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

“When I talk now about stammering and all that, and I was recently down at the Stammering Centre talking to some teenagers who've been there on a two-week course, it is a little awkward to be able to sort of explain the film and the work I'm doing at the Stammering Centre. But I think they understood it. I think that they could see that there were two different things as one way is a way of finding out why people stammer. The other is that I took the role because I don't feel that stammers should not be, you know, should be put in a corner and not even totally ignored, even if it's in a comedy film. Ken Pyle, whose character I was playing, is not a nice man, you know, it's not a saint at all. He's a very unpleasant character, very bad at killing, but in the end, he's the least bad of all the people there. He gets his revenge by running over.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still find it very funny, I mean, because I think Cleese managed to get together a wonderful gallery of characters, and there's lots of humour in it, including the fact that there is somebody who has the only bit of information everybody wants, and he has a stammer.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“around to have that sort of treatment how different life might have been for him and for me and for my mother who he went he got very cross every now and then I used to be I used to feel I'm very uncomfortable about their arguments”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little things like that, I think probably in his work he went for interviews and was not able to perhaps convince people he could talk fluently, therefore was turned down for work. I don't know of this, but I'm sure it was sort of there. And yet it was never discussed. I never asked him why do you stammer? How do you feel about stammering? I never did all this. So my later work for the stammering center and all that was a way of trying to make it up to him and make some sense of all the things I felt were most unjust about the way stammers were looked at, that people who had very little to say. That's why they spoke so slowly, which is just completely the opposite to the truth, that they were not intelligent people, which is completely opposite to the truth. So, you know, my involvement later with the Stammering Centre is and has been a tremendously rewarding experience. And yet moments I just think if my father had been...”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I felt at the time embarrassment about my father's stammer, and I knew this was wrong when friends would come home from school who didn't know him and experienced his stammer for the first time. They'd sort of be a little embarrassed, I'd be a little awkward. And I always felt, well, rather defensive of my father, because I realized that I well simple as that, I didn't want him to stammer. I'd rather have a father who didn't stammer. And I think looking back that it influenced him a great deal, I think it made him slightly well, more cantankerous than normal, easier to fly off the handle, which he did every now and then. I think he was a very funny man who probably found it very difficult to tell jokes because if you don't have fluency, you can't really start a joke now you get to the end of it.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, I mean, I love talking to people and I love sharing my experiences, but there are certain things where I can't give an answer, so I feel I don't want to be cross-questioned and come up with something that is glib and all that. But I do think... that a way of looking at the world through humour and seeing sort of things that make you laugh rather than cry, it must be there fairly early on. I don't know whether it's genetic or anything like that, but I remember seeing all the various sort of pressures at school and all that I generally tended to solve them by finding a friend and laughing about them than by going home and saying I can't stand this any longer. And that's still been fairly good stead.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really don't know. I think it's a way of looking at the world. I always have been an observer rather than, I've enjoyed observing the world rather than being observed myself. Someone wrote once in an interview which I thought was absolutely spot on that I don't like being scrutinized. Very good word.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I can't actually. I wish I could. I can remember about the Duke of Edinburgh and toilet rolls. Now, that's all I can tell you. You can get the gist of it, I'm afraid. Yeah, absolutely. Having to be rushed to him halfway through the ceremony.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's also a bit embarrassing now, but it was sort of, you know, it was the Duke of Edinburgh being caught short in the middle of the coronation ceremony, which all the boys loved, of course, anything like that. Have you put all the accent? Little things like that, and I would do a sort of...”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazing. In a way, it makes me surprised you didn't go straight into the travelling, but actually did the acting first. And at school you were acting. Did you do improvisations in the milk room? Yes, I did. It's funny enough, because I was sort of shy about doing formal acting and I didn't volunteer for many of the school plays. May have been my father's influence there because he was very wary of my becoming an actor. My sister had tried to become an actor, it hadn't worked out. My father wanted his children to earn some money, you know, not go down the decadent path of show biz. But I must have had a talent for entertaining people. I could tell stories quite well. And yes, there used to be, I remember 1953 it was the year of the coronation. I did little sort of ten minute improvisations about the coronation. What kind of improvisation?”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was imagining it as I went on and waiting for people to get on board and all that. So he could say it's sad, but I think it was just exploring certain freedom. Yeah, well, there's two things. One is the traveller in you seeing a bigger world and creating a bigger world in your own environment. But also when you talked about the fantasy world you like to escape to, was that particular books or films or things? Well, I read all the Enid Blyton books to start with, as I think most people of my generation would have done. Then I got very keen on Biggles' books because Biggles was always set somewhere exotic like the Goby Desert or the Himalaya somewhere like that. And I just remember enjoying geography most of all at school, reading, finding old copies of the National Geographic Magazine and being absolutely fascinated by far-off mountain ranges and”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What were you like as a boy? Well, I was quite shy in some ways. I loved reading, I had a very vivid imagination, I loved sort of living in my own sort of little world, but always had good friends around. Sometimes I found the friends took over my life and I wanted just to be on my own doing my things. How did they take over? Well, they would want to see me more often than I wanted to see them sometimes, you know, it's just one of those things. I would like very often just to go off on my bike. and make my own little journey. I used to go for bike rides, which I was a great fan of railways and trains, so I would turn the bike journey into a railway journey. So there'd be certain places by the side of the road where I would stop, and that would lead station, and then the Newcastle station would be a letterbox further up the hill.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you so much for coming in, Michael. Date me back to your childhood, born in 1943 in Sheffield, and your father was an engineer. What kind of home was it? Life was fairly quiet. My father didn't have a great deal of money, though he probably feels he should have done because he was Cambridge educated, but fell foul of the Great Depression. He was an engineer, couldn't find work in the south, ended up in Hull and then Leeds, and then in Sheffield in a very big rented house on the western side of Sheffield that was always cold. I remember that he was not good at heating the place. There was himself my mother and my sister who was nine years older than me, who, yeah, I can remember sort of growing up with very early on, but was quite a distance between us, and she was soon off doing her own thing. But that was the little pale.”
2024-06-06 · Intelligence Squared · Archive – How I Found My Voice: Michael Palin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First time I ever stood up in public and did comedy was at the Oxford University Psychological Society Christmas party up the geek he'd got. 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. Certain moments in humour which define how humour 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. You've got to build it up. The comfy chair. Know what's happening at the moment is not going to be the end of this country. I feel very strongly it's quite the opposite. I think in order to get rid of the mess people have 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