By common consent the comedy actor and intrepid telly traveller Michael Palin is emphatically a good thing.

It is in the way of good things, however, that there can sometimes be too much of them, as there was for me with Palin at the New Theatre on Sunday night.

His show The Thirty Years Tour was originally announced as lasting two hours, with an additional 20-minute interval. But like the “two hours’ traffic of our stage” promised by the Chorus in Romeo and Juliet, the performance turned out to be much longer.

Too long for me, who had been in the pub up the road a full 30 minutes when the rest of the audience passed at 10.30pm.

Not that I had been in any degree bored by the show, but “a feller has to eat” as a Duke of Portland once complained when advised to trim his establishment by letting go of one of his six pastry cooks.

Throughout, the famously affable Palin had been on witty form and with plenty to talk about concerning his impressive career.

The basis for his performance, the three volumes of his published diary, themselves contain enough material to fill nearly 2,000 pages. Their spines stretch more than six inches along my bookshelves.

It was a pleasing feature of the night that the star showed a winning modesty in owning up to his (very rare) failures.

Among them was his 1991 film American Friends, concerning his great-grandfather Edward Palin who lost out on the presidency of St John’s College by a marriage forbidden in academic Oxford of the 19th century. Palin, who played his ancestor, put down the failure to a savage review by the critic of the New York Times – “I think he must have had piles”.

I fancy the film must have suffered, too, from the utter lack of publicity savviness on the part of his co-star Connie Booth, the then Mrs John Cleese.

The ‘interview’ I had with her in Oxford – at St John’s appropriately – was the stickiest I remember in a long career, with monosyllabic replies offered to every question.

Cleese, by contrast, proved a model of welcoming helpfulness when I interviewed him on the set of A Fish Called Wanda, which was filmed in part in Oxford’s long-gone Morrell’s Brewery. How excellent an actor Palin can be was demonstrated on Sunday in a short clip from Wanda when the clearly terrified Ken Pile is seen evading the homosexual advances of Kevin Kline’s Otto.

Palin began the show with an acknowledgement of the special part Oxford had played in the start of his showbiz career.

“Let’s do a cabaret,” his Brasenose College contemporary Robert Hewison had urged, and though neither was entirely sure what one of these was, they did one just the same.

Hewison, later a distinguished journalist and Oxford’s Slade Professor of Fine Art, told me about the show when I met him at Quod at an Oxford Literary Festival dinner for the playwright Sir David Hare.

He spoke, too, of another Brasenose chum, known to him as ‘the Baron’, whose first teaching appointment after university led to his trying to din into me the faction-ridden excitements of 18th-century British history.

Tim Connor later applied his skills in David Cameron’s education at Eton, though is compelled to admit, if asked, that he remembers absolutely nothing about the Prime Minister-to-be. (So, no material for Lord Ashcroft there, then.) On Sunday, Palin spoke entertainingly – reading diary extracts – of his involvement in the car-crash entertainment, as it is now universally considered to have been, of It’s a Royal Knockout, in June 1987.

It will be recalled that Princes Edward and Andrew, egged on by the latter’s wife Fergie, were joined by various celebrities in doing silly things at Alton Towers.

Palin’s diary note on it concluded: “It’s as though all of us knew that we have been part of a very peculiar, but almost magical occasion, the like of which will never be seen again.”

“Magical occasion!” scoffed the Michael Palin of 2015.

He cited the entry – engaging honesty again – as an illustration of how very different a contemporary record can be from the judgment of posterity.