That Gaby Roslin Podcast: Reasons To Be Joyful - Sir Michael Palin

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

In this episode Gaby was overjoyed to chat to Sir Michael Palin who has such a wonderful outlook on life. They chat about Monty Python and their reunion, the famous fish slapping dance, and the worldwide appeal of slapstick comedy. He tells an amazing story about taking his 80-year-old mother on Concord to New York and how she was asked to perform on Saturday Night Live with him. Plus, being star struck meeting his heroes Spike Milligan and Johnny Cash who were fans of his. Also, his friendship with and admiration of Sir David Attenborough and Michael talks very passionately about saving our planet. For more information on the sponsors of this episode: Grass and Co. - Find your calm 25% OFF, plus free shipping at: www.grassandco.com/GABYUse discount code: GABY at checkout.Symprove - For more information visit www.symprove.com or follow on Instagram on @symproveyourlife. Claim 15% off the 12-week programme use discount code GABY15 at checkout. For new customers only in the UK. Produced by Cameo Productions, music by Beth Macari.  Join the conversation on Instagram and Twitter @gabyroslin #thatgabyroslinpodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is brought to you by Simprove. Hello and thank you so much for tuning into that Gabby Roslyn podcast. I was overjoyed. I cannot begin to tell you how thrilled, in fact. I was to chat to Sir Michael Palin. He has such a wonderful outlook on life. We of course chatted about Monty Python and their reunion, the famous fish-slapping dance, of course, and the beauty of slapstick comedy with its worldwide appeal.

He tells the amazing story about taking his 80-year-old mother on Concord to New York and how she was then asked to perform on Saturday Night Live with him. Michael talks about being starstruck when he met his heroes Spike Milligan and Johnny Cash, who were fans of his in the end. Also his dear friendship and admiration for Sir David Attenborough and Michael talks very passionately about saving our planet. Enjoy. Hello Gabby. How are you?

I'm very well. Thank you. All the better for speaking to you and all the better for introducing my 14-year-old to the fish slapping scene. She'd never seen it before, I'm ashamed to say. They're a bit old for it, really. You should start them at about four. It's completely our sense of humour. And I said to, I can't believe, because they've watched Life of Brian and they've watched Fish called Wonder. But I can't believe I'd never shown it. And she was in hysterics. She kept saying, do it again, play it again, play it again. And she kept saying, but that's the sort of thing that makes you laugh, Mom. I went, yes, yes.

That's good to know. It's just such a joy. Do you mind that people bring all of those beautiful, funny, wonderful moments up again and again? No, not at all. I mean, it's great to hear people's appreciation. I mean, that's what I do and have done for most of my life. It's entertained and you've got to have a feedback. and there's an audience out there all the time.

And I used to complain a bit sometimes because the press were very intrusive and wanted to know this and that. You know, the actual time spent answering questions from the press was taking away from the work I was doing. And I would occasionally moan about that. And my wife would say, well, that's, you know, don't do 10 hours of travel programs in a year. You know, because if you don't want to be bothered, just shut up. And unfortunately, I can't shut up. I mean, I do like to be talking to somebody out there. So to get a reaction from somebody who is out there is what it's all about.

And that's fine. Good or bad, really. You learn from both. Do you know you're quite right about those press stuff? I think your wife's right. You know, sometimes you just have to close the door on all of those. But you loved entertaining from the age of 10. I was watching your documentary and you were saying that you used to go into a couple.

and entertain the kids at school. Oh, yeah. It was slightly bigger than a cupboard. I did have an audience of about 12. Yes, it was my prep school, and I had a sort of ability to just make up characters and invent characters and sometimes use the teachers we had in the school

as the basis of characters and transport them to another sort of situation. And I remember 1953 very well, because it was the royal, it was a coronation. Many things happened. Everest was climbed, but it was a coronation which everyone was talking about. And I just used to add lib during the break

the events of the coronation, which were usually very childish and silly and ended up with things like, you know, the Duke of Edinburgh being caught short in the abbey and all that and the toilet roll trailing from his pocket and all that sort of stuff. It was very, it doesn't start. stand up for every world nowadays.

But yeah, they were quite entranced, my little audience. I mean, there were others out there being hearty and doing what boys do in the break, which is bash each other up. But there was a kind of, I like to think, a mother more intellectual group who wanted to hear about the Duke of Edinburgh being caught short at the correlation. There's nothing better than making people laugh. And I just, in, I know I'm very lucky to have interviewed you before. we work together on the Millennium Broadcast.

