Michael Palin has been the unwitting victim of fake news.

It has transpired that the wide-reported story that he accidentally set his north London kitchen on fire and had to be rescued by an octogenerian neghbour was actually a joke in a lghthearted artile that Palin wrote for the latest edition of The Idler.

In the article, which was intended as a whimsical ccount of trying to take it easy after his recent heart operation Palin explain how a stray piece of kitchen roll had caught alight on his stoven:

"It set an adjacent Sainsbury’s receipt ablaze...as flames licked up towards the ceiling, I dialled the emergency services – but the moment we connected, the smoke alarm went off and I couldn’t hear a word they were saying. Just caught something about washing my hands which made me realise that, without my glasses on, I’d rung 111 instead of 999...by a fantastic stroke of luck, the loose tap that we never had fixed finally came apart, dousing the ceiling and partially extinguishing the fire.

At this point my neighbour, who’s 86 and had a sextuple by-pass last Wednesday, wrenched up the window and pulled me to safety."

But speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr show on Sunday morning the 76-year-old Monty Python star cleared things up: "I have to tell you this was all a complete piece of fake news. I wrote a comic article for The Idler about taking it easy after a heart operation and everything was fabrictaed – apart from the heart operation – and someone took this seriously..."

On his Facebook page Sir Michael Palin wrote: "My kitchen wasn’t damaged, but the reputation of some of our news outlets may have a bit of egg on it."

Read the full article here.

Picture: BBC