YouSaid · the spoken record

Sir Michael Palin

lines on the record: 64
first: 2024-06-06
most recent: 2024-06-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, and you've got to stop this Brazilian Bolsonaro from giving permission for people to tear down forests in order to provide land for cows and sheep and all that sort of thing, which just increased carbon. It just seemed so blinkingly obvious. So more power to the Attenboroughs and Thumbbergs of this world.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think you've got to aim at the top, and I think that's very good. Greta Thunberg, I think what she's doing. And David Atrama, they go and speak to the United Nations and all that. Those are the people you've got to shame.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, hang on, hang on. I mean, I feel that it's not a major motive. My major motive is what happens in China, what happens in India when all these people want to get the kind of life that we have had, you know, but if I fly here or there, it's fairly immaterial, although I would consider cutting down my journeys. But the big issues are happening in countries where there are millions of people. And also, you know, I do feel as a geographer that tipping point has been reached. Global warming is now going to increase, it's going to increase very fast. That means the sort of the white ice will disappear and there'll be less reflected. There are fires burning now because of climate change which are wiping out huge areas of forest which of course trap carbon.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I wasn't thinking that, no, I was thinking of the people who run our lives and have sort of the views that people have about what we should do about Brexit or not Brexit. I think there's some very unpleasant things going on at the moment. There are some very hypocritical people around the best people are not doing the best work. But I don't feel that's the end of the world. I think we tend to think of our moment in history as being, that's it. This is the moment. History is vast. It's going to go on and all that. I'm hopeful for my children and my grandchildren, you know, because I think there are good things about this country. And I just want to make sure I do the best I can. And other people should do the best they can rather than shout at each other. The environmental situation, I think, worries me far more because I just don't see how we sort that out and again seem absolutely to help.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“End of this country. In fact, I feel very strongly it's quite the opposite, that I think in order to get rid of the mess, people have got to go, you've got to go through the mess. And we are in deep shit at the moment.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think healing the nation is a very dramatic way of putting it. I think there are lots of people in this country. I think the majority in this country are people of good heart, of talent, ability who are not hostile and not argumentative. What you've just got to do, what I feel I have to do, is keep in touch. But whatever way possible, even if it's just writing a book about a ship that sailed in eighteen thirty nine, it's a little bit about this country, that ship, that voyage, it's about its success, and it's about its overweening pride in the end of the journey when they go to the Northwest Passage. And, you know, I've been around talking about this, and I don't feel that's sort of avoiding any issues. I think it's actually talking about a kind of Britishness or saying, look, look, there are many things that have happened in the past and going to happen in the future, you know, what's happening at the moment is not going to be the end.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and we do talk, but I think we all accept this is what we all are now. Earlier it was much more difficult. Python, we were quite a strong unit in terms of sort of our political activities, political beliefs. I remember, you know, sort of supporting gay news at their trial. And I remember before that being in an Oxford stage production called Hang Down Your Head and Die, which was specifically against capital punishment very dramatic. What I am good at is I'm quite sort of instinctive. I kind of know about people, and I can see very clever people saying things which are not really what they feel, they're just scoring points. And I've never liked that. I've always felt, well, that makes you slightly hypocritical. And, you know, I can't warm to someone who's completely hypocritical.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that you have to remember your own voice and what you can say and what you want to say and not try and be like everybody else, you know. I'm not on Twitter. I don't, you know, John and Eric tweet a lot. I don't know how they have time for that. I have my friends and it's difficult enough to spend time with the people I really like, the people I know and can touch rather than the audience of followers out there, however much it is. So you've just got to be yourself, I think.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nothing. No, I mean, I hope I haven't let down the people who are my friends. I've had a very, you know, my relationship, my wife lasted now 55 years more than that we first met on holiday and I was only 15 and it's great there's just something about that relationship in the same way that my dear friend Terry there was something about our relationship there which you couldn't absolutely pin down and define you just knew it was the right thing You knew this was always going to happen this was going to continue there was never going to be a moment when you would fall out and talk to each other I sort of knew yes so I'm kind of looking for that in all sorts of things in books I read you know when I always get very worried about the books I choose to read I've got to get on with it in more than just a sort of oh that's a nice tale I've got to get in there I've got to get something more from it and then I'm happy”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we didn't know. I'd be tended to behave very badly. I have been behaved fairly badly. Well, I mean, you know yes, or long drunken evenings or things like that.