Michael Palin: Travels of a Lifetime (2020) s01e01 Episode Script
Around the World in 80 Days
MICHAEL:
Now, let's have a look.
Let's see what we've got here.
Oh, yes.
MICHAEL (VO): When I was growing up,
I dreamed of travel and adventure.
CROWD CHATTERS
Bye. Thank you!
MICHAEL (VO):
Then one day, that dream came true.
This is it.
I'm standing on the top of the world!
For three decades,
I've been lucky enough to travel the world
making documentaries
and sharing my adventures
With millions of viewers.
Michael Palin set the tone for, I think,
all travel TV today.
Ooh! Ah
It's a bit like a very friendly steamroller.
He came at the right time,
he had the right daring qualities.
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH:
He has huge warmth.
And it's a warmth that spreads across
all kinds of people.
Bye—bye, Suleiman Two.
Bye—bye, Yousef.
Bye, Mohammed.
It expanded my little horizons
to the rest of the planet.
MICHAEL (VO):
All through my travels, I kept a diary.
MICHAEL:
I've always felt, when I've travelled
it's really, really important
to keep a record.
I mean, every day is precious.
You're seeing things you'll probably never,
ever see again in your life.
Now, for the first time, I'm looking back
re-visiting my most memorable journeys
and opening my diaries to find
forgotten moments from my travels.
My way of looking at each journey
as something different
new, special, exciting
dramatic and challenging
as not really knowing exactly
how it was going to turn out.
"AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS"
INTRO MUSIC PLAYS
I can't deny that I was very, very excited
about traveling.
It was adventure
and it was seeing the world.
All these things I just loved since
I was very young, growing up in Sheffield.
MICHAEL (VO):
But before I was a traveler, I was a Python.
Shaking up comedy, offending people,
and being very silly.
But like all good things, it came to an end
and it was time to decide what next.
And then out of the blue
comes this suggestion from the BBC.
PHONE RINGS
Hello?
Yeah.
BBC, yes, I know. Mm—hmm.
You want me to what?
You want me to go round the world?
Yeah.
But, I mean Yes, well, I don't see why,
I mean, you go round the world in 36 hours.
Ah, 80?
Eighty days, yes.
One of the things that we felt
we should do at the beginning
was talk to an experienced traveller
and I emphasised that I was a novice,
I was a learner
so people wouldn't expect too much from me.
So, who better to go and see
than Alan Whicker?
Alan Whicker did these big travel programmes
called Whicker's World
which were very much about
him and his journey
quite formal, quite reporter—y.
ALAN: They seem an absolutely cracking
people to me, actually.
Are they what they appear to be?
— MAN: Yes, they are.
All the time?
— They're like that all the time.
They're the kindest, most happy people
I've ever lived with.
They're just fantastic.
How do you cope
when things sort of fall apart
or something completely unusual happens?
I become tremendously British, er, erm
and, er, you must always speak English.
You mustn't try and speak
the local language
because when the Tonton Macoute
are sticking guns into your ribs
you mustn't try and say,
"Please don't" to them
you must say in English,
"Do you mind standing aside?
Excuse me, BBC television, do you mind?
Just back a bit. That's right."
And that's exactly what we did.
And they were absolutely staggered,
and it worked like a dream.
That's the way he travelled.
Uh, in a suit, in a suit and tie
always the rather detached Englishman
and I, you know,
I realised I couldn't travel like that.
I hadn't got a tie.
Well, I did have a tie, I had one tie.
Right, where are the porters?
The 40 bearers who are going with us
on this trip.
At the very last moment,
I remembered to bring a tie.
You never know, might come in useful
for strangling muggers or whatever.
When I was growing up, I mean, 1950s,
no one travelled very far.
You know, Nottingham maybe, or Leeds,
but that was about it.
WHISTLE BLOWS
lBye—bye!
— Righty—o. Bye!
Bye—bye, everyone!
BRAKES SCREECH
MICHAEL: So, suddenly,
to find myself being out there
doing things that, you know, would be
so unbelievable when I was growing up
it was so exciting,
and it was so
liberating.
