives? was there kind of a creative hierarchy? um, well, the perspectives were not that different, really. we'd all played to little university audiences. we'd honed our material quite well. so there was a certain similarity there. gilliam was a sort

of wild card. and in the writing, it was very democratic. we would discuss silly ideas, have a morning of silly ideas, which was just great, and someone would have to write them all down. and then at the end of the morning you'd say, "well, you go and write that and i'll go and write this." and we'd go away and write in our separate groups. terry... terry and myself, um, graham and john, eric on his own. but characters were always important for you. and it's interesting thinking back to the series, and also the films — life of brian and the holy grail — your characters are often mild—mannered, they're polite, frustrated. were you channelling aspects of your own character into those characters, do you think? probably. i could do them, that's all i can say. i could do shopkeepers very well, and john and i did a lot of shopkeeper material. and i could be the boring shopkeeper. it's also about affability, isn't it? it's a kind of recurring trait of so many of the characters, and that really is you. i mean, is there anybody that's got a bad word to say about michael palin? you are famously the nicest man in britain. ooh!

grr! now�*s the time to change that. come on. well, i am... what makes you angry? well, uh, you know, lots of things make me angry. you know? but they're tiny things, like everybody else. you know, people who drive very close behind you on the motorway, people who throw litter out of car windows, silly things like that. but, generally speaking, i find you get far more out of people... we've got to know each other, and being responsive to other people. mm. it's very much about giving and taking and not being the one who is the star or has to be this or that. did the comedy ever become competitive in the writing room with python? was it fractious as well? well, like every bit of creative work, of course there are fractures. i mean, with terry, i didn't always agree. um, that's not the way to produce good material. you've got to have someone saying, "that's not funny. this is." but definitely, you know, there were other things that we wrote sometimes that

they...thatjohn and graham and eric didn't like, and vice versa. that competition was very, very important. mm. but in the end, i think we all knew if it was funny, it made people laugh, then that was probably ok. and we set our standards fairly high. you wouldn't think so from looking at some of the python material. dreadful. but generally, we set our standards fairly high. # always look on the bright side of death whistling # just before you draw your terminal breath...# whistling and when it was good, it was great, and it was breaking new ground. it brings to mind... there was a late night discussion show in 1979, i think, it was called friday night, saturday morning, in which you sat alongside john cleese and had to defend the life of brian film against this...this sort of complaint that it was sacrilegious, led by, i think it was the bishop of southwark and malcolm muggeridge. yes. yeah, yeah, yeah. all you've done is to make a lot of people on a cross

singing a music...a music hall song. laughter i mean, it's so disgusting when you think of it. if we wanted to make a joke out ofjesus, jesus would have appeared on the cross. he was an actor. he was there in the film. he does not appear on the cross. it's a gang of thieves, of common criminals who were at that time crucified in hundreds, day by day. i mean, that's.. i'm sorry. i know you think i'm wrong, but that's what i feel. is that the closest we've come to see you riled in public, do you think? well, people do...are quite surprised. they said, "oh, you look really angry." i said, "well, i do get angry." it was because the...the two people representing, if you like, the conventional religious view, that this was a film making fun ofjesus, which of course it wasn't. but, you know, that's... they... all our protestations were dismissed, you know, because they knew, they were the people from the religious hierarchy. there's nothing in this little squalid number that could possibly affect anybody. in that sense, i give you this point, i give you this point, that there's nothing in this film that could possibly

destroy anybody's genuine faith. no... — that i grant you. absolutely not, because it's much too tenth—rate for that. but... audience react there - was a key moment, i think, in broadcasting, i don't think it's too great a thing to say, when suddenly the establishment was seen to have got it wrong, and they thought they'd got it right. because he was a bishop. malcolm muggeridge, a long... a broadcaster and writer of great experience, very intelligent intellectual. "and these two, cleese and palin, just had done a silly "film about religion." they got it completely wrong. and the audience knew that by the end. your next choice for this cultural life is the 1991 channel 4 television drama gbh, written by alan bleasdale, in which you starred alongside robert lindsay. um, it's a serious drama about political extremism, about power, about local politics, and therefore, in a way, new creative territory for you at the time.

throughout my life, i've enjoyed doing different things and taking on different challenges. i think that's what keeps you fresh. um, but anyway, this came rather out of the blue. so to get the call from alan bleasdale, he wanted you to play one of the two leading roles, um, it was a...it was a sort of recognition of... ..of an acting talent which i hoped i could live up to. i mean, i'd done lots of acting, and people tend to forget, you know, that python, you'd do, in a python film, you'd play 12 parts and you'd have to play them very quickly. you have to get the essence of them very quickly. but this was a very different sort of thing. and i remember thinking when i was offered it, "this is huge," you know, and, "can i do something like this?" and it was just one of the most, um... ..rewarding pieces of acting i've ever done. you're playingjim nelson,

who is a headmaster of a school who was brought into conflict with the sort of preening, narcissistic and corrupt leader of a city council in the north of england. jim, isn't it? to some. not all. pleased to meet you. this is a school. you're not a member of this school. i'd like you to leave. oh, come on, jim, you know who i am. wouldn't interest me if you were bishop tutu wearing one. i think playing jim nelson brought things out of me that i'd never brought out before. and i mean, i... it's part of the reason why i haven't done much acting since. because it was such a good, important series, such a significant series, demanding so much of all of us who were in it. well, about 25 years after gbh, you were in the death of stalin, the armando iannucci black comedy which is delivered with serious intent. it's a very funny film,

but i mean, arguably that is a kind of continuation of the same style of acting, isn't it? yes. yeah. well, i played molotov as this sort of slightly put—upon character. i mean, he was the foreign minister and all that sort of thing. stalin and beria put you on a list. stalin? oh, i must have wronged him so badly. what did i do? oh, nothing. don't you see? beria — he wants you out. i've been talking with comrade bulganin. no, no. i think he's right. we can outvote. no, no, no, this is factionalism. stalin didn't like factionalism. stalin is dead! he was the arch loyalist. he was the arch loyalist, who was very devious and nasty, but also kind of, um, loved his wife and all that sort of stuff. um, even though he put her in prison. sossme: ican'ti believe he's gone! 0h!