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they knew a little bit of English, but it was mainly through preparation of food, for instance. You just see them what's in there? What's that? You know, that red stuff. And they tell you they'd tell you the local word for it. But it was the preparation of food. It was looking at, I had to blow up globe. So I showed them my blow-up globe. And I said, this is where I started and this is where I'm going. Catching fish, the engine going wrong, you know, and trying to help them find an extra rubber band to keep the engine together and all that. It was kind of we were all sharing. We all needed each other, really, in that experience.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, being on the Dow was the strongest memory of all the journeys I've ever done because I said there were eighteen Gujarati sailors. Probably all their earnings together would be in a minute fraction of what one of the BBC crew were earning with different backgrounds, and yet we absolutely, during those seven days, we needed them more than they needed us. They were getting us through this difficult waterway and all that very, very slowly. That was absolutely key thing to me because I felt for a start I wasn't frightened of travel, which I think I was when I was young. I was frightened because you didn't hear much about people travelling, certainly of young people. It was expensive. You had to learn a foreign language. I would be laughed at if I didn't get the language right. So suddenly find at the age of 45 that you could bond with a group of fishermen from northwest India and laugh and share.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just had to be myself, talking to them by the end. I thought this is it. Just be me, and if things go wrong, things go right, just be absolutely be yourself.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comedy actor to be found in quite a roundabout way because when we set off doing Around the World in 80 days, All I'd seem was in the small print. Michael goes around the world. I thought, wow, fantastic. Take my spotter's guide to countries. But I didn't know actually how I was going to play the character on that first day. We never really discussed it. Was I going to be an actor playing a sort of philosophers fog role? Was I supposed to be the bumbling Englishman abroad? Was I supposed to be something more which was a sort of political reporter able to interview members of the government in various countries and all that? And it was the first two episodes. I really wasn't sure how to do it, and it's slightly awkward. The third episode, everything went wrong. We ended up on a DAO going from Dubai to Mumbai. It wasn't the DAO that they'd all expected it to be and had booked. It was a completely odd collection of people with eighteen Gujarati fishermen, only one of whom spoke a bit of English. So you had to get on with people. And suddenly that was it.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, part of the secret was I had a really good crew, I mean, always forgotten in all this that there's a cameraman providing these images without which the series wouldn't exist. And yet you ever try and tell an interview or something like that the name of the cameraman. They're not really interested in that. So that's important. I mean, it's a simple thing. And a very good team. So I knew we were getting good pictures and we were seeing where I was going. The rest was just to be as open as possible”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the fantastic scenery there, the mountain scenery, and it'll all be free and all that. So there were little moments like that where my love of places and going to places and just sheer curiosity about the world. I couldn't believe how you could stay in one place without wanting to see what was over the next hill or around the next corner. And yet, you know, for a long time I didn't really travel in any particularly kind of adventurous way until I was 45 and the BBC came and said, what do you do around the world in eighty days? And then I just got the dream job of someone who likes geography and travelling and people particularly.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I did. I wanted to be an explorer. And I explored, you know, by proxy through magazines and books, I knew that I was brought up. Sheffield there was very little chance of me ever exploring the world, probably even going abroad. People didn't then. It was quite exotic to travel abroad. In the same way, at this time I felt well I'm never going to be a scriptwriter and do jokes like some of my heroes. But it was there from very early on and kind of informed a lot of what I did later. I mean Terry was quite interested in places and all that and for instance when the Monty Python and the Holy Grail was being we just had to decide where to shoot it. We could have been a studio in London, which John and Graham, I think would have preferred. And Terry and I said, let's go somewhere wonderful that looks great. Scotland, you know.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The box just explodes. Probably something you couldn't do now. And he just looks at the audience and he picks up his music stand. He just turns and goes off. And I love that moment because you really took the audience around the other way. And in the end, you know, they hadn't written the thing, but by involving them in it as a character, by giving all your sort of emotion to the audience, you suddenly find yourself very vulnerable. I love that change.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The pain and kind of Yeah, I like sort of conveying a character who surprises an audience and moves an audience and very early on at the nineteen sixty four Edinburgh Festival there was a sketch in which I come on stage as a sort of old fashioned entertainer with a very bad song and a very bad line in Patter. And there's a big tea chest with a ribbon on one corner. Anyway, he does his thing and then he says I'm sorry to the audience. You've got to take the audience absolutely. You've got to love them. I love you all. Thank you. But I've got this box and it's got a label on it. It looks at the label and it says, loving you in the past as we will in the future, yours, the audience. And he's just terribly moved. By this, you know, no one's ever said this to him before, you know. I never thought I was any good anyway. He starts to sing, get all the audience to sing one of his dreadful hits, and after the second night.