MICHAEL (VO):
The idea was beautifully simple.
It was a race against the clock.
I would trace the journey of Phileas Fogg
the hero of Jules Verne's
classic 79th—century novel
across land and sea,
with no planes allowed.
Could I make it
round the world in 80 days?
I saw it as something almost theatrical,
you know?
It was all there in my mind already,
the longest journey of my life.
I don't think anyone had ever,
the BBC ever said
"We're going to go with one traveller
and we're going to spend 80 days with him
and he's going to be watched
by the camera every single moment."
You know,
there's hardly a moment of privacy.
That hadn't been done before.
We were sort of toying with a completely
new way of doing documentaries.
This is on the Espresso Egitto,
which was the ship
from which we went from Venice
to Alexandria.
You know, exotic part of the journey
but I was clearly
at the beginning of the journey
and I was very unsure of myself.
This is what I wrote.
"Occasionally, the realisation
that this whole project
is supported on my shoulders
demands not just my survival,
but my wit, energy
exuberance and enthusiasm
quite terrifies me.
It's going to be a supreme test
but I'm determined to pull this off.
Failure is unthinkable."
HE CHUCKLES
That used to keep me awake at night.
Thinking, failure is unthinkable.
The enormity of the task itself
had me worried
and it was tied in with
how I was going to present myself.
Could I be funny for 80 more days,
could I be funny for one more day?
And because everyone agreed, well,
it's got to be Palin being spontaneous
no one was going to really step in and say,
"You shouldn't say this.
You shouldn't say that."
That was against the spirit of it
but at the same time,
it fed on a sort of insecurity in my mind.
CAR HORNS HONK
— TRAFFIC BLARES
This was arriving at Alexandria.
And it was quite a moment for me,
because it was the first real
sort of moment of foreignness.
Up till that point,
I was within a European perspective.
Suddenly I'm in an African perspective.
CAR HORNS HONK
It was a world you didn't know at all.
Suddenly being somewhere foreign, strange
really different,
everything felt different.
The heat, the smells, the sounds.
You can't relate to it
in your English way, particularly.
You certainly can't be all colonial about it
and saying, "Come on, excuse me!"
You've just got to go with it,
and I realised I was quite excited by that.
That was where the fun began, I thought.
MICHAEL (VO): As well as keeping a diary,
I also carried a tape recorder.
And although I kept the tapes,
I've hardly ever listened to them.
Until now.
MICHAEL ON TAPE: Now proceeding
at a manic gallop on the old
horse—drawn carriage.
— HOOVES CLATTER
It is just extraordinary.
Lots of little individual enterprises.
The untidiness, really.
I suppose if I were on my own,
I'd be pretty scared.
TAPE STOPS
Says it all, really, it sort of
just spills all around you, all these
all these different sensations
and the fact that everyone seems to be mad.
HE LAUGHS
Mad but happy, I would have to say.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
I finally reach the handsome station
resolved to shed some English inhibitions,
and become a part of Africa.
CROWD CHATTERS
— INDISTINCT ANNOUNCEMEN
My first experience of fending for myself
in a very difficult environment
which I knew very little about.
There were no sort of English lettering,
English signs or anything like that.
"Just go in there, Michael,
ask for a train ticket to Cairo"
and honestly, at this point, I just didn't
quite know what I was supposed to do.
Cairo?
Cairo?
INDISTINCT CHATTER
Goes to Cairo?
Cairo?
Cairo?
Cairo? OK, here we go.
Right.
Palin, look at you! You look like a child.
Look at your boyish looks.
That's what they always say about Palin,
his boyish good looks.
MAN SPEAKS ARABIC
— One?
One?
— Yes, one—way to Cairo.
MAN SPEAKS ARABIC
It's real life, it's happening
it's not scripted, they're not all extras
they are It's reality.
And we're seeing a little moment of it,
we're seeing a little
a little fragment of existence,
in that train station at that time.
I love it.
Cairo?
— Yes.
Today?
— Yes.
