The Hay Festival

The actor, writer and globetrotter discusses his memoir Halfway To Hollywood - Diaries 1980 to 1988: The Film Years.

The second volume of Michael Palin's diaries covers the 1980s, a decade in which the ties that bound the Pythons loosened as they forged their separate careers. After a live performance at the Hollywood B...owl, they made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful Monty Python's Meaning of Life. Writing and acting in films and television then took over much of Michael's life, culminating in the smash hit A Fish Called Wanda, in which he played the hapless, stuttering Ken (for which he won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor), and the first of his seven celebrated television journeys for the BBC.

He wrote much of the dialogue and acted in Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits and acted in his next film, Brazil. He co-produced, wrote and played the lead in The Missionary opposite Maggie Smith, who also appeared with him in A Private Function, written by Alan Bennett. For television he wrote East of Ipswich, inspired by his links with Suffolk. Such was his fame in the US, he was enticed into once again hosting the enormously popular show Saturday Night Live, in one edition of which his mother makes a highly successful surprise guest appearance. He filmed several journeys for television and became chairman of the pressure group, Transport 2000. His family remains a constant as his and Helen's children enter their teens.

Tickets £15

Tickets available at:
http://tinyurl.com/palinhay
Read more

The Guardian Hay Festival comes to London October 23, 24, 25 with a special festival programme of conversations, lectures and performances by writers and artists exploring the literature on London.

Friday 23 October
Charlie Higson, Scritture Giovani

Saturday 24 October
Sophia Bennett, Fay Weldon, Posy Simmonds, Hanif Kurei...shi, John Sutherland

Sunday 25 October
Mary Kay Wilmers, Steve Jones, Meg Rosoff, Will Self, Dan Cruickshank, Martin Amis

Tickets: £4.50 per event

available from:
http://www.kingsplace.co.uk/Read more

From a wartime beach in Wales to the gleaming skyscrapers of twenty-first-century Manhattan, the extraordinary career of Fleet Street legend Harold Evans has spanned five decades of tumultuous social, political and creative change.

Just how did a working class Lancashire boy, who failed the eleven-plus, rise to a posit...ion where he could so effectively give voice to the unheard? Born in the bleak years between the wars in the sprawl of Greater Manchester into a thrifty, diligent and loving family, Evans inherited only the privilege of his parents' example. Theirs was a work ethic that led Evans through night school classes, national service and a passionate commitment to regional life, and, finally, to his unassailably successful editorship of one of our greatest newspapers, the Sunday Times.

Whether unpicking the murderous chaos of Bloody Sunday, pursuing a foreign correspondent's murderers or uncovering the atrocity of Thalidomide, this consummate newsman evokes his contagious passion: for the real story and the truth.Read more