But I remember you saying to me that you love hearing people laughing with you and at you. Yes, not at me so much. With you. But with me, certainly. As someone said, you know, when you see someone slip over on a banana skin, that's funny. When you slip over on a banana skin, it's not funny. So there is a difference between laughing with and at. But I'm never particularly good at jokes per se because I can't remember jokes.

And the wonderful Barry Cry, who I've known for a long, long time, rings me up. You know, quite often actually, Barry is a great believer in the telephone rather than email and all that. And he rings, finds out what I'm doing and all that and says, well, just before I go, three people go into a bar or something. And he goes into a wonderful joke, which I try and write down. as quickly as I can. And then he tells another one. And then there's a third one. I'm scribbling down.

And, you know, he rings off, and I look at this bit of paper. It has the most extraordinary, you know, shambolic, sort of unconnected words on it, like sort of parrot, none, summertime. I think, where, why couldn't I get the joke out of this? So I'm not good at telling jokes that much,

but I do love comic situations. and I do love to sort of press the button that makes people laugh, you know, just by putting people in different strange situations like the fish slapping dance, which is extremely silly. But everybody knows about the sort of folk dances and all that that we have to know about and we occasionally used to see our grandparents doing. So there is a context, but it's putting something quite different into that context. It's so funny that you just said that his joke.

you wrote down parrot and you wrote down nun. And I can see something coming. I can see a whole scenario coming. That would be the parrot and the nun scene together. Well, yes. Because that's what you put together, brilliantly. Yeah, parrots and nuns do seem to occur a lot in comedy. I don't know why that should be.

It's also, I remember us in Python wondering why fish were so funny. And they just were. But not all fish. were funny. Hallibut was funnier than a haddock or something, for some reason. I don't know why. Trout was quite funny, but basically it was halibut. We did a sketch about someone trying to get a license for their pet fish, Eric.

He's an alibut, you know, and they had to get a license for a halibut. So that's one thing that's funny. Why is it funny? I don't know. It's a bit like why are certain places. like Penge funny and Camden aren't funny. You just don't know. But all you know is that people do respond.

And you learn that from improvising stories, which I used to do, listening to jokes, just seeing what it is that make people start to laugh. It's always fascinated me. Because I think if someone's laughing with you, then you're in a happier place than you are if someone's scowling or not talking. They're a great icebreaker humour. I completely agree with you. And one of the things that we always ask everybody on this podcast,

because I think that laughter is the best medicine. I really, really do. I think kindness is the key, and laughter is the best medicine. And whenever I ask anybody what makes them laugh, they'll say Python or Seinfeld or anything. And then suddenly they'll say, but you know what I really like is if somebody falls over or walks into a tree or slapstick.

We love. Yes, we do. And slapstick, of course, is absolutely universal. I don't know of anywhere in the world where you can't get a laugh from, you know, king of football with a group of children. They're missing the ball completely and falling on your bum. And they love that. It's just so funny because there it is. It's adult or somebody doing what they all do at some point. Make a fool of yourself. But it has to be something that happens to somebody else. But I can remember actually with fish slapping dance, which is a bit of slapstick, really, with a sort of serious ritual around it. You know, John is very serious when he aims the fish at me. And yet, when I was in North Korea recently making a documentary, my director had bought various Python clips,

which he thought he might at some point be able to show to people. We did at one point show my guide, So Yang, Fish Slapping Dance. And she didn't know anything much about me and what I did at home. They do nothing of the context. They knew very little about the Western world, about England, about television or anything like that. They lived in their own little bubble. And we just played this, wondering what her reaction would be. And she just broke up when John hit me with the fish and I fell into the water.

And you realize this is a completely universal thing. thing. And then she said to me, which is rather sweet, she said, oh, so this is what you do? And I said, well, no, I didn't do it all the time. No, that was about 50 years ago. And then she said, the fish, she looked very concerned. She said, the fish, was it alive? I said, no, no, no, but I was. But she laughed at that because it's a piece of slapstick. And it's because it's a great relief to people to see pretension, order, you know, power debunked, which is part of what it's all about. Oh, completely.

There's a wonderful quote that you said it's important to always keep a sense of wonder. Yes, I say it quite a lot, actually. I think it's one of the most important motivations for me in life generally. I do think there's sort of I don't like the attitude which is, well, I've seen it all before while, you know, oh, that's boring. You know, the kind of attitude you had when you were 12 or 13 or 14

which my grandchildren have slightly. In fact, the other day, it was rather wonderful because Archie was about 14. He's always bored. And I finally came to the house one day. He was sitting, he had a rocking chair over his head and just kind of lying on the floor. I said, actually, you're all right.