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, and I mean, I think jokes are all about current attitudes. That's what Python is about. That's what that was. The 1948 show was about Spike Milligan was all about that. However surreal they are. They're about current attitudes. Probably things you wouldn't say now. And rightly so.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said he getting away from that. I don't look back on them a lot. But I'm aware of it. And I think it was just the way things were at the time, I'm afraid, you know, the way things were talked about. And generally speaking, if something makes you laugh, and that's what we're doing with Python, I think that takes away a bit of the edge. But I mean, it's undoubtedly sort of, I suppose you could say it's uncomfortable now, but that's the way people were then, that's the way people talked, that's the way attitudes were. I don't want to get into a position of defending myself because I think you're defending yourself against something which is now looking back then.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ferry page is mother, you see. Terry was his mother, and it was wonderful he had to climb over wolves and all that. There was just something about his portrayal of the character. I can't remember the man who comes in and says, oh, how are you? I'm fine. What have you been doing? What are you doing? Well, I've been at the ministry. I'm Minister of Aviation. Yes, so you are. Oh, I say, God. We's a good boy. And Terry managed to do that brilliantly. It was real love expressed in the wrong way, at the wrong moment.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, we like dressing up, whatever it is, whether Spanish Inquisition or Roman Centurion. So dressing up in women's clothing is just yet another side to it. I don't know if it necessarily shows that that's the feminine side of our nature because most of the women we play tend to be rather sort of tough. The Hell's grannies. whatever. But yeah, I really quite enjoyed that. All the Pythons, merely so far, I think, could play women very, very well. Terry Jones was a wonderful woman.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's another sketch which I think is just interesting about why things are funny. It's called the fish slapping dance, which John Cleese and myself do when the music starts, I hit him with little pilchards on his cheeks and all that, and then I bow. And then John basically hits me with a very large.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, yeah. Well, that was sort of. There was a good, I mean, I think, again, there's certain moments in humour which define how human should be played. For instance, the comfy chair to someone says, put her in the comfy chair. It's put her in. And there's a terrific sting. So you've got to build it up. The comfy chair.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're brought in in a huge rush and they're obviously not prepared. They don't know their lines, they haven't got their costume on properly and all that sort of thing. And that's where it began to take off because I felt the group of people in the Spanish museum was a funny little group and they would look good and they were all in this outfit and they were all fairly hopeless.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yes, it was. I did a lot of late night writing. I remember that. And I was getting a bit bogged down with a sketch. I can't remember what it was, but I think it was a woman being shown photographs by someone who was very boring and said, this is me at the front of the house. There's me at the back of the house. You can see the front of the house just on the corner there. And you just tear them up and throw them away. And the woman was played by Carol Cleveland. And it wasn't getting anywhere. So I thought, what do we do? So I brought in a Graham Chapman character who says, you know, I want to say something's gone askew on treadle or something like that abroad Yorkshire. And she says, what? We carried on with this a bit. I thought, where's this going to go? And she said, I'm sorry, could you say, I've just been told to come in and say something's going to skew on the treadle. I didn't expect a Spanish Inquisition. I thought, ah, yes, that's the next.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Either worked or it didn't work. I mean, there would be moments when someone would say, can we take that away and work on it? Because I think it's a very funny idea, but I think we go this way or that way. But the actual assumption was that we knew how to make people laugh, and we knew basically how humour worked and how it should be played. And Terry Gilliam was very, very important because he was sort of cementing all this together with his amazingly sort of surreal work. I mean, it was just absolutely perfect. But why the six of us all from slightly different backgrounds had sort of gelled together? I don't know, and it's very rare. I know very few comedy shows written by six and performed by six people which have lasted.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it is That's true. The partnerships, I think, are very important. It just gives you a little more confidence, gives you the chance to sort of test out material. And when the material doesn't go very well, if there's two of you to sort of support each other, Well, you know, well, yes, there were different groups, but the great thing about Python was somehow there was a unity, there was a harmony in the humour and what we wanted to do. We didn't really spend much time having to explain to each other why something was funny or wasn't funny. We wrote material, usually in our separate groups, and then we'd read it, I read my stuff, and John read stuff that him, Graham read. And I mean,”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's odd because I can't think quite why it happened. I know the mechanics of what happened. It was after we'd completed another history of Britain. John Cleese rang up. I knew John from the Frost Report, and he said, I've just been watching your series, Complete Nut History of Britain, and I was quite chuffed. I said, thank you. He said, yes, you won't be doing any more of those, will you? Very ecclesiastic. But he said, I like your imagination. I like the way you write. I like the way you perform. I think Eric's good and all that sort of stuff. And do not adjust your set. Why don't we get together and let's do a television series altogether using, you know, your talent, the talents that Graham and myself, Graham and John Cleese had for writing sketches, Terry Gilliam, the animator had worked on Do Not Justin School.