CROWD CHATTERS
— INDISTINCT ANNOUNCEMEN
Go there?
Ah! I've just come from there.
I shall walk to Cairo at this rate.
This is even cleverer than I thought.
That it was actually unrehearsed.
I mean, he turns up at a ticket booth,
and says
"I want to go to somewhere or other,"
and it's a real exchange
and if there's a confusion
about understanding one another
there's confusion about understanding,
which is how it is.
I personally think that one of the reasons
viewers like
telly travel programmes
is that they are quite hard to script
and over—produce.
The very nature of going on a journey
where serious travel is involved
means stuff is gonna go wrong
people are gonna appear
who you weren't expecting
and there's gonna be spontaneity,
and I think people enjoy that.
They like the sense
that this isn't running on rails
and somebody's feeding lines
through an earpiece
and certainly watching Around The World
you had that
You had that sense that these
perhaps this entire team don't entirely know
what they're doing
but focussing on Michael
in front of the camera
clearly the bloke hasn't got a clue,
and that's great!
That's fun for us
and you can see he's open
to the experiences he's having, as well.
MICHAEL: The Englishman
trying to make sense of it all
hanging on to his Englishness,
"But surely they shouldn't have done that
people shouldn't shout on stations,
they shouldn't argue in public"
and all that sort of thing,
but that's what they do.
It happens all the time.
Hello!
I saw you before, you're trouble.
Cairo?
After buying the ticket, I just thought,
"This is hopeless.
I'm going to look completely incompetent."
In the end, it was this sort of incompetence
which people quite enjoyed.
They sort of felt comfortable with that,
like, you know
"Well, we'd have been in the same situation
if we'd had to buy a ticket at Alexandria
and we didn't know any Arabic."
TRAIN HORN BLARES
ADE: The thing about
when you have had a career
and you're moving into something new
is you're almost like a baby
because everything is fresh and new again
and you could see that.
The thing that makes it special
is when you have hardened travellers
that kind of newness,
that sense of excitement is gone
you know, but it was there with Michael
and people connect to that.
TRAIN HORN BLARES
CAR HORNS HONK
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
Back across the Nile to the city centre
to search out a room for the night.
Eschewing the Hiltons
and the InterContinentals
I plump for the classy ring of something
older and more dignified.
JOANNA:
When Michael surfed into the travel shows
we knew it was going to be different.
We knew it would be quite,
what we call in the business, roughty—toughty
not all smart hotels and lovely clothes.
It would be a real travellers' piece of work.
PIPE JUDDERS
MICHAEL ON TAPE:
There is no hot water.
There is no stopper on the bath
even if there were hot water
and the fact that so many fittings don't work
add to the sort of magical anarchy of Cairo.
Mm. Gosh.
I know that's something
of a romantic notion.
But it is just how you have to
approach the place.
It's good to hear that, actually,
"magical anarchy"
and things like that, that I've said,
are probably
exactly what I felt,
and I feel a slight regret
that I've never felt quite like that again
because the next time you go somewhere,
it just is less
of a surprise,
and this was just boom!
And a real assault on the senses.
Unfortunately, we were going rather slowly.
It got rather late,
and things really began to fall apart.
MAN :
Allahu Akbar.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
MICHAEL (VO): First, we missed the ship
that was meant to take us on to wards Muscat
then forced to travel overland
we hit a snag in Saudi Arabia.
The situation is this,
it's gonna put us at least four days late
if I catch a boat round to Dubai.
That's the quickest we can do it.
However
I thought we were scuppered,
but at 3:30am this morning
the Saudi Minister of Information
came up with this letter
which gives me permission to travel
right across Saudi Arabia
as far as Dubai overland.
However, it only extends to me.
It doesn't include you lads, as well.
Sorry about that, but
tis the way it goes,
and at least it gets me as far as Dubai
then maybe we'll catch up some time
on the dhow, so
this is it, lads.
See you in Dubai in two days.
Sorry about that!
You'll get a lift, pretty boys like you.
MAN:
Drive carefully, Michael.
Yeah, bye!
Bye, good luck.
