Halfway To Hollywood

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.