Michael Palin

When Michael Palin met the Dalai Lama a few years ago, the Tibetan leader said he recognised Palin from his television travel programmes. The two quickly discovered that they had shared a passion for geography from an early age. “It’s just an assumption but I felt a certain empathy when he was talking about how atlases were his favourite books when he was young and I said they had been mine too,” recalls Palin.
Palin met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in northern India, where he has lived in exile for nearly 50 years since fleeing China in a dramatic 15-day journey by foot. A few weeks later, Palin found himself in the Dalai Lama’s apartments in the Potala Palace in Lhasa while filming a series on the Himalayas. “Looking out over the city and the plains, I thought, ‘This is what he was doing growing up in the 1950s and there was me in Sheffield looking at an atlas also.’”
Palin has barely sat down at Wiltons restaurant in St James’s before he is telling stories. First there is one about how he was once photographed during lunch and how acutely embarrassing it was. The photographer’s enormous lamps had shone a spotlight on him in the middle of the restaurant. It was, he says, “admirable” that everyone else carried on as if this were entirely normal.
There is one about his own failure to show a similar level of restraint when, at a friend’s wedding, the registrar read out all the bridegroom’s middle names, including one that none of his friends had known before. Everyone was laughing “including his betrothed”, Palin recalls, and the only way out was to look as if “we were very moved”.
How television expanded its horizons
Television travel programmes were originally not a window on the world as much as a shop window, showing the package holidays it was worth spending your hard-earned on. But as audiences became better-travelled, so the shows also started to venture off the beaten track, writes Ceri Thomas.
The practical approachThe BBC’s original vacation review show Holiday started in 1969, to which ITV’s riposte in 1974 was Wish You Were Here...? This programme finished in 2003 but straightforward TV travel shows still struggle to shrug off the image of its perma-tanned presenter Judith Chalmers sipping umbrella drinks by the pool. Five recently teamed up with the Rough Guide books for a 21st-century spin on the concept, theming episodes (beaches, eco-escapes, urban adventures and so on) in place of the time-honoured model of providing freebie holidays for minor celebrities.
The cultural approachAs early as the 1970s, cheap air travel and advances in video technology meant shows such as The Ascent of Man and Connections were actually filming in the places they talked about. Three decades later it would seem very odd if historian Dan Cruickshank didn’t actually get to marvel at the buildings in his series Adventures In Architecture, or Michael Wood travel through India as he explains its history.
The celebrity approachSince Michael Palin travelled Around The World In 80 Days in 1989, there is barely a part of the globe that hasn’t been graced by a TV celebrity and his camera crew on a journey. Far western Australia? Covered by Billy Connolly in his World Tour Of Australia. Outer Mongolia? Ewan McGregor still has the bruises after biking along some of its more battered roads in The Long Way Round. It’s easy to see why celebrity travel shows are such popular TV (Palin’s Himalaya series regularly pulled in more than 8m viewers). You get the usual scenery and history but also an insight into the celebs as they react to the world around them. But surely they are eventually going to run out of convoluted routes round the world.
The adventurous approachIf you prefer something riskier, extreme travel programmes will be just your cup of tea – or lightly fermented tree bark juice, hand-boiled over an open fire. The likes of Ray Mears (whose Extreme Survival series from 1999 is the grandaddy of the genre) and Bear Grylls head to places that few audience members are ever likely to see. The genre’s hard man credentials did, however, take a knock last year when it was revealed that former SAS man Grylls stayed in a hotel when he was supposed to be roughing it outdoors in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Ceri Thomas is TV reviewer for the Evening Standard
And there are several more about the Dalai Lama, who, like Palin, is also known to laugh easily. “He came in and shook my hand and then he shook the hands of every member of the [film] crew,” says Palin. “People just don’t bother, they don’t notice [the crew. But] he took each person in and I felt, ‘I must remember that.’”
I notice my digital recorder appears not to be working. “Does it switch itself off when it’s bored?” he wonders, the comic timing that first made him famous as part of the Monty Python team in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s still in evidence.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the filming of Around the World in 80 Days, the BBC programme that marked the launch of Palin’s hugely successful second act as a travel journalist. Its success prompted epic television adventures such as Pole to Pole (1992), Sahara with Michael Palin (2002) and Himalaya with Michael Palin (2004).
Aside from the great landscape shots, the charm of watching Palin’s shows lies in his ability to put people at ease even when he doesn’t share a common language. Watching Michael Palin’s New Europe, first aired last year, I chuckled through an episode in Latvia where Palin is made to wear a wreath about the size of a bush and participates in a pagan dance, all of which he goes along with gamely. In Turkey, a young woman tells him she dated a man who participated in the local passion for wrestling in leather pantaloons after olive oil has been poured all over the combatants and Palin sets off to investigate.
In the book that accompanied the series, Palin writes of being on a boat at dawn, making its way along Croatia’s coastline. “What I am looking out on now is Dalmatia and I’m not the only one excited by it ... Shakespeare set part of Twelfth Night here. Dalmatia, homeland of the Illyrians, was settled 5,000 years even before the Greeks and Romans arrived. This is not new Europe, this is very old Europe.”