What are you doing? He said, I'm waiting to be bored. And I love the idea of waiting to be bored. That's so 14. But yes, exactly. And I went through that and days seemed to pass with nothing happening at all. And gradually I realized that it's up to you to find something out of your life, to get something out of the days and the life you're leading.

And as you get older, you need it more and more, I suppose. and I have always felt that it's, I've responded, I respond to things very warmly, usually whether it's a view, a bit of music, a painting, a friend ringing up. To me, that's always, there's a potential for something wonderful to happen every day. And it's not, I don't, I really don't like the attitude that says, well, it won't happen here, you just, you know, it's like people who say, oh, you can't be in London over the winter, just miserable. Well, it isn't miserable.

It's actually wonderful. Even when the snow's driving across Hampton Heath or something like that, straight in your face, something like that, something rather wonderful, because you know in three months' time, the sun's going to be on your face. It's little moments like that that I think wonder is the only way of describing it, really. Don't ever be blasé about the world.

however difficult things might be, there's always something wonderful there. How wonderful were you always like that? Did you always look at life like that, even when you were a child? Yes, yes, I was very, I remember I enjoyed seeing things and feeling and touching and getting to grips with something. So at school geography I loved because it got you out of the school and it took you up some valleys outside Sheffield or something to see how those valleys were forged and how they were created

and how they started the steel business began from the streams that came down there. I enjoyed that much more than something theoretical like maths or all the science stuff, which I never was very good at. We just had to sit at a desk and be told about it. And I've never been very good at being told about things. I have to see them and feel them, be aware of them, and get a sense of them for myself. And I think that goes away, way back.

And I can remember when I was quite small, I always, you know, wanted to go where my parents had said, said, stop. I wanted to go a bit further than that. Like one of those children, always wanted to see what was around the corner, what's happening here, what's happening there. And I think that was the start of it, a curiosity. That leads so perfectly into all your travels, doesn't it? I mean, that you were like that as a child and then the sense of wonder and wanting, when somebody says stop, you want to go further. And that's exactly what you did.

And I know that it's a very sort of a well-known story that you got that phone call about you want to go around the world in 80 days. But that changed your life so dramatically. Yes, it was so unexpected because I was 45 or so when I first did the travel programmes. And to some people, 45 is quite late in life. Your life is sort of, for a lot of people,

things are set by then. Things are determined. You're basically filling the days with things you know you can do and you're qualified to do and you don't really beyond a certain age like that ever get asked to do something totally out of left field,

something you've never done before. And I was lucky to be given that chance. I had, I mean, I had done a documentary, but it was only about a train going from London. and Scotland. And this was something altogether bigger scale, not just in where I was asked to go,

which was around the world, but also in the presentation of it. I'd never done a documentary longer than about 50 minutes. And here we were going to be doing seven hours at least. And I had never done, been in a situation where the camera would be there all the time. whatever you're doing really, I mean, apart from a few private moments, but generally speaking, the idea was that the camera would follow you and you would have to talk to the camera and

you'd have to be aware of the camera being there. So it was really like a sort of your, it was real life. I was being asked to sort of portray my life on television. So a lot of things happened with around the world in 80 days. A lot of things that I, you know, my instinct was, as you rightly say, to go with it because it was something that had accorded with my childhood feelings and all that. But at the same time, it was something very new, and once I started it quite frightening. So you did have frightening moments then?

Well, yes. I mean, the enormity of the project initially kept me awake at nights. I just realized that I had to have the energy and the stamina and the curiosity to approach all sorts of situations. Sometimes when you least wanted to do it, when you're most tired, but because we happen to be in a certain place and a train was arriving at a certain time or whatever, you had to go and buy a ticket and there was a huge crowd at the ticket desk, and it's somewhere in Egypt and you've got to. speak Arabic or the direction that just go for it and you don't you know you don't get any chance to have had a rest beforehand or think about what you're going to do you just go in there and that requires quite a bit of quite a bit of energy and a lot of spark you've got to have something behind there that says I really okay it may be silly it may be may not work but I

want to do it I want to have a go and some of some days you felt like in some days you didn't to be honest. So I have to make sure they had reserves there in order to interact where it was necessary. I mean, you met some extraordinary people and you went to some, I mean, completely incredible places. And for you then to write about this afterwards, did that help you process what you'd been through? Yes, it did. The writing was very important because that was the other thing I really enjoyed when I was growing up was reading and writing and particularly trying to create stories of my own. I mean, I could improvise the little comedy moments and all that. So I wanted to, you know, school essays, for instance, the more sort of ingenious I could be

