You didn’t have to be so nice. We would have liked you anyway. The first words (slightly paraphrased) of a classic Lovin’ Spoonful song of the Sixties came into my mind fairly often during a hugely enjoyable holiday read of the 516 pages of Michael Palin’s Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988-98 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25). Along the way, too — as one happy event after another cheers our hero — I was reminded of the serendipitous good luck of Mark Williams’s Fast Show character, he of the catchphrase “which was nice”.

Palin’s niceness is a quality almost everyone notes in him — to the annoyance, we discover here, of the man himself. He inveighs so often about the description (not always so nice then) that it is a surprise to find no reference made to it in the otherwise exhaustive ten-page entry on ‘Palin, Michael’, in the book’s index (“starts Pilates class again”, “visits the McCartneys”, “grapples with Uganda” — which may raise a smile from Private Eye readers). On June 1, 1991, for instance, after reading a profile of himself in the Independent Magazine, Palin notes: “Most of it is about my being nice. It’s like an actress being only known for the size of her tits.”

Well, up to a point . . . for Palin is perfectly aware of course — as is the reader — of the many other talents, besides niceness, that he has long displayed.

The book’s biographical blurb begins: “Michael Palin is a scriptwriter, comedian, novelist, television presenter, actor and playwright.” Monty Python fans might well add “and right clever dick”, recalling the words used to cap a litany of achievement in the show’s celebrated spoof of This Is Your Life.

In some ways Travelling to Work is a catalogue of comparative failure which Palin, with a winning self-deprecatory attitude, is quite prepared to admit. “I cannot avoid a feeling of having stumbled over the past few years,” he writes in June 1995, calling to mind his novel Hemingway’s Chair, stage play The Weekend and film American Friends.

“Jamie Lee Curtis enthusiastic about”, “Delia Ephron enjoys”, read the index entries on the first, though the general reader scarcely concurred. The Weekend, after savage reviews, spluttered to a premature halt. American Friends, though a well-made, polished production, was poor box office, too, possibly on account of its dullish love story involving a Victorian cleric based on Edward Palin, the great-grandfather of MP, who plays him.

Oxford being the setting for the last, Palin visited the city for a special showing, followed by a reception at St John’s College, both of which I attended. Interviewing Palin, I found him courteous, well-informed and helpful. This was the very opposite of his co-star Connie Booth, whose chilly demeanour and monosyllabic ‘yes/no’ answers to questions made our encounter a reporter’s nightmare. Years later, I came across another journalist (name forgotten) writing of Booth as the most unforthcoming person he had ever tried to interview.

An insight into the cause of her behaviour is supplied by Palin in a diary entry of June 15, 1990: “Only Connie of the actors is terrified of being interviewed. Her self-doubt is so appealing I only hope she never overcomes it.” How, one wonders, did she cope with life with the oddball John Cleese, whose post-Python career is closely followed in the diaries by his good pal Palin?

The principal professional co-operation of the two is on Fierce Creatures, the long-delayed follow- up to A Fish Called Wanda in which both also starred (I met Cleese on location at Morrell’s Oxford brewery). The vicissitudes of the filming, here recorded, are as instructive to the industry outsider as the revelations of the hype surrounding Palin’s BBC travel programmes, which with the carefully promoted spin-off books supply his main financial support over the period.

‘There is nothing quite as wonderful as money,” sang the Pythons in their heyday, and Palin has evidently taken this to heart. I enviously noted his ‘expenses’ of £2,500 (roughly my annual wage 25 years ago) for reading a few books competing for a literary prize.

Judging and competing for prizes is another diary theme, focusing at one point on seeming dirty dealing — ‘Baftagate’ — when Alan Bleasdale’s GBH, in which Palin starred, was beaten for a Bafta by Prime Suspect, despite four of the eight judges being known to have favoured the first.

The allure of fame, of recognition, which prizes represent, is almost as powerful for Palin as that of hard cash. That people should tell him he is wonderful is hardly surprising in the luvvie world in which he moves. That he should record this in a diary initially not intended for publication (allegedly) is possibly to be expected too. But that many unseemly encomia should survive into print does no credit to Palin, nor says much for the stewardship of his talents exercised by his literary advisor (and Brasenose College contemporary) Robert Hewison.

Palin’s regurgitation of the opinion of publisher Colin Haycraft (“You can write . . . It’s as simple as that . . . Some people can and some people can’t”) is one error of taste. Another is his gleeful reporting of playwright Ronald Harwood’s praise of his work in the radio version of his play The Dresser: “He has had so many letters, all mentioning the strength of my performance. He is wonderfully fulsome.” The misuse of ‘fulsome’, incidentally, (OED: “cloying, excessive, disgusting by excess”) makes one ask whether Haycraft’s judgment was altogether accurate.

At various points, Palin describes three men ‘gushing’ over him. Two are the BBC boss Will Wyatt and the Oxford English professor and Sunday Times literary critic John Carey, both of whom I know and know to be non-gushers. The third is the combative playwright Harold Pinter.

Gushing! He’d have had his guts for garters.