Abstract
In his post-Monty Python career, Michael Palin has carved a significant niche for himself as a traveler, crafting eight televisions series (with accompanying books and website) out of his extended treks across the world. Three broad principles organize his approach. He is, first, more interested in getting to places than in being in them. Second, he is always, irretrievably and absolutely, an Englishman abroad, with all the problems (in terms of unresolved imperialist legacies) and possibilities (as far as adventurous involvement with highly different cultures and peoples) that this entails. Finally, Prasch’s “Getting There: Michael Palin’s Travels” reveals that the most memorable moments of any of Palin’s treks are improvisational, interpersonal interactions: Palin conversing (if almost always through an interpreter) with local people, unscripted, often unplanned.
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Notes
- 1.
Sahara, directed by Roger Mills and John-Paul Davidson, written by Michael Palin (London: BBC Films, 2002). The book version includes the tea—“I’m told by one of our tireless escorts that the tree is a famous meeting place, where people on both side of the border, Libyans and Algerians, get together to take tea and exchange news and gossip”—but does not mention the rush to move on. See Michael Palin, Sahara (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 209.
- 2.
Around the World in 80 Days, directed by Roger Mills and Clem Vallance, written by Michael Palin (London: BBC Films, 1989). The camel and keffiyeh make their way into the book version of the adventure; Palin writes that he “feels ridiculously conspicuous in an Arab head-dress which the camel driver…has insisted I wear.” See Michael Palin, Around the World in Eighty Days (London: BBC Books/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 42. The visit to Lawrence’s house in Saudi Arabia, however, does not get mentioned.
- 3.
Pole to Pole, directed by Roger Mills and Clem Vallance, written by Michael Palin (London: BBC Films, 1997). In the book version, where the story is recounted in somewhat different language, the blame for Palin’s sitting down with the doctor is assigned to Roger Mills. See Michael Palin, Pole to Pole (London: BBC Books/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992), 244, and for the full episode, 244–246.
- 4.
Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–98 (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 1.
- 5.
The observation does not recur in the book version, but he opens the volume with this observation: “The compulsive urge to travel is a recognised psychical condition. It has its own name, dromomania, and I’m glad to say I suffer from it.” Palin, Around the World in 80 Days, 9. And henceforth, since published text and film text seldom directly correspond, whenever one is cited and not the other, it is only present in the one.
- 6.
Palin, Travelling to Work, 476.
- 7.
Ibid., 77; brackets in original.
- 8.
In the (undated) interview accompanying the DVD version of Pole to Pole, Palin notes: “we weren’t going to do a follow-up to Around the World in 80 Days. It was a one-off. But it did have quite an impact.…There seemed to be an expectation that I should do another journey.” See also the book Pole to Pole, 6. That he was the fourth person asked to host the series he mentions in the (undated) interview accompanying the DVD version of Around the World in 80 Days.
- 9.
The website (http://www.palinstravels.co.uk/) offers maps, a handful of short video clips for each series, complete text for the books (but not the often very different script of the shows), and assorted other features, and can be searched for keyword, as well as for other features (persons, forms of transport, etc.).
- 10.
The special anniversary reissue of the title incorporates a documentary, Around the World in Twenty Years, directed by Roger Mills and written by Michael Palin (London: BBC Films, 2008), as well as additional text in the book to cover the revisitings (a new preface and 230–38).
- 11.
Full Circle, directed by Roger Mills, written by Michael Palin (London: BBC Films, 1997); Michael Palin, Full Circle (London: BBC Books/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997). The journey was not, in this case, continuous, as Palin notes in the book: “We set ourselves the deadline of one calendar year and were on the road for more than two hundred and seventy days of that year, returning home briefly to do some laundry and save our marriages.” (1) The series, however, maintains a diaristic day-by-day organization. That pattern—discontinuous journeys, but presentation in continuous format of numbered days—would be followed as well in Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe; see Palin, Sahara, 7; Michael Palin, Himalaya (London: BBC Books/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 7; and Michael Palin, New Europe (London: BBC Books/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 7. Palin’s introductions, it can be seen, follow a fairly strict format.
- 12.