and the more creative with a story, the better. So you'd say, oh, the subject is my holiday. and I'd turn it into something where people got trapped in a cave and beheaded. God knows what happened, you know. There was some other element. I thought, I've got to grab the audience here with a really good story. My own holiday would be extremely boring. So I was into creative writing quite early on. But then descriptive writing, which is what you do when you're travelling,

and I take a lot of notes. And I realise that even though, you know, we've got seven hours of television, considering the amount that we actually film and the amount that we see, that's a tiny sliver. And an awful lot of the material will be things that I saw and noted that the camera wasn't able to pick up. And so being able to write the book as well gave me a second chance to show and inform and describe things that had not been seen in the series. And I was very I saw it as very important that the book should be in many ways different from the actual series itself. Obviously, you were going to the same places, but what I noticed was sometimes things I couldn't put on screen and vice versa.

I absolutely loved the books. I mean, I remember watching the shows, but I remember reading the books because my parents bought the books and they said, right, now read the book. And I was, oh, but I've watched it. And like Lama and, and they said, now, read the book. And I remember then getting completely lost in the book because it just took me, sort of further into your head and took me on that journey with you. And it was, it just, what it did, I think for me is it opened my mind to parts of the world I'd never been and always wanted to go.

And the sense of wonder that you talk about. It brought that to all of us. It really did. I think also the thing you said there, going into my mind a bit, but it is, the book was more personal in a sense. It was very much, well, the form was the daily diary I kept when I was travelling. And very often that had to be scribbled late at night just before you're going to bed or up in the morning before you started filming. And little things that I wrote in those diaries were much more personal, my own personal view than perhaps I would. that would come across in the film version in which I had a short time to say what I was feeling

and more time to say it through the books. So that did, yeah, that helped make the books different, the personal touch, I think. I love them. With your parents, I've also read that, I mean, I love, there's a wonderful clip of your mother coming on to Saturday Night Live with you. Oh, that's joyful. Yes, well, that was one of those really high. points of one's life. And again, as you can tell, I like surprises. I like things to just turn out

and not to know exactly what's going to happen. And if ever there was a case of not knowing what was going to happen, it was taking my mother on her 80th birthday to New York. All sorts of things. First of all, I was appearing on Saturday Night Live and they had enough money to fly me over on Concord. So with my sister and my mum, we took Concord. And my mother had only flown once in her life before, which on a rather slow plane from London to Paris. So when we get to New York, I say, well, Mum, what do you think of that as we're getting off the plane? And she said, yes, very nice, dear. And I said, three hours and ten minutes from London to New York. What about that. She said, well, what do we do now, dear? And of course, I realised that she didn't know

anything different. She hadn't, only flown once. Far as she was concerned, all planes flew from London to New York in three hours and ten minutes. Oh, that's wonderful. And then, of course, the, well, got in the hotel and my sister was there, I was going to take her around New York, because I wasn't abandoning her, but basically I had to get on with the work, which was going to a read-through talking about what I might do as the opening monologue, which is a very important part of the guest's appearance on Saturday Live, as you know. And I was talking about what's going on. I brought my mother over, and Lorne Michaels, who was the producer,

just thought this was wonderful. You brought your mother. First time in New York? Oh, yes. I said, first time in New York. Oh, that's wonderful. He said, would she like to come to the show? And I said, well, yeah, I think she'd probably,

like to, but it's quite late at night, you know, and it's very noisy and all that. And I said, well, you know, Alaska. And then as I was going out law and said, by the way, you know, this opening monologue, would she like to be in the show? And I said, she's 80 years old. And you've got this hip show, you know, broadcast to 45 million people who are over there's across America. I said she'll be really bewildered and they're just, you know, it's a nice idea, but, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, you know, there's no chance. And I went back and I told about it. I said, I'm doing this show and it's a huge audience right across America, mainly young college kids and all that. And the producer today asked if you would be, if you'd like to come onto the show and do a part. And I sort of laughed and

said, I said, no, I don't think you want to do that. She said, oh, it sounds quite interesting, dear. What do I have to do? I said, well, I mean, you know, I could write you something. That'd be very nice, dear. Yes, I'll do that if you'd like me to. Just as if she was talking about going down to the shops. And she ends up there with this manic world on the evening. She has to go to rehearsal. She was a very little lady. And she just did it with such extraordinary calm composure.