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, I think you've got to get the character, you've got to have a certain tension. I mean, the thing is that sometimes with sketches, it takes a while before the humour really kicks in. You've just got to have the tension and all that. And we did, I remember doing it just your set, we did a wonderful sketch, which David Jason is hanging about his fingertips off the cliff. And these people come along and he says, help, help. And they say, aren't you that guy from the television? He says, yes, I do do a show. We like your show. Oh, good. Well, thank you. Thank you. I'm glad you like it. No, we like it. Well, actually, my wife doesn't like it as much as I do. I love it. Yes, can you please, I'm just one hand, and it builds up, builds up, and suddenly he's actually saying, please, I'm going to fall. Oh, that's the voice your sketches. So you've got to sort of trap an audience and get them involved.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there was one about Stonehenge, and the conceit of Peter History was a bit like horrible histories now. It was as if you had sort of the media and cameras and broadcasting throughout history. So how do you treat each little area? And we treated the Stonehenge with a sketch about an estate agent taking a young couple round and trying to sell them Stonehenge, you know. The wife would say oh yeah the husband was kind of you know middle English gormless. If the wife asked all the questions there are a lot of gaps. An east says doors, doors forty three doors and went on like that. And then, of course, the husband ends up pushing one of the doors and it falls down. That was the sort of thing we were doing.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our approach was that children know much more than we think they know, they're much more savvy, they don't want to be talked down to all the time. And so we had a sort of python humour, which we were, I say, spent a lot of time on, and we're able to practice that. And I think my contribution was I was quite fairly versatile. I could do pretty much any kind of acting role, but also I think I kind of understood about writing, and I think I did know how a joke worked.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we also did a series called Do Not Adjust Your Set, which gave us 26 shots, a half-hour program for children, went out at 5.15.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also about, I think it was about character too. I've felt the best comedy comes from character, from understanding people, not from, I can never remember jokes, but not from telling jokes so much as creating the characters, which I suppose I was doing back in the melt room with the Duke of Edinburgh, probably giving him some sort of character.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I can remember. I'm not sure how much they reveal. There was a sketch we did for the frost report, and it's about a very boring man at a party who'd come from Hendon and he was talking to this man. What do you do? I'm a lion tamer. I've been lion-tamer most of my life, made films about lions. Oh, I'm from Hendon. Where do you live? I live a little hut on an iceberg. Oh, we live in Pinna Lane, number 23, and it goes on and on and on. So it's about sort of the underdog talking to the overdog. And at the end, the overdog tells a wonderful tale to this guy about how the daughter of the chieftain and this tribe came in and spilled her robe and let her hair loose and her long black hair, and then you know the trumpets blew and the whole place was whatever. And the tagline is, oh really yes.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technical side. He also Terry had a very, very strong sort of political side to him. I mean, stronger perhaps than my own.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a lot of our comedy at that time was sort of self reflective on our education or television, the world we were trying to get into. That was the world we also were sending up at the same time. Terry was very stimulating and he could play lots of different characters. And there was a sort of truthfulness about whatever he did, which I liked. This wasn't just somebody who said, look at me, I'm going to be a star. He wanted to dig down into the characters and he loved the sort of diversity of what we wrote. And he was very interested in film. Remember very early on. He did this lovely film at his parents' house down in Claygate, which he just used chairs from inside the house and stop action single frame, and made this wonderful film about chairs sort of escaping the house and going out in the garden and running off and all that. I just thought to be able to do that, that's great. So Terry had sort of”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was around then. But that was satirical comedy. And what Terry and I were doing was sort of a more whimsical, surreal comedy.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was chosen to be one of the cast of five, which did my confidence a lot of good. Also, the review was very well received, and we had to put on extra performances, and we did late-night shows. And I realized that a lot of the audience weren't friends or mates from college. These were people from all over the country, all over the world who'd just come to see what you were doing. I realized I was enjoying this. I was enjoying the act of writing. I was enjoying the act of playing the sketches. I loved hearing the audience reaction. And at the very end of the run, David Frost appeared from London on a talent spotting trip, and came and saw us all, and suddenly thought in back of my mind, although he didn't say anything to me, just maybe there is a chance that I could do what I've always really wanted to do, which was to act, but also to write material which I could perform.