COLIN STEELE  reviews a couple of biographies from British comedians Michael Palin and Bill Bailey.

Michael Palin’s There and Back: Diaries 1999-2009 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $36.99) is the fourth in his series of Decade diaries.

Palin once reflected that a good diary should be, “rich, well-observed, gossipy, analytical, funny, introspective, bitter and celebratory”. 

Certainly all these elements are covered in more than 500 closely printed pages of a book dedicated to his wife Helen, who died in May 2023.

Looking back on 1999-2009, he reflects, “our last child leaves home…  it’s a holistic look at 11 years of my life”. 

Palin was unsure as to his creative future, “I wanted to go back to acting and writing… But I ended up being tempted back to globetrotting and in the end made a number of TV journeys”. 

Those journeys resulted in not only successful TV series, but also the best-selling books on Hemingway, Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe.

Globally he says: “We think it was a quiet time. But of course, there was 9/11, 7/7… and the war in Iraq”. 

Palin juxtaposes his reactions to these with the mundanity of home life, literary and charity events and the vagaries of the English weather.

There are, of course, many diary entries about his fellow Monty Python members, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, living in England, and John Cleese and Eric Idle living in America. 

Idle, as ever, the keeper of the Python purse, eventually gets them all to agree to the production of Spamalot. Cleese needs the money to fund his numerous divorces, while Jones, who died in 2020, faces similar problems after he leaves his wife for a Swedish student whom he met at an Oxford book signing.

Palin reflects: “The more I see of the process of destroying one life and setting up another, the more it confirms me in my own ways, and makes me feel ten times more fortunate.” 

And on the financial side: “From what I’ve observed, the more money you have, the more is expected of you.”

Palin is often self-critical and anxious. He reads every review of his work, even the most negative. He reflects: “I’ve always done everything to avoid confrontation” and that perhaps he is “too nice to be a great diarist”.

He documents his numerous friendships, especially with David Attenborough, Allan Bennett and the late Barry Cryer. Good friends die, notably George Harrison, who told him “the farther one travels the less one knows”.

Queen Elizabeth famously used to say to those she met on official occasions, “have you come far?”. Palin recalls how both Prince Philip and Charles greeted him with the same phrase: “What are you doing here?” We now certainly know from his diaries what Palin was doing in the decade from 1999.

MY Animals and Other Animals – a memoir of sorts (Quercus $34.95) by Bill Bailey, comedian, musician, actor and TV presenter, is not a conventional memoir, but rather a zany account, seen through a lifetime’s interactions with birds and animals.

Bailey has said his home “started out with a rabbit and now we’ve got all sorts… The only thing this place is missing is a turnstile and a gift shop”. Currently, Bailey’s west London home contains a family of armadillos, Tommy and Pamela, and their offspring Dylan, who resemble “robot carpet cleaners”, three dogs, cockatoos, lizards, tree frogs, a couple of pheasants, an entourage, however, that has been significantly reduced.

Bailey reflects: “We even had a giant chicken at the house for a while, a huge Malay cockerel, Kid Creole. After a few stand-offs he took against me. He had to go in the end, I was being stalked in my own back garden”. 

The other downside was when Kid Creole discovered his crow, “he just wouldn’t shut up then” which didn’t go down well… A cockerel crowing at first light in a flat in west London? This is going to be a problem”.

Bailey has had some extraordinary encounters around the world, including swimming alongside a dwarf minke whale off the coast of Australia, cradling the head of a Jaguar in Brazil and holding the paw of a sun bear in India.

His memoir, with black-and-white illustrations by Bailey himself, is underpinned by a love of the natural world and how animals connect people to it and provide companionship. 

Bailey shows how animals can “teach us lessons about loyalty and responsibility, and even loss”, as they don’t live very long. A warm, humorous and engaging memoir.