It was absolutely wonderful. It wasn't she was hogging the camera in any shape or form. In fact, she looked rather sort of, you know, bemused as to why she was there, why she was doing anything. Of course, again, she didn't realize the profile of Saturday Night Live, the fact that she was on, she was having, her dressing room was, her dressing room had Eddie Murphy on the outside. Eddie wasn't on the show that week.

But they hadn't taken the name down. So it's just Eddie Murphy. And underneath it said Michael Palin's mother, talk about surreal. But it really did happen. Oh, how glorious. Because I was going to, the reason I mentioned that is, I've heard on the documentary, and also reading about your father just sort of the way,

his reaction to your idea of acting and being in this world, that he was not so keen, I suppose, as a polite way of putting it. No, he wasn't keen at all. And I've tried to sort of work that out. I mean, there's two ways of looking at it. One is a very very negative way, which is that he, you know, he just had, bias against theatre or entertainment when it was clear that it was one of the things I really

was wanted to do. He very much wanted me, if you look at it, the negative way to follow the pattern of his life. And he was an export manager. And all he wanted was me to go away to the same public school that he'd been to and behave and certainly not get seduced into the decadent world of acting where, you know, I would obviously make no money. Actors never did. This This was the gloomy view of it all. The other side, I think, which I've sort of thought about more recently, is that my dad actually, he was quite a show-off himself in a way. I've got some wonderful photos of him in India, all dressed up,

some of them in drag with his mates, doing funny poses and all that. It could be Python. Wow. And I think that what happened to him, the pictures of my father taken in the 1920s show a much more light-hearted guy who's very dapper, he dressed very smartly. He was very handsome, good-looking guy. And then all the later photos, the photos from the 40s onwards after I was born, it's different. It's middle age, things that obviously aren't.

There are not so many smiles. There's none of the dressing up. There's none of the showing off. And I think that really you look at his life. And he was married in 1930, having survived, obviously, the First World War. He wasn't in the army. Then they had a great, as soon as they married, there was a depression. He was an engineer, couldn't find any work.

Down in the south of England, went up to the north, ended up in, Hull and Leeds and Sheffield. Then there was the Second World War and by the time that he and my mother came through that, they had very, very little money. And things were just not so, things were not going so well for anybody, but particularly for him. And the underlying thing, which I think is very, very important, which wherever you look at my dad, was that he did have quite a bad stammer. and I think if you want to entertain or tell jokes,

which I think he really wanted to do. I think he had a great sense of humour. It's very, very difficult if you had a stammer, and he never managed to deal with the stammer. It was quite bad throughout my childhood. And I think this must have probably depressed him and made him frustrated and sometimes rather sort of commudgeonly, I'm afraid. So, as I say, that's a long-winded answer.

but if you look at different sides of my dad, one I feel sorry for him and the other, I just feel, you know, why did he have that bias against stage and all that? Didn't sort of count that as something in any way admirable. I think in my father's

case, to be honest, a lot of it was that I wouldn't earn any money and he'd be on a very low salary which he had. He'd be paying for me for the next 10 years after my education finished and that was altogether too horrific. There's also another thing I'd like to ask you about, the note from Spike Milligan. Oh, yes.

That you received a note and you said it's one of the most, that and being shot by Robert De Niro. Those two things next to each other just make me giggle. But the Spike Milligan note, what was that about? It was after one of the ripping yarns. I mean, I have to say, I was a huge fan of Spike. He was probably the most strongest comedy influence on me and my childhood. for Spike himself to send me a little note after the, I think one of the ripping hours,

I can't remember if it was Tompkinson, the first one, and just said, I can't remember, more please, Spike and his wonderful writing and all that. Wow. And, you know, that made my day week, yeah, really. That is fabulous. That is fabulous. When there's somebody that you hold in such high regard,

applauds you. There's sort of no greater feeling. There is no greater feeling. And it was, it's one of those things in life where you suddenly find a connection which you thought would never, ever, ever be made. So the fact I actually not just got a note from Spike, but ended up being quite friendly with Spike. And it's to see him quite a lot and, you know,

we wouldn't say we hang out all the time. But I got to know him very well in all his various different mood. and the fact he'd give me a ring and I could ring him. That was extraordinary. And another amazing one was one of my great heroes when I was young was Keith Miller, who was an Australian fast bowler in the Australian team of the 40s and early 50s. And he was very dashing and had incredibly long hair, unlike the cricketers that had some wartime haircuts.

