Finest hours: Michael Palin in A Private Function

Groundbreaking comedy icon, intrepid globe-trotting documentarian, dedicated diarist, Royal Geographical Society president… Michael Palin has worn many hats throughout his storied career. “I love challenges, I love new work,” Palin confirmed in a recent interview, politely rebutting any assumptions about ‘slowing down’ in his eighties.

That irrepressible zeal is part of what’s made Palin such a vital presence as a writer, performer and presenter. He’s the protagonist of so many celebrated British screen moments – whether delivering The Fish-Slapping Dance in series three of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, getting memorably tortured with chips up his nose in A Fish Called Wanda (1988), or following in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days (1989), the first of the TV travel series that cemented his national treasure status.

For all the mania that defined some of his Python performances, Palin has also often excelled when playing timid types being unjustly harassed. Few performers are better at the comedy of being put-upon, a fact which surely connects with public perceptions of Palin’s ‘niceness’. It’s in that spirit that one of the quieter Palin performance emerges as among his finest – namely, his turn as Gilbert Chilvers, the mild-mannered chiropodist turned pig thief in A Private Function (1984), the sublime postwar satire directed by Malcolm Mowbray from Alan Bennett’s razor-sharp script. 

Part of the beauty of Palin’s performance here is that it allows him to connect with his real-life Yorkshire roots. Filmed in Ilkley and Ben Rhydding, Mowbray’s film is set in 1947, at the uniquely confounding time of ongoing austerity and the Royal Wedding, and its title refers to an event planned to celebrate said nuptials. Meat is strictly rationed, but a black market trade is thriving, and three of the town’s luminaries are illicitly having an unlicensed pig fattened to serve at an exclusive celebration dinner.

Gilbert lives with his socially ambitious wife Joyce (Maggie Smith) and her mother (Liz Smith) and is looking forward to finally open his podiatry practice “on the parade”. (The scenes of Gilbert forlornly clutching a model foot bought for the business are a pleasing Python homage.) When his cherished plan is thwarted by the odious Dr Swaby (Denholm Elliott) – whose adoration of the Royal Family is matched by his hatred for virtually everything else, not least the new NHS – Gilbert finally snaps and plots to steal the pig.

Like A Fish Called Wanda, A Private Function pays homage to Ealing comedy – a realm in which Palin seems particularly at home. The film begins by presenting Palin as an epitome of benign, rural Englishness: between appointments, Gilbert is introduced bicycling alone through the Yorkshire countryside, though there’s a hint of the eccentricity to come when, stopping for lunch, he finds a half-knitted tea towel in his lunch-pail. (His sandwiches have been filched – not for the first time – by his ever-famished mother-in-law.) 

Gilbert’s ‘mobility’ as a visiting chiropodist gives him access to the town’s different social groups, with their schemes and prejudices, and Palin plays these scenes wonderfully, showing both Gilbert’s professionalism and his watchfulness around alleged social superiors dedicated to keeping him in his place. As such, the audience can only cheer when he turns the tables by stealing the pig – however deranged the idea might appear.

The film is also a portrait of a stale marriage, and the reunion of Palin and Smith – they’d starred together, alongside Elliott, in 1982’s Palin-penned The Missionary – pays dividends, especially in the scenes that turn the Chilvers into a variant of the Macbeths: he too tender-hearted to kill the pig (“She’s my friend!” Gilbert pathetically protests), she goading him with some priceless insults delivered as only Smith can. In contrast to Betty Blue Eyes, the far cosier 2011 musical adaptation of the film, Bennett doesn’t shrink from the inevitability of the pig’s fate – but a brief coda sweetens the pill slightly, allowing Gilbert a small secret triumph.

Though top-billed in what is essentially a fully-furnished ensemble piece, it’s fair to say that Palin’s work in A Private Function has always been undervalued. While Elliott and both of the Smiths won BAFTAs for their performances, Palin wasn’t even nominated. Nor does the film itself have the status it merits, its 40th anniversary last year passing without fanfare or any screenings to mark it.

But the kind of self-effacing acting Palin does here is essential to grounding what could be simple farce in emotional and social truth that makes the film all the more rewarding. One of those very rare comedies that only gets funnier on repeat viewings, A Private Function deserves recognition as a British classic, and Palin’s performance, which gives a black comedy a bit of heart, is absolutely integral to its appeal.