Michael Palin

Michael Palin undertakes a new journey through Eastern Europe in this fascinating BBC series, breathing in its rich history, filming its exquisite sights and talking to its diverse peoples.
Until the early 1990s, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, traveling behind the iron curtain was never easy and now Palin fills what has been a void in his own experience and that of very many of his own generation.
As in all his series, Palin's New Europe takes the form of a journey through countries which have rich and complex cultures. Few have survived intact, as the ebb and flow of warring armies has continually changed the map of Europe.
Starting in the mountains of Slovenia he travels down through Croatia and the former Yugoslavia to Albania before turning northwards to embrace Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, The Ukraine, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, the former East Germany, Poland, the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (as Konigsberg originally home to the Teutonic Knights), Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, opening up a new and undiscovered world to millions of viewers.

In 1989 Michael Palin recreated the famous voyage made in 1873 by Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's epic Around the World in 80 Days. This 10-part (eight-hour) BBC documentary featured Palin and his passepartout using only the modes of transport available to the novelist's intrepid traveller. Hiring Palin was the masterstroke that ensured the series became a television milestone; despite being one of the comedy-surrealists of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the perpetrator of Ripping Yarns, he proved to be the most amiable travelling companion imaginable. His charm and ingenuity, coupled with the race-against-time format and the opportunity to visit at second-hand places most of us will never see, made Around the World in 80 Days an unmissable television event.

From Michael Palin and the team that brought you Around the World in 80 Days and Pole to Pole comes the most ambitious journey every undertaken for a television series - 50,000 miles of adventure and humour-packed incident which attempts a complete circle around the world's largest ocean. Michael sets off from Diomede, in the Bering Strait, and hopes to return there one year later via Russia, Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Borneo, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and the whole length of the Americas. But right from the start things don't go to plan…

Michael Palin goes on another jaunt round the world, tracing the steps of famous author Ernest Hemingway.
This 1999 BBC documentary was produced to coincide with Ernest Hemingway's centenary. Michael Palin makes his way round the writer's old haunts, from Paris to Pamplona, Milan to Montana, and Kilimanjaro to Key West, in his attempt to discover the man behind the legend: a hard-drinking womaniser who liked cats and shooting - but wrote like a dream and left an indelible impression on the twentieth century through his work.

You might think that Michael Palin has visited pretty much every nook and cranny of the globe by now, but not so: he's managed to find a few previously unexplored hectares in Himalaya, his latest jaunt for the BBC. Here the format, established originally in his Phileas Fogg-inspired Around the World in 80 Days, remains unchanged: always affable, seemingly unflappable, Palin journeys through the various countries along the world's greatest mountain range, getting friendly with everyone he meets and offering gently witty, gently affectionate observations on the customs and cultures he encounters. From the Khyber Pass through dangerous territory along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, via Nepal then up into Tibet to Everest and down into China, and finally to Bangladesh, Palin is, as ever, unfazed by whatever the world has to throw at him, be it chaotic bull-racing in Peshawar, the threat of kidnap by Maoist rebels in Nepal, Tibetan Yak herding, or rafting down the Yangtze. Even if both the once indefatigable traveller and the programme format itself seem a little tired at times (in Palin's case probably a side-effect of the high altitudes), the trek still provides manna from heaven for armchair travellers.

In Pole to Pole, Michael Palin follows the success of his original global trek, Around the World in 80 Days, with a race against time to get from the North Pole to the South Pole. Palin balks at nothing, tries just about anything and always finds time for a spot of tea. En route Palin stars in a crayfish documentary in Novgorod, attends a baby-rolling ceremony at a Cypriot wedding, gets stuck in a Nile traffic jam, buys chicken in Wadi Halfa, goes camel shopping in Khartoum and is prescribed tree bark by a Mpulugu witch doctor to get rid of his evil shadow. Even when things go according to plan, Palin travels in unusual ways--by dogsled on Spitsbergen, barge down the Dnieper, train roof across the Nubian Desert, van through the Sudan, hot-air balloon over Kenya and down Lake Tanganyika on the "African Queen". With curiosity, courage and his standard aplomb, Palin plunges himself into the local cultures, beating himself with birch branches in a Finnish sauna and wallowing in mud in an Odessa sanatorium. It all makes for an armchair traveller's delight

If the mere sight of Michael Palin striding purposefully towards the camera across some foreign terrain is enough to send you into fits of delight, then Sahara is just for you. Following on from his three pan-global expeditions, Palin is back on the exploration trail. This time it's traversing the Sahara desert; travelling from Gibraltar through Tangiers and the Arab world down through Africa and some of the most inhospitable conditions on the planet. The formula that Palin established in Around The World In Eighty Days has hardly been tampered with, but Sahara is proof that there are few better exponents of the travelogue. Palin is an engaging host, far more attractive than the extreme survival merchants, walking the fine line between experienced traveller and slightly eccentric Englishman abroad. The programme also strikes a perfect balance between grand visual gestures (the camerawork is simply stunning) and focusing on the individual lives that characterise the region, all underpinned by Palin's unique brand of humour. This is one to return to again and again.