He was very dashing and he didn't hang about. He just hit the ball very hard or he missed it and was out. but he tended to make, you know, he made a huge impression. He, I think, is down as having hit the furthest six at Lourdes, right over the pavilion in the 1948 test. And I just, I read all I could about him when I was young, a 10-year-old, just, oh, wow, what a dream. And I was at Lourdes, about 40 years later, invited to a box,

I think it was Michael Parkinson's box, actually, something like that and who should come in leaning on two sticks but Keith Miller you know this this hero of mine from the past he was very you know he was not very well then but he had a terrific sparkle in his eye that was what was so wonderful although he was on two sticks and a lot of people would just be looking at the ground and tottering he was looking around trying to catch the waitress his eye and that sort of thing I thought yes this is everything I want and I And, you know, instead of ignoring me, he just ignored everybody else and came up and said, Michael Palin, we love you.

We love your shows, don't we, darling? Yeah, oh, we do. It's great to meet you and all that. Oh, that must have been incredible. It did. Took the words. I totally out of my mouth. And there was I saying, well, I think you meant everything to me when I was young and all that.

I couldn't say any of that. I just mopped up. Oh, yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you. So there are little moments like that. when childhood you suddenly meet your childhood heroes I think probably happens very, very rarely to people

and I was very lucky because it happened two or three times the third time being Johnny Cash Oh, what happened with Johnny Cash? Tell me about that. Well, I was backstage at the chat show in America and the guests were there and it was quite a small green room we were in and one of the guests, the last guest I think,

was Johnny Cash and the door opened and there's this huge man. And once again, I felt I was right. He is a hero. He's a godlike figure. He's about 12 foot tall. He's wearing black, and it's just wonderful. And I was kind of bobble, blubbling, burbling in the background.

And he says a quick hello to various people. It comes right across to me, put his hand out, and said, John Cash, big fan. And that was four words to be engraved on my, my heart for my life. So that was it. John Cash, a fan? It's like hearing that Elvis liked the Holy Grail, which apparently he did.

Oh, my word. These are wondrous moments. They really are. They're so special. If people say that to you, how does that make you feel? Because you've had those moments with your heroes. How does it make you feel when you get people? people behaving like that towards you?

Well, I still feel like the one who admires others. I feel like, you know, still the same relation to heroes, whoever they might be, David Attenborough or whatever. So I don't see myself suddenly as having changed places completely. And when people say to me, oh, we really love your work, or we like everything you've done, I'm very pleased and obviously really sort of delighted that that's, that, you know, they feel they need to come up and say that. And most people say it very, they don't shout it or they don't sort of,

they come up and they just, just very politely will say something. And I feel that's like me. You know, this would be me talking to, you know, Spike or Johnny Cash or whatever. So I feel very much in their place, which I think is very important in life generally to have that empathy, not suddenly think that. that, you know, well now I'm the one who's admired, this makes me better and different from anyone else. It doesn't really. I'd now love to tell you all about one of the sponsors of today's episode. It's SimProve. Simprove is something that I have been taking every single morning for a

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speaking from the heart, speaking from the gut. This is something I swear by. You mentioned David Attenborough there. So you recently did an interview with Sir David. That extraordinary piece of work that he did for Netflix. I mean, just his witness statement, as he calls it. Yes. And you're very passionate about, I know you're passionate about transport,

you're passionate about the environment, you're passionate about this planet. But to be interviewing Sir David, I mean, the two of you together, it couldn't be more perfect fit? Well, I again, I'm very, very fortunate. I find him very fortunate to have got to know David. I've always admired him. I mean, I watched him when I was 10, I should think,

or even younger on ZooQuest and things like that. And I've always felt there was a consistency there in his programmes. They were always delivered the information clearly. There was always a rather spectacular element to where he was going and there was a quietly authoritative tone that he had. It wasn't sort of look at me, aren't I wonderful? It was basically trying to interpret what he saw for us, the viewer. And what I've always envied about David is his ability to communicate, which is quite extraordinary at any level. And I suppose I got to know him a little bit when Python was at BBC and he was one of the

people who got it on, really, on BBC in 1969. But then much later, when I was travelling and we ended up very often having books out at the same time at Christmas. So we'd meet up and we'd have jokes about putting each other's books on top of the other person's books in bookshops and silly things like that. And I realized that part of the great communication, that communicator in David was his sense of humor, terrific sense of humor. At the same time, allied to a very serious sense of responsibility to get right what he's saying. Not to take on too much, not to try and pretend he can do this. If he can't do it, he's always been just, he's managed to just shape every program he does

