Michael Palin

Five Minutes With: Michael Palin

This week, comedian and broadcaster Michael Palin talks to Matt about his career with Monty Python, his take on modern comedy, favourite countries that he's visited for his travel documentaries and squeezes in a couple of classic Python moments.

Forty years ago this week, Nixon was withdrawing troops from Vietnam, Je T'Aime topped the charts and Concorde broke the sound barrier. And then for something completely different: the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus aired on BBC One. We never looked at comedy - let alone Spam, parrots or lumberjacks - in the same way again. This new film celebrates the anarchic troupe's Ruby Jubilee and marks the first time the surviving Pythons have come together for a project since 1983's The Meaning of Life. It's archly subtitled The Lawyer's Cut and those Beeb briefs have been busy because it's slimmed down from a six-hour series screened in the US (as Terry Jones says, "a record so complete and faithful to the truth that I don't need to watch it") to just 60 minutes. Directed by Alan Parker, it features new interviews with Jones, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Eric Idle, as well as archive chat from the late Graham Chapman. All tell the story of how they met at Oxbridge and The Frost Report, created trailblazing television, made the transition into films and ultimately became a British institution. Which, like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expected.

Michael Palin reads from his second volume of diaries, covering the 1980s, a decade that saw him achieving success with films The Missionary and A Fish Called Wanda. He's as amiable in print as he seems in the flesh. This is no acid-tongued attack or expose of fellow professionals. Michael doesn't do vitriol. The worst you get out of Michael is slightly peeved and the book is all the better for it. There are fascinating insights to his work alongside tender and heartbreakingly tragic family stories. And he's charmingly modest: suffering a crisis of confidence while shooting Great Railway Journeys he laments "I'm not a documentary presenter" - this from a man who was to go on to make some of the most enjoyable travel programmes of the last 20 years.

Michael Palin, the Monty Python team member who escaped Transatlantic lures, who still retains his curiosity about the world while seldom indulging in public reflections on private torments, reads his new volume of memoirs. It's about the Eighties, when the Pythons were moving on into movies, finding their careers diverging and, for some of them, coping with ordinary family life. Here's how he began unexpected new chapters in his life. He wasn't top of the BBC's list, we learn, to front big travel series. They changed their minds. Lucky us.

Now here's an interesting way to celebrate the 30th birthday of a classic sitcom. For the first time ever, John Cleese reveals his favourite scenes Fawlty Towers. No clues yet as to which ones they will be but there's the added bonus of the likes of Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Mitchell and Webb, Eddie Izzard and AA Gill reminiscing about these magic moments. Possibly even more interesting will be the comments from the owners of Gleanagles Hotel, which was the real-life inspiration for Fawlty Towers.

It may have only been 12 episodes, but more than 30 years after its debut Fawlty Towers remains one of our favourite sitcoms. This documentary looks at how the show came into being and why it turned out a classic. Michael Palin suggests it's survived because its "precision comedy" and Basil Fawlty's hysterical character were a symptom of the times. Not everyone was enamoured with it though - a BBC executive described it as "dire". Cast members John Cleese, Connie Booth, Andrew Sachs and Prunella Scales all contribute their recollections of making the programme.

Thursday nights will be sad and hollow now the series has ended. I shall miss the saintly wisdom and tolerance of Rick's partner, Mel, and the unworldly abruptness of Michael, the cafe owner who makes Basil Fawlty look like Michael Palin.