Michael Palin narrates latest BBC Classic Serial

[Ignatius_S]

Available via Listen Again on the BBC's website is Gogol's Dead Souls narrated by Palin and starring Mark heap.

[Jemble Fred]

I really enjoyed this (read my way through Gogol in college, purely for the Fawlty Towers connection), but Heap's performance won't silence many of his critics on here – stutter city. But I think he fits the part perfectly meself.

Plus my old school chum (sure I spoke to him once) Toby Hadoke was in it!

Anyway, ANYTHING would have been good in that slot, following the recent Code of the Woosters debacle.

[benthalo]

Palin was plugging it on Saturday's Loose Ends, whilst fielding off questions about Spamalot.

He also made reference to a new radio production of the Simon Gray play  Quartermaine's Terms, which he stars in and is due later this year. I'm impossibly excited about that.

[bennyprofane]

this sounds really interesting actually, but when I go to the bbc website and select this under 'listen again' is just says there is 'no clip'.
What am I doing wrong?
Gogol is ace, and not in a way that makes me immediately think 'palin', so I'd be hugely grateful if anyone could help me to listen to this.  Does the fact that I'm outside Britain mean I can't access it?  Occasionally I get that on the bbc and other british media outlets internet sections, but then it normally says so.

[benthalo]

Yeah, haven't they drastically reduced Listen Again access to overseas users?

[Ignatius_S]

He also made reference to a new radio production of the Simon Gray play  Quartermaine's Terms, which he stars in and is due later this year. I'm impossibly excited about that.

**Bump**

It's on next Sat on Radio 4 - here's some info from the BBC site:

Quartermaine's Terms, written by Simon Gray and starring Michael Palin, is set in a school that teaches English to foreigners in the Sixties. It deals with the concerns of seven teachers over several years and, in particular, the progress of St John Quartermaine, a lonely man and ineffective teacher.

Michael Palin stars as Quartermaine, a teacher whose life, lived vicariously in the confines of a staff room, is dwindling away. The cast includes Francesca Faridany, James Fleet, Clive Francis, Andrew Lincoln, Harriet Walter and David Yelland.

It is directed by award-winning actor Maria Aitken, whose recent theatre-directing credits include Man And Boy, by Terence Rattigan, starring David Suchet.

Writer Simon Gray has written over 30 plays, including Butley, Otherwise Engaged, Stage Struck, Hidden Laughter and The Old Masters; as well as several TV plays, film scripts and a number of popular memoirs. His subject matter often focuses on the trials and tribulations of educated intellectuals and his plays are notable for their wit and emotional incisiveness.

Popular ex-Python Michael Palin was lured back into the acting arena after a gap of several years by the massive appeal of Radio 4's Quartermaine's Terms, from the pen of prolific playwright Simon Gray. Imagine his horror, then, when he woke up on the first day of recording with "a stinking cold". But the engineer's son from the industrial city of Sheffield proved he'd been forged with a steely determination, writes Doreen Brooks.

"It was a nightmare," recalls the globe-trotting father of three. "I had to take all sorts of Fishermen's Friends and things like that in with me. But [director] Maria [Aitken] seemed to think my voice sounded even better at a slightly gratey register and it didn't seem to be a problem.


"But," he confesses, "I felt I'd let the side down by getting a cold on my first acting job for 10 years, or whatever."

Gray's 1981 play is set in the staff room of a Cambridge language school, teaching English to foreigners in the Sixties. Michael stars as lonely and ineffective teacher St John Quartermaine, who has no life outside the school. It was award-winning actor and director Maria Aitken, whom Michael had met at Oxford, who invited him to consider the role.


"Maria and I had worked together," says Michael, who was awarded a CBE in 1999. "She had been in one of the Ripping Yarns and played John's [Cleese] wife in A Fish Called Wanda. So we knew each other and I respect and admire her work a lot."

In the frenetic Flying Circus of life, it was partly Quartermaine's quiet qualities that appealed to Michael.

"He's somebody who, rather quietly, but gently, takes over in quite a fevered hysterical situation, which is the common room of the language school," he explains. "He's sort of a still, small voice in the middle of it and the play is all about this world going on around him. He's the one who is perhaps most loyal to the school and yet he's obviously not got a huge amount of commitment to the teaching.

"There's another side to him – another element," reveals Michael. "He's got a past and you feel that, somehow, things haven't quite worked out for him, but he's a decent man. He listens to everybody. Everyone comes back to him for reassurance, for some sympathy.