and everything he's done very, very carefully. so they're just right. And so you don't believe him because you're, I mean, well, you aren't dazzled in a way, but he's not up there in a sort of white suit with music behind him, like Elvis or anything like that. He's there just because he can tell you about things so brilliantly. And he is so throughout his life, has been a consistent search for how the planet works and the natural world, he has continued always to provide something new and different

so that we can learn about the natural world. So in all those things, I think he's absolutely admirable. But he's so easy to get on with because he does have a great sense of humour. And I'll tell a little story which sums up David. There is an ego there because he likes to get the programmes right. but it's entirely the ego is centered on his work, not himself and his own behaviour. He's very, very loyal. If someone asks him to go somewhere, he will generally try and make it.

And I went to an event at Canada House, and it was going to be given a medal. And this was about a couple of years ago. And I was asked along, and I was there. And there was people who would get together and having their drinks. And suddenly David appears. You know, it doesn't have an entourage. Didn't he have anyone with him? He just came in in his coat and took his coat off.

I said, hello to everybody. Very direct, very natural. And I said to him, I took him once in. I said, David, I think you're brilliant that you turn up to all these things. And he said, I turned up last night. It was the wrong night. That's fantastic. Which is just brilliant.

He not only come once, he come twice. and presumably gone home again afterwards. Oh, that is wonderful. You'll fabulously say what's on your mind, which I love and all the sort of recent stuff that you've said, and I know it was only 16 months ago that you had your heart operation. And may I ask you how you feel, I know it's a bit of a sort of hugely deep question,

but how you feel after sort of talking and being a friend of Davids and looking at that program, and how passionate you feel about the planet and obviously facing the surgery that you've faced. How do you feel about it all now? I know it's a very huge question, but how do you feel about the world right now and what we're doing to it?

Yes, well, knowing David, or just knowing, reading about the world and what's happening and how fast species are becoming extinct and forests are being cut down and seas are being polluted, It doesn't take just David to tell me that. It's in the papers almost every day.

And my main feeling about it is a sense of complete frustration that people still are prepared to burn down forests and spill oil into the sea or whatever. I mean, there has been great progress, I think. But still, you know, we have cruise ships and container ships going around. sort of spilling oil or being oil into the ocean. We have overfishing. We have trawlers which just scrape the seabed until there are no fish or no marine life there at all. We have the corals that are disappearing. And I suppose like David, but like many other people, Gretta Thunberg, whoever it is.

Most right-thinking people, I hope, would really like to try and do something about it. But I realize that I can't sort of take on everything I'd like to. And I think most people probably feel the same way. And what you have to do is directly take some sense of responsibility for the way you live and know about what is happening about CO2 in the atmosphere, know how much pollution you and your lifestyle might be giving out. And moderate it. I'm really not one of these people who say,

you've got to stop everything now and live out of cardboard boxes. That's unrealistic. I think we've all got to try and moderate. That would make a huge difference for a start. And I think one has got to persuade people by being honest, open, natural, and kind of, you know, there's got to be some way of enlisting people. You can't hate everybody who you see as a polluter. That's not really going to get you anyway.

You've got to somehow get inside them on or use empathy or something like that so that they understand what they're doing and will try and change their mind. But, I mean, you get someone like Donald Trump along. It's very, very difficult because he just believes whatever you might say that human beings are not responsible for the growth of carbon in the atmosphere. Because he won't say that because that goes against everything he thinks about business and his business friends and all that. But I think most people now, a lot of people now, feel that moderation is at least one step. And I go, I mean, I go when I travel, I've always been amazed and I try to make this point that the people who have little are the ones who are doing the least damage, the poorest people. And they're also, I mean, I don't believe everyone in the world just, they're relatively poor, compared to us. but in their own terms, they're very inventive, they're very ingenious about the solutions.

They live quite happily, even though they live with a very, very much smaller income than most of us. And I think that's an important thing. We've got to learn how to be inventive and how to ingenious and how to do without stuff. We've all got too much stuff, me included. No, we all do. And it's so easy to get swallowed up in stuff. It really is. Yes, yes.

If we may, I'd like to just finish it. on the Monte Python reunion because there you were, you started telling about when you were 10 and there were 12 people in the room that you were entertaining and then suddenly you were at the O2 doing these huge shows

and after all the, I love that you said it took five and a half seconds after years and years and years of everybody saying that you guys get back together. Then in five and a half seconds it was, yes, let's do it. What was it like being back on stage with everybody?