Our first courses arrive remarkably quickly – gazpacho for me and smoked eel for him. Aware from my own experience as the FT’s travel editor of the challenges of travel writing in an era when so many of us are frequent flyers, I ask how he keeps his work interesting and relevant. “I always bring it down to the personal experience,” he replies. “The other thing is to give a voice to people who don’t normally have a voice, who would not be interviewed generally and to go to places where people would not normally go.”
The inspiration for New Europe came from his feeling, when waking up on a long-haul flight back to London, that he was flying above places that were just two hours from Heathrow but which he knew little about. I suggest the series resonated partly because so much of the workforce in Britain is from eastern Europe, not least the staff in restaurants. Later I ask the waitress where she is from and this leads to an animated conversation between her and Palin about her native Moldova. His empathy builds bridges with people he meets – and in turn with audiences around the world.
Our main courses – poached halibut for him and grilled salmon for me – have been brought as speedily as the first course and this prompts Palin to remark on how unusually attentive the restaurant’s service is by London’s standards. Before he came here he had assumed the quintessentially British Wiltons (“since 1742”), complete with green velvet banquettes in separate booths, would be the sort of place that “members of the House of Lords visited with their researchers”. On his previous visit, however, he remembers a group of businessmen from Dubai trooped over to his table and asked him to look them up when he was next there. Palin says he picked the restaurant for our meeting today because it is quiet and apologises because it is expensive.
By this point, I am relaxed enough to confess that, having grown up in Calcutta, I never watched Palin in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the TV series that made him and the other Pythons – including Eric Idle and John Cleese – comedy legends, nor in the subsequent Python films. I am worried that this is a bit like telling Paul McCartney you never listened to the Beatles. “I’m immensely relieved,” he says to my own relief. “In some people’s eyes it makes one totally legendary. I find talking about Python not that exciting because people tend to want to hear about how their favourite sketch was written or some anecdote involving The Life of Brian.”
Palin traces his gift for comedy back to boarding school, where he enjoyed impersonating teachers. As a 10-year-old in 1953, he developed a mini-cabaret based on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. “I would tell this running story about the coronation and it was about the Duke of Edinburgh being taken short.”
I ask whether it was ever performed on stage in school and this leads Palin to reminisce about how his father, an engineer at a steel mill, was wary of his son’s interest in acting. “He just saw this as a folly that would lead to a life of dependence on him. I didn’t realise until he died quite how little [money] he had. He put about a third of his salary, about £500 a year, into educating me at Shrewsbury.”
When he was growing up, Palin had assumed that his father had a particular dislike of theatre. In fact, “it was all to do with his hoping that I would eventually get a good job, probably better than he got.”
Returning to travel, Palin recounts how an Ethiopian approached him in London a couple of years ago and thanked him for not showing his country as a victim. “Everybody has a sense of pride about where they live,” he says. “I don’t think the way to help is to say, ‘Help is on its way from the World Bank.’ I remember being in Tanzania once and the World Bank representative was in Dar es Salaam to discuss the next five years of Tanzania’s economic cycle. They all seemed in terrible awe of him. I am not an interventionist. I really find that when we intervene, we just cock it up.”
We discuss a shared concern – the often overly alarmist travel warnings issued by the UK Foreign Office and US State Department against visiting many parts of the developing world – and this produces another rich anecdote. When Palin was filming a few years ago in the admittedly dangerous tribal areas of northern Pakistan, a posse of 10 local policemen was sent to accompany him and the BBC crew. He wandered into a local market “to watch people make guns”.
“A man came up and talked quite aggressively about the British and our policy towards Pakistan and Afghanistan and I remember thinking, ‘This could get nasty and I’m glad we have 10 security guys with us.’ They were nowhere to be seen. It did not turn into a problem at all but I said later, ‘Where were the guys?’ It turned out that the police were so pleased to be with the BBC, they were having a group photo taken with the camera crew.”
I laugh out loud but Palin goes on, more seriously, to say: “I’m not pretending there aren’t dangers but I think saying, ‘These are the places we should not go,’ restricts communication and curiosity. I do a lot of talks and people sometimes ask you very earnest questions, ‘What do you know about the world now?’ And, God, I don’t know anything. Whoever said travel is more about questions than answers got it exactly right. I get more confused but the one thing I do feel is less afraid of the world than I would if I didn’t travel.”
After decades of travelling, however, Palin, who turned 65 last month, has decided that he wants to stay home with his wife Helen, who once joked that she might have to divorce him because she had tired of answering questions from reporters about what a nice man he was. Being away for several weeks at a time has become a bore for Palin and he wants to enjoy watching his two-year-old grandson grow up.
Then, after allowing me to quiz him obsessively about my favourite actress, Maggie Smith, whom he has worked with, Palin thanks me and rushes off to another appointment. He was right about the bill – it is exorbitant – but, hearing the jollity prompted by Palin’s goodbyes to the staff at the front of the restaurant, I think that you can’t put a price on that ability to make people laugh.
‘New Europe’ by Michael Palin is out now in paperback (Orion Books, £7.99)