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Christmas party. That was the gig he got, which was, it seemed a total disaster because we did our half hour in absolute silence. But at the end, someone came up, shook our hands warmly, and said, that was very interesting. So Robert was very important. And then I met Terry Jones, but it was doing cabaret with Robert Hewison. I was noticed by somebody who was the producer.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah. First of all, I met a man called Robert Hewson, who I give major credit to, because Robert was from London. He's a metropolitan, cultured in a way, coming from Sheffield, I wasn't, you know. I didn't know what a pizza was, you know. And he sort of educated me in a way. And here it was. We shared a sense of humor. We enjoyed Pete and Doug, Peter Sellers, the Goons, and he said, look, let's put our, why don't we write all this stuff down? Let's create our own comedy half hour, and we can go and make money at university parties, balls, more, that sort of thing. I never countenanced that. I thought, well, we're just telling each other jokes. No, no, no. We can make money out of it. And off he went and got me got our first booking first time I ever stood up in public and did comedy was at the Oxford University Psychological Society.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There we were. Well, there you go. You've got a better narrative of my life than I have, I think. But I actually won an award for that at the Bradford Cooperative Institute Drama Festival. I won Best Perf Gent and Doreen Barakluff, who was the other prisoner with me. We have a slightly romantic sort of connection. She won Best Perf lady, I think it was. So there we are. So I was doing serious acting for about a year.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I do remember there was another one called Exit for 7, which is all about political prisoners going out to be shot. Fun thing to do.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that was very important to me. I had a gap year in Sheffield after Bhutan and Bali. I went about six miles down the road to the steelworks where my father worked and I worked in the advertising department, met somebody there who was a keen amateur actor. And a lot of amateur dramatics in South Yorkshire, probably in all of Yorkshire. And I found myself doing joining these guys all much older, well not quite a bit older than me, and doing two or three straight plays. Yes, the wood carver was the first one I did, and it's all about somebody who carves Christ on the cross and has a sort of vision. And I was the sort of the atheist kind of saying, come on, you can't do this. Someone can see the seeds.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being someone else, you know, it's like just going for a walk or something, I had to dramatize where I was and the buildings around all that sort of thing. And I kind of, it was very much aware of keeping a narrative of my life, you know, thinking about myself. And why am I doing this and where am I going? There wasn't a moment wasted. I think that's what diary keeping is all about. It's just really saying, you know, every moment is part of a story, part of a narrative, that is you. So if you can write it down, or write as much as you can down, then you'll keep that narrative in your head.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to act being an actor was obviously going to produce a great clash with my father if I said this is what I want to be, I want to learn how to act, I want to go to acting in school and all that sort of thing. So I really did it surreptitiously. And I did act at Shrewsbury at my public school, but only in things that he probably wouldn't have seen. And indeed one play, he did come along to see. It's rather complicated Bernard Shaw played called The Apple Cart. And I was playing one of the two secretaries at the beginning who talk a lot, but it's not easy to follow. And he fell asleep after a minute. And so he didn't realize quite how large a part it was by the end of the play. So there was that feeling I loved acting. I loved playing other people. It was part of my imagination. I loved...”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, would you have missed the key thing which is I gave up smoking April 1969? We had our little son, Tom, and just having him on my knee and then having to get the cigarette out of my mouth to give him a cuddle. I thought this is ridiculous. They're incompatible, you know, fatherhood and smoking. So I gave up smoking. And that had been very much a part of my life for, you know, seven or eight years, ten years possibly. And it was such an act of will that I a successful act of will actually, because I gave up virtually like that. And it made me feel, hey, I've got this new enabled willpower. What can I use it for? So I thought, well, diaries, which, as you say, I'd kept at school, maybe now's the time to start keeping a diary. And I mean, quite coincidentally and extraordinarily, it was about two weeks before we had our first.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the obvious thing is I enjoyed writing from I can remember from Whenever I first learnt to write, I like to keep notebooks, I would create little books about my favourite footballers, I like lists because I was a train spotter. So writing things down was something I enjoyed. I wonder actually, and I've not really thought of this before, whether the act of writing and writing diaries was sort of somehow to define my own identity away from my parents, away from school and all that sort of thing. This is me, this is what I really am. I'm not sure it was as clear as that, but I think that's certainly an aspect of diary keeping. And I still do keep a diary.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it is, no, there are awkwardnesses there, but that's part of the reason I became so interested in trying to help the stammering cause.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT