Michael Palin: The nice man cometh

Michael Palin gets a warm smile wherever he goes – and he's gone around the globe and from pole to pole. His transition from the charming Python to the gung-ho English explorer has been seamless, but what does he do when he gets home? And is he ever, ever nasty to anyone?

Michael Palin is a really, really, really, really, really nice man. Everybody says so. Even his wife says so. "Michael," she is reputed to have once said, "if you get any nicer I shall have to leave you." He is, it is also often said, "the nicest living Englishman". Which he would dispute, in fact. Not, it turns out, because he isn't really (x5) nice, but because there are others who are nice, too. "Gary Lineker is very nice. And so is Cliff Richard. I'm not sure I like being singled out for niceness. Terry Jones is also very nice. His wife gets terribly upset when anyone refers to me as nice. She'll call up and say: 'But my husband is perfectly nice, too'."

I'm sure Mr Jones is nice, as is Mrs Jones, who sounds terribly nice, and loyal, but can they be as really (x5) nice as Mr Palin? OK, I arrive at his house, which is in Gospel Oak, a sort of forgotten, very un-showbizzy area of north London tucked between Hampstead and Kentish Town. His house is a kind of two-up, three-along, by which I mean that although he started out in the Sixties with just one of the little railway cottages here, he's since bought next door, and the one next door to that, and knocked the whole lot together. "The Sun once said that this street should be renamed Palin Street, but there is a fourth house that I don't own, and that I don't have my eye on." There's a courtyard in the middle, bursting with geraniums and other colourful flowers that, alas, are beyond my powers of botanical identification. The flowers are his wife's bag, he says, and watered by some automatic system that kicks in first thing. "It's like having a group of incontinent people outside your window at 6am."

He met his wife, Helen, when he was 15 and she was 16 and they were both on family holidays in Southwold, Suffolk. They married in 1966, when Michael was 23. No other proper girlfriends, then? "Not for want of trying. Funnily enough, a lady in Sheffield recently wrote to me saying I'd written her a love letter from school. She was reminded of this when she recently got together with her friend Rosemary, who, it turned out, had also received a love letter from me while I was at school. The letters were identical, so I was obviously sending out some kind of prospectus."

Helen is not in. I'd read that she's a keen tennis player, so maybe she is out doing something athletic. Either that or Mr Palin (whose amorous feelings for Rosemary have perhaps been revived) has, in a murderous rage, strangled her, chopped her up and buried the bits beneath the courtyard geraniums. It's tennis, I expect.

Anyway, I circle his two-up, three-along for some time, trying to find a place to park, but it's very much a residential-permit area so, in the end, I ask Mr Palin if I might trouble him for one of those visitor things. "No trouble," says Mr Palin, going to quite a lot of trouble, as a visitor thing turns out to be like an exceedingly complex, fiddly, perplexing scratchcard. Then, just as he's finished doing one for me, the photographer turns up and asks if he might have a visitor thing, too, so Mr Palin has to start this tricky business all over again. And then, later, after making us fresh coffee with warm milk (you spoil us, ambassador!), he spots traffic wardens in the street from a window, and dashes out to check he has done the visitor things properly, so the photographer and I do not get tickets.

This is really (x100? x500?) nice of him. But creepy or what? Actually, no, he's not creepy. This is the other thing about Michael Palin. He is nice, but somehow not creepy. Or boring. I don't see how Gary or Cliff could be half as nice, but then they probably have their own drives whereas Michael has never been an own-drive sort of person, has never sought to set himself back from the main road in that way. Is this all sounding too worshipful? Maybe. After all, he's not the Messiah. He's just a very lovely boy.

We go up to his study, passing lots of intriguing knick-knacks on the way: a big plaster Monty Python foot; a scrap of wreckage from the plane Hemingway crashed in; an eclectic collection of teacups; lots of little, delicate china things. I wonder if he has a mean streak at all. Have you ever broken anything, Michael, and pretended it wasn't you? "Yes, I'm sure," he says. This, though, turns out to mean "no". "I'm a very poor fibber. My family always know when I'm lying, so there is no point." He tries to convince me that he can have a shocking temper like his father, Edward, an export manager in a Sheffield steel factory. "He kept a stick by the back door that he'd grab and come after me, to give me a whacking. I learned to run into the garden, because he wouldn't do it in front of the neighbours. I've inherited that temper a bit."

Michael, are you sure? Don't you famously not have a temper? Indeed, when filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the director asked you to crawl through the mud for a seventh time, and you did have a little outburst, didn't the other Pythons all stand up and clap you? "Helen and the children would say I have a temper," he insists. OK, what would make you lose it? "I try not to get into situations where I might lose it." Pathetic. "OK, inanimate objects make me lose it. If the computer tells me I've performed an illegal operation and it will now shut down, I get really..." Murderous? Beside yourself? Chase Helen into the courtyard with a stick, with no fear of the neighbours, as you are your neighbours? "...cross!"

Pathetic, like I said.

