Michael Palin's Travelling to Work Tour review, Palace Theatre

Money is a preoccupation for the Monty Python team. John Cleese has raised as many laughs weeping publicly over the millions he's lost to a trail of angry ex-wives, as he did with the dead parrot sketch. Michael Palin in his one man show Travelling to Work, suggests all the Monty Python high points were predicated on anxiety about money. There was never enough, so they had to keep coming up with one new idea after another. Thankfully for us, these included Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Life of Brian - on which George Harrison staked £5M because he 'wanted to see it'.

Travelling to Work, celebrates the latest volume of Palin's diaries which cover the period 1988-1998. It's a book tour. The material, however, spans his entire life. The first 90 minutes emulates an old fashioned slide show - the gnarled explorer talking an audience at the Royal Geographic Society through the toughest bits of his expeditions. The photographs from his TV travels are terrific and Palin's verbal snapshots ever interesting. All that's missing is a pith helmet.

The second half is about the comedy, and draws on the memoirs of others as well as his own. We discover his need to perform from childhood: solo reenactments of Shakespeare plays knocked off in 45 minutes. At Oxford, Palin discovered his gift for comedy; at the Edinburgh fringe, David Frost offered him the break that others can only dream of; and on The Frost Report he met John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman and Terry Jones. The rest is history. All of this information is delivered with warmth and wit - for our pleasure more than our entertainment.

In conclusion: The structure of Travelling Light is clearly kept informal to promote intimacy - a conversational feel, but the lack of a linear narrative in the first half and clearly articulated turning points in the second, mean Palin has to work harder than he ought to make the stories work.  That said, it's terrific fun, hopefully allaying any current anxieties about money...

References
Michael Palin, Travelling Light Tour

Tour ends October 22