Autumn tour announced

Michael Palin has announced a new 17-date tour for this autumn.

The show, The Thirty Years Tour, will coincide with the paperback release of the latest edition of his diaries.

It promises a look back at 30 years of his career, from the end of the 1960s when Monty Python's Flying Circus began end of the 1990s when he had become the best-known traveller on TV, and will be illustrated with some rare recordings and photographs.

Palin is also using the tour to launch a new campaign, Write It Down, to encourage people to keep diaries.

He said: 'The attraction of a diary is that it remains in its own time.  It reflects only what happened on that particular day.  It doesn't flatter and it isn't distorted by what happened later. In that way it's the most truthful record of real life. And it's your own life and nobody else's.

'Keeping a diary means that all that seeing and hearing, loving and laughing, excitement and embarrassment, gladness and gloom that make you what you are is not forgotten. A diary blows away the mists of time, and offers your life back to you.

'My message is simple. Get yourself a notebook. Write down whatever you want to remember over the last 24 hours… and keep on doing it.'

Palin is also the narrator of the revamped children's series The Clangers, which starts on CBeebies on June 15. He said yesterday that the show had a 'similar spirit' to Monty Python's Flying Circus, which began in the same year, 1969. 'It set out to be different from any other series for children, and I suppose Python set out deliberately to be different from anything that had gone before,' he said.

 The third volume of Palin's diaries, Travelling to Work - Diaries 1988 – 1998 will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in paperback on September 24, priced   £12.99 (Click here to order from Foyles).

And his tour – a different show to his successful Travelling To Work performances last year – kicks off in Gateshead on September 24, and ends in Belfast on October 30. Full schedule.

Published: 2 Jun 2015