Jonny McCambridge: Sir Michael Palin and the alchemist’s dream

There were a few possible routes to achieving such a lofty and elusive standing. Ability in rugby was one. I quickly learnt that to be good at rugby you had to be either big or fast. Ideally both big and fast. I was small and slow.

In my school members of the first XV rugby team were permitted to wear a different coloured tie to other pupils, presumably as an official recognition that the institution considered us inferior to them.

Academic ability was another potential barometer of social rank. Excellence delivered a certain gravity while those who were wretched in their studies were able to adopt a cavalier, rebellious persona. I was always in the middle, never close to the best but far from the worst. Utterly unremarkable and anonymous.

The most obvious highway towards acclaim, but one in which I was particularly deficient, was the possession of an amiable personality. I had none of the easy manner of the popular kids. I was always awkward, strained and unable to sustain a conversation with girls, sort of like Mr Darcy but without the smouldering good looks and the big house in the country.

Often I was miserable and lonely and desperately wanted to be liked, but I could no more change my introverted personality than I could alter the matter of base metal.

There were a few others like me and, unsurprisingly, they became my small circle of friends. A band of misfits united in the commonality that we didn’t fit in anywhere else. And the thread which bound us most closely together was comedy. Countless hours were exhausted in our tiny group dreaming up ‘humorous’ characters, sketches, songs and stories. School exercise books, intended for more serious purposes, were defaced and filled with outpourings of adolescent invention.

My best friend and I went as far as recording an album of absurdist songs in his bedroom. We also produced an alternative, irreverent school magazine (which lasted one edition) and composed an entire pilot for a sitcom which we sent optimistically to the BBC (we received a polite but firm letter of rejection).

And we were inspired by our comedy gods. Blackadder was sacred and the subversive, surrealist talents of Bill Hicks and Spike Milligan were certainly worthy of worship. But the messiahs in terms of being very naughty boys were Monty Python.

In those primitive days before on-demand TV, watching Monty Python involved begging my parents to allow me to sit up late to watch repeats of the Flying Circus on BBC2. Part of the ritual of belonging to my social group meant being able to recite sections of comedy scenes while warming your legs against the classroom radiator. To this end Python episodes were recorded on the video and played over and over until the sketches were as familiar as the shape of my nose. (On more than one occasion my teenage heart was broken when I sat down to watch one of the Python tapes only to discover that my Ma had taped over it with Emmerdale Farm or Last of the Summer Wine or some other such feeble nonsense).

While I loved all the Pythons my favourite was always Michael Palin. Cleese, Chapman and Idle were obviously masters of their art but seemed to display harsh edges while Palin exuded likability. Collectively their virtue was that they got away with, succeeded in and then were celebrated for being so indubitably silly. In a harsh and serious world that meant something to me and provided succour when more confident and aggressive kids called me a weirdo.

Now let’s move forward three decades. I’m in a studio in BBC Broadcasting House in Belfast appearing live on the Sunday With Dearbhail radio show, hosted by the excellent Dearbhail McDonald. The format is this. In the first hour myself and other panellists review the Sunday papers. Then we are joined by celebrity guests for a chat in the second hour. This week the guests are TV presenter and anthropologist Professor Alice Roberts and Sir Michael Palin.

Perhaps it is because of my excitement of what’s to come or simply because I’ve drunk too much coffee, but near the end of the first hour I realise I need the toilet. I’m not an experienced broadcaster but my assumption is that they won’t want to halt a live show in order to allow me to nip to the loo.

So, when the programme breaks on the hour for the news bulletin, I make a dash for it. I sprint down a narrow corridor in the hope I can get to the bathroom and back before the next part of the broadcast begins. I find the Gents and throw the door open with some force and urgency. On the other side of it is a startled looking Michael Palin and I almost knock him off his feet.

‘Oh,’ I begin, trying to cover my embarrassment. ‘You never know who you’re going to run into in the toilet.’

‘Ah,’ he responds, without a moment of hesitation. ‘I’m usually to be found in here.’

Minutes later I’m back in the studio and sitting across the table from a man I grew up wanting to be. With unrelenting patience Palin takes us through the story of the rise of Monty Python and his globetrotting adventures. I feel that I know so much of his story that when Dearbhail questions him I have to hold back from answering on his behalf. Occasionally I jump in with my own observations and try to give a sense of the cultural importance of Python because I know he is too modest to do so.

It’s much later on the same day. My wife and son are asleep so, as I often still do, I watch some Monty Python on telly. It’s bittersweet, the richness of the comedy diluted by the memories of an unhappy young boy who dreamt of a fool’s gold and fretted over his inability to fit in. I don’t know if experience has made me much wiser, but at least I don’t worry so much anymore about whether people like me. I’ve accepted and grown comfortable with my own character and I trust that it glistens all the brighter because of it.