Michael Palin reveals how a Monty Python sketch saved him from being thrown in a Colombian jail

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

You could almost hear the sigh of collective disappointment from the country’s female population. I’d asked Michael Palin – perhaps a little insensitively, given it’s only two and a half years since his wife of 57 years died – if he might be looking for a new travelling companion. And the answer was polite (of course) but emphatic: “I do miss Helen very much on holidays. I was away with all my children and grandchildren in Italy recently, and it was lovely, but I realised I was 25 years older than the next oldest person there. You do need someone your own age to share your perspective and roll your eyes with – but I’m not really in the market for meeting anyone else.”

Bad news for the nation’s womenfolk, perhaps – anyone who’s seen any of his TV travelogues knows he’d be the perfect person to squire you around foreign climes – but at least we all get to accompany the former Python in his witty, insightful, lightly learned written accounts.

The latest of these, Michael Palin in Venezuela, accompanies September’s three-part series of the same name. But why Venezuela? “The decisions on where we go are taken by myself and Neil Ferguson, the director. He’s the one who says, ‘I want to go somewhere else,’ while I’m saying, ‘I’d rather stay in bed for a couple more days.’ But I never really want to stay in bed or sit in one place too long: I love travelling. It’s a form of global fidgeting.”

It sounds like he has a travel companion already then. Do they bicker like a couple? “Oh no, I’m far too agreeable. We have constructive conversations. I say, ‘I’m 82. I might fall over if I go there.’ He says, ‘You’ll be fine.’ And Channel 5 – who are presumably paying the insurance bill – seem very keen to keep me travelling, too.”

That still doesn’t explain Venezuela, I point out. “It’s always been a mysterious country to me, but with something seductive about its name. It also fits the bill for what we try to do in these shows, which is go somewhere and find out what’s gone wrong. Venezuela is oil-rich, it’s got enormous mineral wealth, it has wonderful Caribbean beaches, beautiful mountain scenery – but nearly eight million Venezuelans [over a quarter of the population] left the country in the last ten years or so. They’re Latin Americans, so they like painting, colour, food, dancing, having fun, but they’re living under intolerable pressure in a dictatorship.”

Perhaps inevitably, Palin and crew experienced some of that themselves. “We were filming in a town called Sabaneta. First, a couple of people asked what we were doing. Then some uniformed people came and did the same. Then there were people in slightly smarter uniforms. And finally it was men in totally black uniforms, with helmets and body armour and M16 rifles, working for the Intelligence Service. And they weren’t smiling.”

Surely at this point, I venture, you tell them Who You Are? “They didn’t seem the sort of people to whom you’d say, ‘Actually I do comedy sketches!’ – you tend to keep quiet about the Spanish Inquisition sketch when you’ve got an assault rifle pointed at you. But eventually one of them googled my name, and the first thing that came up was a clip on YouTube of myself and John Cleese debating Life of Brian with Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark from 1979 – which is the only time I’d been really serious and angry on television. So they’re looking at this, saying, ‘He’s supposed to be a comedian?’

“At that stage, someone said, ‘Mike, show them some Monty Python.’ So I tell them to look for The Fish-Slapping Dance, and they laboriously type that in… and it worked its magic. They realised that anyone who got hit in the face with a pilchard or knocked into a canal with a perch couldn’t be a threat to the regime.” Yes, but did they laugh? “You couldn’t really see their faces because they were heavily masked and had goggles, but the security headgear began to shake slightly, and that was rather reassuring.”

Fellow Python Eric Idle said recently that Palin’s “twinkly naughtiness” was on the wane, but Palin himself disagrees. “Eric can be a bit catty sometimes… And I think my twinkly naughtiness is still there. In fact I think there’s great scope for silliness in your 80s. You don’t have to worry about how long you’ve got to live, or what you should eat. You’re in the departure lounge. It gives you freedom.”

That said, there are clearly no thoughts of exiting the lounge any time imminently. Venezuela, Palin mentions in passing, is the 100th country he’s visited. “But there are 204 or something in the world, so I’m not even halfway.” And, adds the octogenarian with an optimistic (possibly even naughty) twinkle, “I’m over three-quarters of the way through my life.”

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