Michael Palin, Hemingway Adventure (London: BBC Books/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 11. See also Hemingway Adventure, (London: BBC Films, 1999). The series is anomalous in multiple respects: it focuses on no particular geography, instead simply tracking Hemingway’s travels; it jettisons the numbered days that organize the other series; it has a date-specific logic, released on the centenary of Hemingway’s birth (80 Days, by contrast, was timed to the not-especially-significant 115th anniversary of the Jules Verne novel that inspired it); and it is the only one of the series that Roger Mills had no hand in whatsoever. But the series does reflect Palin’s personal interest in the writer, which also figures into his quirky novel Hemingway’s Chair (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
- 13.
Himalaya, directed by Roger Mills and John-Paul Davidson, written by Michael Palin (London: BBC Films, 2004).
- 14.
New Europe, directed by Roger Mills and John-Paul Davidson (London: BBC Films, 2007).
- 15.
Brazil, directed by Francis Hanley and John-Paul Davidson (London: BBC Films, 2012); Roger Mills served as executive producer for this outing. Brazil should not, of course, be confused with Brazil (1985), the Terry Gilliam film in which Michael Palin starred; that work offers a very different sort of travel.
- 16.
Palin, Around the World in 80 Days, 9.
- 17.
Palin’s protagonist had “devoured everything Hemingway had written: ten novels, over sixty short stories” as well as “the letters and the thick biographies of Carlos Baker (which he liked) and Kenneth S. Lynn (which he loathed) and those of Myers, Reynolds, Mellow, Anthony Burgess and others.” Palin, Hemingway’s Chair, 15.
- 18.
Michael Palin in Graham Chapman, John Cleese, et al., The Pythons Autobiography By The Pythons (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), 68.
- 19.
- 20.
Palin, Travelling to Work, 127.
- 21.
Ibid., 418.
- 22.
Ibid., 270–271.
- 23.
Palin, interview accompanying the DVD of Around the World in 80 Days.
- 24.
Palin, Around the World in 80 Days, 9.
- 25.
Palin, Pole to Pole, 6.
- 26.
Ibid., 79.
- 27.
Palin, New Europe, 68.
- 28.
Palin, Travelling to Work, 5 n.1. He reiterates the point in the interview accompanying the DVD edition of Pole to Pole: “The things that worked best were just the encounters: the casual, un-set-up, improvised encounters with people. And the things that didn’t work were the formalized, set-up interviews.”
- 29.
Michael McCarthy, “A New Journey of Exploration for Michael Palin,” Independent, 3 July 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/a-new-journey-of-exploration-for-michael-palin-1731265.html, accessed 1 July 2016.
- 30.
Michael Palin, “Presidential Address: Annual General Meeting of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) 7 June 2010,” Geographical Journal 176:3 (September 2010), 253.
- 31.
Royal Geographical Society, “Media Release 04.06.13: Michael Palin among those honoured at the Royal Geographical Society—Medals and Awards ceremony,” www.rgs.org. Rees’s allusion to “conversations” refers to a series of talks Palin initiated, under the title “Michael Meets…,” in which he brought other travelers or people he had encountered on his journeys to London—people he defined as “Not well-known, but with great stories to tell”—for informal public conversations. See http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/London+Lectures/Michael+meets.htm for more details on the series.
Bibliography
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Brazil. Directed by Francis Hanley and John-Paul Davidson. London: BBC Films, 2012.
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Himalaya. Directed by Roger Mills and John-Paul Davidson, written by Michael Palin. London: BBC Films, 2004.
McCarthy, Michael. “A New Journey of Exploration for Michael Palin.” Independent, 3 July 2009. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/a-new-journey-of-exploration-for-michael-palin-1731265.html. Accessed July 1, 2016.
New Europe. Directed by Roger Mills and John-Paul Davidson. London: BBC Films, 2007.
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Palin, Michael. “Presidential Address: Annual General Meeting of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) 7 June 2010.” Geographical Journal 176:3 (September 2010): 253–255.
Palin, Michael. Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–98. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2014.
Pole to Pole. Directed by Roger Mills and Clem Vallance, written by Michael Palin. London: BBC Films, 1997.
Royal Geographical Society, “Media Release 04.06.13: Michael Palin among those honoured at the Royal Geographical Society—Medals and Awards ceremony.” www.rgs.org.
Sahara. Directed by Roger Mills and John-Paul Davidson, written by Michael Palin. London: BBC Films, 2002.
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Prasch, T. (2017). Getting There: Michael Palin’s Travels. In: Reinsch, P., Whitfield, B., Weiner, R. (eds) Python beyond Python. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51385-0_5
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