he 5085 oh! flush struggles you have to wait for it to fill up. it was comedy. it was brilliant comedy with a very serious sort of underbelly to it. the next big chapter of your life — your third act, in a way — is as a global traveller when you embarked on around the world in 80 days? were you a keen traveller anyway? um, i wanted to be. ididn't... i hadn't travelled a lot, um, because when we were young, the idea of going on holidays abroad didn't happen. there wasn't enough money. if you're living in sheffield, you didn't go off to the costa brava then. we went to norfolk. i loved the idea of exotic places. i wanted to see the nile. i wanted to cross the equator. i wanted to see the north and south poles. ridiculous things like that you have when you're young, and you know it'll never happen. and yet it did. it did in the end.

travelling around the world, you know, with the bbc paying. um, wonderful. of all the many places that you visited in those series, is there one place that sticks in your mind that you're particularly fond of? the north west frontier in pakistan was... i think that was the best show we ever did, partly because we were warned not to go there at that time. we were told, you know, it's very, very dangerous. i can remember having to do a piece to camera there. and i thought, "this is it, this is it. "this is what making travel programmes are about." i'm at the top of the khyber pass on the border between pakistan and, out there, afghanistan. through here have come some of the great armies of the world. alexander the great brought an army through here. i'm in an absolutely sort of pivotal point of the world. you know? ithought, "well, yeah, doesn't get better than this." you lost your wife, helen, last year. yeah. i know you'd been together since you were teenagers. yeah, yeah.

how have you been, michael? well, it's not easy. it's just... it's an unreal world you enter, you know? someone who you've been with for so long, and every reference point in your life is sort of connected with that person. um, and...and suddenly they're not there, and you kind of fool yourself, um, that they are there. i haven't changed much in the house and all that. the family still come round. we have, you know, birthday parties and all that, which helen would have been part of. and it's kind of dealing with the foreverness of it, you know? that it's forever. mm. michael palin, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. thank you... thank you. ..for sharing your cultural life with us. thanks. and for podcast episodes of this cultural life,

go to bbc sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. hello there. the weather's looking very mixed this weekend. yes, there will be some rain at times, temperatures a bit disappointing, but things are set to warm up as we push into next week, especially for england and wales. so, we will have some rain around at times this weekend, mainly across northern and western areas, though for saturday, it's the south which will bear the brunt of some of the wettest of the weather. will be quite mild to begin saturday in the south, a bit cooler further north where we have more clear skies. but outbreaks of heavy and persistent rain affecting much of the channel islands into central and southern england, southeast wales, up into the midlands and across into eastern and southeast england. we have a met office yellow warning for the far southeast of england because we could see in excess of a couple of inches of rain here. that could lead to some localised flooding, some standing water on the roads.

has been very dry across the southeast, though, for all of august. so this is very much needed rainfall — a good drink for the gardens, but it will be very wet through the morning. eventually, it clears out into the afternoon and we should see sunshine and some heavy, maybe thundery, showers moving in, too, but it does brighten up elsewhere across the country. it's a bright day from the word go with sunshine and showers, but disappointing temperatures —16—18 celsius. that is below par for the time of year. saturday night's dry, quite cool, chilly for many, single digits across the board, but it will be turning a bit milder, wetter and windier out west as the next weather system starts to make inroads for sunday, and you'll see more isobars on the chart so it will be a breezy, blustery day on sunday, with most of the rain in the north and the west. so, quite a wet day, i think, for northern ireland, increasingly so for scotland, northern and western england and wales, maybe a few showers getting into the midlands. but i think the southeast quadrant tending to stay drier, closer to high pressure to the south, so could be up to 20 degrees given some brightness, but rather cloudy skies and again disappointing further north — mid—teens. that system moves away during sunday night into monday.

it's a bank holiday monday for many. a ridge of high pressure will start to build in a bit more strong, stronger across the south, so i think england and wales largely dry. we should see some sunshine around, but another area of low pressure will bring more of a breeze, cloud, outbreaks of rain to the far west of the uk, but temperatures responding up to 23 degrees in the south. and that's the sign of things to come. for this upcoming week, it looks like summer will make a return, especially for england and wales, where it could be very warm indeed, with one or two spots in the southeast perhaps touching the 30 celsius mark.

live from washington. this is bbc news. german police are hunting for an attacker who killed three people and wounded others with a knife at a festival in the city of solingen. the independent candidate for the us presidency, robert f kenneder, has suspended his campaign

and given his backing to donald trump. and authorities in russia say they've killed four inmates after a rebellion that left four prison guards dead. hello, i'm helena humphrey. good to have you with us. police in germany are searching for a man suspected of stabbing three people to death at an outdoor festival. the attack happened on friday night in the western city of solingen, near cologne, which was holding a street party to mark its 650th anniversary. three people were killed and four others seriously wounded. police say the motive behind the attack is unclear, and are asking people to share any information they might have, particularly photos and videos of the attack. the local police force is advising locals to be cautious. a spokesperson told reporters it's not clear if the suspected attacker still poses a threat.