Borders Book Festival, Melrose review: 'banter and rage'

Michael Palin, Sally Magnusson, Kirsty Wark and Alison Steadman were among those playing to packed houses at this year’s Borders Book Festival, writes David Robinson

Let’s look back a bit. That’s what Borders Book Festival director Alistair Moffat, newly minted MBE, is doing in his latest book – looking back at how much Scotland has changed in his lifetime – and in part it’s what his festival’s stars were doing last weekend.

For Sally Magnusson and Kirsty Wark (“just a couple of pensioners talking to another lot of pensioners” – Wark) that meant looking back in banter on a half-century’s worth of friendship and curiously intertwining – not to say, now that they’re both novelists with the same publisher and even editor – mirroring careers.

Sally Magnusson PIC: Robert Perry / The Scotsman

Looking back is something Michael Palin has done every day since 6 April 1969, when he first started writing his journal “to give each day a value”: within a week he had the very first meeting about something that became known as Monty Python. “It worked,” he said, “because we took extremely silly behaviour very seriously.”

It’s a strange art, this ability to be affable in front of 550 people without the slightest trace of ego, but Palin has it in spades. This is a man whom John Cleese (“the funniest man in my generation”) wanted to take as his luxury item (because he talks so much it would be like a radio”) on Desert Island Discs. The Dalai Lama even said he wanted to be his personal assistant, for heaven’s sake.

Sir Michael Palin has spoken out about his regrets following the death of his wife. | Victoria Jones/PA Wire

Alison Steadman is less assured talking about herself (who isn’t?) but as soon as she started explaining how she got into character for her roles, she was fascinating.

Beverly in Abigail’s Party, she said, drew heavily on a makeup artist at Selfridges, while her Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (the one with Colin Firth) owed a lot to her aunt.

Jim Swire, played by Firth in the recent BBC drama Lockerbie, says he is still driven by the rage that started when he found out that one of the reasons his daughter Flora found it so easy to book a flight on Pan Am 103 in that normally busy time just before Christmas was that some passengers had been deterred by a US Helsinki embassy warning that a bomb would be put on a US-bound plane from Frankfurt. After 37 years, his demand that we be told all the facts of the case seems irrefutable.

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What about the future? Andrew Marr joined Magnusson and Moffat in a brilliant, freewheeling discussion of how the media can cope with what Gavin Esler on Friday called “truth decay” – the way in which lies flourish as we retreat to our own thought-silos and rely on social media for news.

Marr is, however, surprisingly upbeat: 24-hour TV news is on its way out, so is Trump, there’s still great journalism out there, and it’s more accessible than ever.

I’m not completely convinced. But all of these events were packed, even on a rainy Saturday, when news broke that the director of what Magnusson claims is “the best book festival in the UK” was honoured. And no matter what Moffat says, the last thing his award means is Muckle Big Eejit.

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