As his diary entry of 29 December 1985 concluded of that awful year: ‘Watched a review of ’85. This SDP-voting adoptive resident of north London becomes increasingly exasperated at the decline of the capital and the country in the 1980s, and of politics of all shades. Palin’s diaries also reveal a private person who is far from placid. As affable and amiable as he has become known, there has always been the odd outburst of bad temper, such as in the final episode of Around the World in 80 Days, when he becomes vociferously irate at the bad manners of Londoners he found upon arriving home. As the expletives from this 79-year-old in the opening episode of the Iraq series shows, this is not the case. Not only does Michael Palin ‘national treasure’ distract from Palin the writer, it also suggests a pure, Boy Scout-type figure – a latter-day Thora Hird. Like George Orwell, he knows the importance of beguiling your audience with brevity and simplicity. Tolkien, his love for language – we have seen him speak French in West Africa and Italian in Venice – has partly been his making. This is a writer who aspires to write in a crisp, clear and concise manner. On 4 April 1988 he praised the virtues of ‘concern, compassion, co-operation and conscience’. ![]() ‘Wild, wet weather’ goes one entry on 3 January 1988. ![]() ‘It’s cold, clear and clean’ is how he described 20 March 1980. This is manifest most clearly in his enthusiasm for alliteration. His felicity with language is also revealed by his penchant for edifying his prose with a melodious cadence. Michael Palin in his latest series, Into Iraq In one entry he vowed to read a Shakespeare play every day. His diaries also reveal his enthusiasm for his first métiers of comedy and acting, and his long yearning to become a writer and novelist, a wish he since has realised. As he divulges in his journeys in Africa ( Pole to Pole, 1992 Sahara, 2002), he was a keen reader of adventure stories while growing up in Sheffield. It was through the exotic tales he consumed as a boy that he developed his intimate rapport with language. I demand reparations for my ancestors’ fall from grace Not only does learning a second language help you write with precision and economy, but Latin furnishes you with words that, naturalised into English, have become markers of high thinking. He attended the prestigious Shrewsbury School in the 1950s and 1960s, where he would have been taught Latin. To read his diaries and the books that accompany his travels (barring the latest one on Iraq, I have read them all) is to experience his immense erudition. ‘National treasure’ is not just a bland, trite cliché: it does one of the finest writers of our time an injustice This is testament to his voracious appetite for literature. Or witness the manner in which he unpacked with relish a whole heap of unread classic novels as he prepared himself for the long, boring Pacific crossing in his 1988 voyage that became Around the World in 80 Days. He managed an entire series based on the travels of Ernest Hemingway. He just writes so well, and writes as someone who has spent a lifetime reading books. He hasn’t become a bestselling author six times over for nothing. ![]() ‘National treasure’ is patronising, twee and demeaning, and distracts from the fact that he’s one of the finest writers of our time, whose elegant and erudite prose is known for its rich, mellifluous, accessible yet uncluttered style. ![]() Never mind that he’s no doubt utterly sick of this lazy cliché – objectively, it’s a misleading misnomer. So it was with grim inevitably that a few days before the first instalment of his latest expedition, Michael Palin: Into Iraq, aired on Channel 5 on Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times both felt it imperative to describe him with this phrase. Or so you are told just about every single time the travel presenter and writer appears on television or features in a newspaper interview. It’s a well-known fact that Michael Palin is a ‘national treasure’.
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