Palin looks on the brighter side of a maligned Scottish art movement

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Oct 8, 2000 | by Anna Burnside

Already with a career in comedy, writing and professional travelling, Anna Burnside meets the former Python as he unleashes yet another of his passions on the viewing public

MICHAEL Palin, former Python, writer and TV presenter, veteran of several television travelogues with the massive-selling books to match, falls in love with the Scottish Colourists. So what does he do? Go and look at them whenever he has the opportunity? Yes. Buy some of his own? Yes as well. But being Palin, a man whose personal passions, crusades and obsessions have become the stuff of early- evening entertainment, he doesn't stop there. He has made a television programme as well.

The Bright Side of Life, a documentary about Fergusson, Peploe, Cadell and Hunter, to be broadcast on BBC2 tonight, is a counterblast against the sneery London critics who found the major exhibition of the Colourists, which is coming to Scotland next month, sadly lacking. Palin made an earlier film, about the Scottish painter Anne Redpath, with the same BBC Scotland team and fell in love with the turn-of-the-century artists whose work he first discovered in the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. "I just loved them, they were very vibrant and rather elegant and beautiful. Very striking pictures. I was amazed by the fact that they came out of the turn of the century in the north of Britain, they seemed so full of light. Reality didn't impinge too much, they weren't particularly imaginative painters but in terms of technique and beauty I thought they were really interesting."

Enthusiasm has always been one of Palin's defining features.

"I've learned quite a bit more about Scottish painting since I met Ewan Mundy, a dealer, and bought a number of paintings from him. They're not all Scottish but I'd sort of been looking at the Glasgow Boys and the painters of the end of the 19th century and I think it was just the brilliance and the dazzle of the Colourists that struck me more than anything. I suppose it was a surprise to find them up here. I'd come to associate Scottish painting with either the modern people like Peter Howson, or Joan Eardley, who I like very much or, going back to Victorian times, straight landscapes like Landseer. [Who is English, although he painted the famous Monarch of the Glen.] It was then I found the Colourists. These artists just seemed to jump out of nowhere."

Palin's interest in visual art has come on the back of a post- Python career of writing, acting and professional travelling. All these things involve being away from home and that, invariably, means hanging around. And that is when Palin looks at paintings. "In my travels, if you're not in a city or a place for very long, a gallery is one good place to go. In a place like Chicago or St Louis, Paris or Rome or Madrid, I'd find I didn't know what to do with half a day so I'd go to the latest gallery and I got a lot more interested in painting."

It is hard to square this man, charming, articulate, wearing well- pressed chinos, who can hold his own with Peploe's grandson- biographer and effortlessly win over Fergusson's neighbours, with the thousands of Monty Python websites, with those funny old scratchy prints of a 30-year-old TV show, harder even with the guy with the chips up his nose from A Fish Called Wanda. He looks like a nice chap you might meet on holiday in the Algarve, not one of the faces that launched a thousand student union monologues.

Yet it is the legacy of Python, and the films that followed, that have allowed Palin to become this person who travels, who writes, who looks at pictures or follows in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway, is filmed while he's doing it and gets paid afterwards. He talks about his Python past without resorting to either the rose-tinted specs or the cynical voice of middle-age recalling relative youth. He is still, unbelievably, enthusiastic.

"It's nice to have done something that still survives, that people connect to it in some way. I find it rather extraordinary that that's the case after so long, I'd have thought there would have been six or seven Python imitators, or comedy would have develop on from that but now I don't think it does work like that".

He is slightly amazed at the show's current cult status in the United States, where it is available as a CD-Rom game and on DVD. American television never ceases to amaze him. When one of the networks wanted to buy Fawlty Towers they said they were going to rewrite it. John Cleese asked them what they were planning to change and they replied that they were going to get rid of Basil Fawlty.

Yet Monty Python's progress from 13 funny little programmes that went out on Saturday nights to defining cultural landmark of the 20th century didn't really start until the series was sold to the States. It was something none of them ever expected. "There had been Americans who had liked it but no one thought that it would stand a chance of getting on there," Palin recalls. "No commercial station would touch it. But public broadcasting in America bought all the episodes. They showed them one night back to back and in the morning there was mayhem, everyone around the States was saying this is wonderful, can we have more of this.