His study is cosy, very book-lined. I imagine he is hugely rich. After all, Python is still playing all over the world, and his BBC travel programmes – Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, and, now, Sahara) – have been huge, global successes. I'd even been told that royalties from the book tie-ins are so enormous that, under BBC regulations, only the Director-General himself can sign the cheques. True? Yes. "It did happen with Around the World in 80 Days, which sold so rapidly." It was, he continues, most unexpected. "When the first programme went out, nothing. When the second programme went out, nothing. Then, at about the time of the third programme, the book came out, and I was due to do a signing at Stanfords [the travel bookshop in Covent Garden] at noon, but they phoned me the day before to ask if I might come in at 9.30am because so many people were besieging them for a copy. I must have signed a thousand. The last programme got an audience of 12 million."

What was your reaction to all this? "Pure visceral pleasure." He says all this not in a smug way, but in a happily surprised one. His expression is certainly one of happy surprise. He has a lovely face. Now I think about it, even his features are configured in a really, really, really, really, really nice way. Michael is just the sort of person most people would wish to travel with. Hence, I guess, his success.

I try to find out what, if anything, he spends his money on. He drives a 10-year-old bottom-of-the-range Mercedes. His three children, now grown up, were all state- educated. Perhaps it all goes on the belted, bone-coloured chinos and proper, long- sleeved shirts he always wears on his epic journeys. Today, Mr Palin is in navy-ish get-up, which surprises me somewhat, as I thought he was married to those chinos. "They're made by Craghoppers. They're A Very British Trouser!" He has bad luck with clothes, he says. He'll find something he likes, go back for 10 more, and be told "the line has now been discontinued". He used to buy his bone-coloured chinos from a shop in Kentish Town, "but that's just closed down. Sometimes, even the shop has been sadly discontinued."

He is wavering on the long-sleeved shirt front. "Long sleeves are useful in hot countries. The more covered up the better. But I've recently taken to wearing T-shirts and jackets. I'm after the Terence Stamp look." Are you interested in your money? "It's just lots of figures on a statement. I don't do the Stock Exchange. I don't want to be a hands-on money-mover. I don't understand people who change cars and houses all the time. Why would you want to? I'm not good at extravagance. It probably comes from my Yorkshire childhood. In the last 10 years, though, I have started buying paintings, which can cost a lot more than a car. A house you can justify, but a painting?"

He later shows me his most expensive acquisition – a Sickert oil of a Dieppe bakery. It is utterly beautiful, and in good hands. He has really, really, really, really, really nice hands.

I wonder what motivates him. Ego? There must be an ego in there, surely. How can he do what he does, be who he is, without being egotistical in some way? I try to get at this by asking if he ever feels jealous of the success of others. What was your reaction when you first saw Fawlty Towers? Initially, I find his answer quite telling. "I thought, why is John doing this very ordinary sitcom set in a hotel where every time a door shuts, the whole set shakes? Why are the secondary characters so one-dimensional? This is what John's been working on? Didn't Python move us on from this? We weren't well-disposed towards John at that point because he'd been the first to break away, and there was a certain amount of resentment."

Goodness. This sounds almost bitter. But he continues: "After the third or fourth episode, I was hooked, of course. The skill of the plotting, the sheer watchability of it. And it made me laugh a lot." That's the ticket. I'm not sure that Mr Palin does have a motivation, as such. Perhaps he just enjoys doing the things we happen to enjoy watching him do. Perhaps it's as simple as that.

If, I ask, someone had never seen Python, never heard of it even (although this is unlikely, as Michael once encountered an Eskimo in the Arctic who could recite the dead parrot business), what sketch would he show them? "Probably, the fish-slapping dance. I've never been able to analyse why it works. It's completely pointless, utterly silly and lasts only a minute. But if you don't laugh there is no point in watching any of the other Python stuff." I've always rather thought of Michael as the John Noakes of Monty Python, doing the things no one else wants to do. Did you protest when you heard you were going to be slapped across the face with a halibut? "I think I wrote it, and the deal was: He who writes it does it." He is rightly proud of his performance. "It was shot at Teddington Lock. When we rehearsed it, there was just a short drop to the water, but when we came to film, the water level had fallen and there was a 15ft drop." Ouch! Yes, "but I managed to keep my pith helmet on!".

Fish are funny, he says, in a way dogs and cats are not. "There is just something about fish. And their silly names. Halibut." And haddock? "Haddock is very, very funny." Pilchard? "Hilarious." And Brian? Is that an especially funny name? Did you consider others for Life of Brian? Why not Derek, Geoffrey or Stan? "Oh, we went through all the Dereks and Geoffreys and Stans. And Keith. We did think very seriously about Keith."

Sometimes, I think that people forget just how talented Michael Palin is as a writer, actor, comedian, and TV presenter. Does it matter? Possibly not. He can still be thoroughly enjoyed. The photographer and I drive away in our unticketed cars, while Mr Palin waves happily from one of his doorsteps. "Sorry I didn't have croissants," he calls out after us. He is just such a really (x1,000,000) nice man. Watch out for that terrible temper, though. Ha! Come back and I'll nice you to death, more like.

'Sahara' will be broadcast on BBC1 from 13 October. 'Inside Sahara' is published by BBC Books, £25