Michael Palin talks returning to acting in new comedy from The Office legend – and how he approaches old age

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

You don’t act much these days. What made you want to play Michael’s dad Brian in Small Prophets?

Travelling and writing books take up most of my time. I really enjoy acting. I’ve done A Fish Called Wanda, The Death of Stalin and GBH, which were wonderful, but they don’t come along often. What Mackenzie writes is very special. I enjoy his humour, his understanding of people. There was no question of saying, “No, I can’t do this, I’m busy travelling.”

Brian lives in a care home and is the first elderly person you’ve played. Did you have any reservations?

I found playing this part fine. He’s old and forgetful but able to interpret extraordinary text and put old bits of machinery together again. He’s definitely not the archetype in a care home. I wouldn’t like to just be in a chair, dribbling away, and then you die.

As you get older, you do forget the most obvious things — names, places — I sometimes find that tricky. But if I’m going filming in Venezuela, say, I’ll know everything about Venezuela for a bit. My children keep saying, “Careful, careful,” but they’re being overcautious. In the show, Brian is not cautious and likes doing mad things, like trying to ride a motorbike aged nearly 90.

Do you think that’s quite true for a lot of people of your generation?

I was lucky to grow up in a period where being young was great — which my parents’ generation couldn’t because they’d been embroiled in two world wars. After university in the 60s, it was the Beatles, Mary Quant, Pete and Dud, and Spike Milligan. You could do anything. There was no real censorship, not to the degree there is now. In Monty Python we could write what we wanted. Now you’d have to be more careful. We just thought, let’s be silly.

The way that Mackenzie writes is quite Pythonic because it’s understated. The best humour is done without a smile. When people take themselves absolutely seriously, that makes me laugh more. That’s what Python was all about: the absurd things that we all do.

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