Well, not all of you, obviously, but with the chaps that are still here. We got together, we agreed to do it in five and a half seconds. Then we had to put a script together. Then we had to rehearse that material. We had not played a lot of those sketches for 30 or 40 years. So that was the first risk we were taking was, would they still be funny? Could we still make them funny? And then there was a thing about we're all of us in our 70s. And a lot of the things that we're doing on stage are quite, demand quite a certain degree of athleticism, even if it is smashing flowers into a vase or jumping up as the Spanish

Inquisition. And so, you know, that was an imponderable. We didn't really know whether we could do that over two nights, three nights, in the end, 10 nights. So I think all of us felt that we were happy to have got together again. There was enough that was working in rehearsal to make us feel that we, you know, we, it was worth doing. We wouldn't be shamed.

We wouldn't be embarrassed to have got all these people along. We would give them a good show. But it was not until we actually broke out of the TARDIS that began the show onto the stage and heard the reaction from that vast audience, 15,000 people, that we realized this was something on a totally other level than just putting together a show. where we didn't get anything wrong. This was something where we had to get everything right and we had to rise up to the audience's expectation.

And that was something really thrilling. When we forgot lines, people absolutely loved it. Yes, yes. There'll be cheers and someone in row 174 would shout out the line or something like that. So, you know, if you dry, it didn't really matter. It was all part of the entertainment. In fact, I think audience is quite disappointed.

sometimes and the whole sketch went by without somebody getting a line wrong. It was a very good nature atmosphere and the most important thing of all. I think this bears down on the reason why I was never very happy to do a show before that was that the technical side was so good. The sound was absolutely brilliant and the fact that we could use Graham on the screen above the stage and making part of the show was very, very important to me because Python was always six people. We all contributed equally and to not have one person there always felt to me that it wasn't quite Python. But to have Graham there and he was very skillfully interwoven into

the show in a way which you could only do in 2014. You couldn't have done it in 2004 or 1994. I think that made a huge difference as well that was technically brilliantly run and of course Eric had this wonderful idea of getting dancers in which I thought why are we doing young dancers were all 70s and they're just what you needed in the breaks in between to have this terrific energy

and these brilliant dancers and they're not on which come dressed as 75 year olds and fart about just joyful joyful joyful I always ask everybody on the podcast, I think I said earlier, that we always ask what makes you laugh. And every time I've met you and talking to you now, I love that you, you love to laugh.

What makes you laugh, Michael? Well, I, it's so many complicated things. I mean, a good joke well told will make me laugh. But very often it's just a wonderful human, absurdity, really. I can't think of a particular instance, but it's not something where someone's incredibly put down. It's usually just something where you say, well, there we are. I could have done that with complete idiots. Or just sort of being, I mean, there were moments that made me laugh when I was travelling a lot, being approached by people who, you know, I had to

try an interview and they would come back with the most extraordinary. replies, you know, the lighthouse keeper in the north of, north part of Norway, who I had to go and interview and he's a very miserable man because he said, oh, he spent six months of the year, you know, in the lighthouse on my own and it's dark and all that. And I thought, well, this is one of the most grim interviews I've ever done. So I said, I mean, what do you do during the winter to keep me? He said, we watch your program on the television. I just cracked up, and he cracked up as well.

So little moments like that take you, I think it has to be unexpected moments, really. They are the best. Michael, thank you so much. And I will not say the thing that you hate. So I'm not going to say that you're a nice person. I'm not going to say that it's a pleasure. I know you don't like any of those things.

All I'm going to say is... Oh, I do. I do. Oh, you do now. Oh, you've changed. Well, I never said... No, I never said I didn't like being complimented. I'm an absolute sucker for it. It has to be the right person. Oh, I'll compliment you then to that I won't stop.

Michael, you are a joy. You make me laugh. You make me happy. You make me smile. And you just make this world a better place. So thank you for everything. And carry on doing what you do so magnificently. Oh, well, thank you. That's very nice to feel that way. And that's what we all need a bit of that. And thank you for letting me sort of have my time and understanding me a little bit better. Thank you so much for listening. On the next episode, I'll be joined by comedians Rachel Paris and Marcus Brickstock.

Boy, oh boy, do they make me laugh. So I hope you're going to enjoy it. They're very funny indeed. That Gabby Roslin podcast is proudly produced by Cameo Productions. Music by Beth McCari. Please press the subscribe button and it will come straight to your phone on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you choose to listen. Also, please rate and review us. on Apple Podcasts.