"I thought he was rather touching, but also had a kind of enigmatic quality to him. He was a bit mysterious, but I liked his humanity. I think it appealed to me in this mad rush of a world that we live in that there should be somebody who was not quite on this planet all the time but had, in a sense, a sort of decency and an honesty and a peace at the centre of his character, but who wasn't terribly well fitted for modern life.


"I suppose, in a way, he's quite a tragic character and I'm somehow drawn to that."

After leaving Shrewsbury public school, Michael graduated from Oxford University's Brasenose College with a degree in History – and his experience of a cloistered, academic world helped him burrow under the skin of the complex Quartermaine.

"I certainly have known people who have dedicated their lives to staying in a nice scholastic and academic environment – people for whom a base became very important and who weren't particularly well suited for the world outside."

He reveals: "The academic world is actually quite a bitchy world – as bad as almost anything you can imagine, really. So I appreciated the sort of competitiveness and back-stabbing that went on amongst the characters in the play, because I'd seen that.

"Just because one's mind is on higher things, it doesn't mean you're free of the base desires to sort of do in other people and compete just as aggressively as in any other walk of life. So that also could have made me understand the play a little better," he muses, "and made me understand why St John was an outsider."

Michael found it easy to understand why Quartermaine was captivated by his environment.

"He does rhapsodise about certain things – a sort of past when he remembers swans on the river and all that sort of thing. And I suppose, having been to university in somewhere like Oxford, you know that there were certain days everything was magical and you'll remember them for ever, and that helped me in playing some of the character."

Michael's last major acting roles were in A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures, after which he embarked on a series of far-flung journeys for BBC Television.

He's been Around The World In 80 Days, gone Pole To Pole and taken viewers Full Circle With Michael Palin. His well-thumbed passport came out again for Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure and he's trekked through the Sahara and the Himalaya region.

Michael, 63 and married to Helen for 40 years, is fondly remembered for many Python sketches, including the infectious Lumberjack song. But he felt some trepidation about dusting off his versatile acting skills.

"I enjoyed it greatly but I was a little bit apprehensive to start with because I was with a wonderful cast of great actors [his co-stars include Harriet Walter, James Fleet, Clive Francis, Francesca Faridany, Andrew Lincoln and David Yelland]. And I thought, 'I'm a bit rusty, I'll have to feel my way rather carefully'.

"But the great thing about a good play and a good piece of writing, with a good director, is that nobody's scoring points off anybody else.

"There was a really good collaborative feeling that we were all in it because we loved the play and I found the rest of the cast were very patient and very supportive of someone who'd not done acting for a while."

He continues: "But if you act and you enjoy acting, you might get a little bit rusty but you don't forget it. You don't forget the basic joy of bringing a character to life and Quartermaine is a great character to play, so there are no half measures. Simon Gray gives you something wonderful to work on.

"So," he declares, "in a sense I was very fortunate; I was able to get back into acting and get my teeth into something that was really nice and meaty from day one onwards."

Michael also enjoys the structure of working in radio.

He explains: "Most of the acting I did, certainly in the last 15 years or so, tended to be films and, if you're not very careful, you spend a lot of time sitting in your caravan waiting for the lights to be fixed or for the back projection to work, or whatever.

"The great thing about doing radio is that you go in there and you start. You arrive at 9.30, you're starting by 10 – you're right into it and I like that discipline."

BBC Radio 4 listeners have another Palin treat in store in October when Michael begins reading his diaries for Book Of The Week. He's kept a diary since just before Monty Python began in 1969 and the first volume deals with the Seventies. The diaries will also be published in three volumes by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

And BBC TV viewers can look forward to a new series of Michael's travels, this time in Eastern Europe.

"It's what we're calling New Europe – the new countries that have grown up in the last 10 years who are all going to be part of the European Union in maybe the next 20 years," he explains. "So it's a journey which takes in the Balkans, Albania, Turkey, Romania – a lot of countries – and we hope to have a series ready by the autumn of 2007."


Team Palin is made up mainly of colleagues with whom Michael has worked on previous expeditions, including the same two directors and camera man.

"We're all a bit gaga now," he quips. "We're over 60 and we call ourselves Saga filming, but there's nothing better than working with people who have that experience. We may move a little more slowly, but I think we know how to do the work now!"

[benthalo]

Quartermaine ...... Michael Palin
Anita ...... Francesca Faridany
Mark ...... James Fleet
Eddie ...... Clive Francis
Derek ...... Andrew Lincoln
Henry ...... David Yelland
Melanie ...... Harriet Walter


Just re-reading the script today and I can't really imagine better casting than James Fleet. Palin too, although I have in my mind a much younger character. It's a nice part nonetheless.

The ever-earnest Andrew Lincoln can only be a disaster.