MAN:
Pretty boys like us
I did feel, on this journey,
that anything could happen
and you had to be able to deal with it.
At the same time,
there was a part of me
that really wanted to get this done
in less than 80 days.
From Saudi Arabia onwards,
began to lose days
four days behind.
So, it was a combination of frustration
because I wanted
to get the thing done properly
but exhilaration that we were having,
you know
These weird and wonderful things
were happening.
There are times when everything seems
to go wrong when you're travelling
and you just think
"Oh my gosh, what am I gonna do?"
and there's this intense frustration.
What was lovely about that moment
was that he
he showed that frustration,
he was like, "Urgh!"
But, um
but you find a way round, and he did.
He found a new way, a new route
and that was just brilliant and just lovely.
He just kept on going.
MICHAEL (VO): Today, Dubai resembles
a space—age city of the future.
When I got there, it was still a working port
on the Persian Gulf
and I needed a lift.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO: That I'd arrived
in Dubai at all was a small triumph
and I'm even more cheered
when I look out next morning
onto a most promising waterfront.
And at last, my first sight of a dhow.
Preceded by the provisions
I board our dhow, Al—Shama
which means "candlelight", in Arabic.
No one really spoke English, but the captain
spoke a few words of English.
The other 17 members of the crew
and our own crew
had to sleep there on that deck,
on those sacks and all that.
There was no cabins or anything.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
It's all very strange.
We're setting off for six days
on the high seas
out of radio contact
on a boat with not a lifebelt in sight.
We're heading out into the Persian Gulf
where nine years of war
are just coming to an end.
MICHAEL:
Nothing like this had been done before
which made the whole thing
quite sort of alarming,
but also exciting at the same time.
You were sort of making up the rules
as you went along.
ED: This is a totally beautiful
piece of television.
There's nothing rigged or contrived
or organised about this.
They are just out in the middle
of the ocean for days
with people who have done this journey,
just like this
every day for centuries, for generations
and so we're getting an insight
into the reality of how these guys live
in a way that
television finds
Would have found so hard to show
until Michael Palin and these guys
decided to do six days on a dhow.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
The plumbing is basic.
They favour the hole in the barrel system.
But using it is nowhere near as alarming
as getting to it.
The approach is scorchingly hot by day
and suicidal at night
but once installed,
one enjoys direct contact with nature.
This is rather a shock
and causes my bowels to lock solid
for three days.
ADE:
Oh, I remember this!
Yeah, I think it's kind of
a reoccurring theme with Michael
when he goes on boats,
he talks about his bowels
and how they get locked solid.
That's another thing you never talk about
but travellers only talk about your bowels,
"What's the water like?"
You know, "Oh, I had the runs,
I was constipated. I had this, that."
It becomes something that you don't
you don't get shy about.
It's terribly important.
I think the British public know more
about Michael's bowels
than his GP or his doctors.
I'm telling you, we all know that his bowels
are probably a national treasure.
HE LAUGHS
I've been on squatters, my God,
hanging out over precipices.
You've got to face up to grim—ish things.
You've got to know that maybe
you won't be able to shave.
You've got to know that sometimes
you're not seen in your best light
as it were, and you always want to
Even if you're a clown, which he is
an entertainer and not a vain man
which he's not remotely
you kind of want to look good onscreen,
and sometimes you can't.
H E G ROANS
Oh!
This is not for prime—time television.
Ah.
This is for indigestion, I hope he knows.
Short walk on the
MICHAEL GROANS
Englishman.
MICHAEL GRUNTS
Ah!
Being ill, and suddenly
old Kasim comes and walks all over me.
HE SIGHS
MICHAEL (VO): This was a time before
technology took over our lives.
The dhow had no sat—nav,
no wi—fi, no phone
and the crew navigated by sextant.
I felt a great curiosity
about the people I was with.
I wanted to get things on a personal level
and that's where the dhow really worked,
it had to be personal
because there was no way of us
getting away from anybody else.
MEN CHATTER AND CHUCKLE
SIMON: There was one moment in particular
that really stuck with me at the time
where he sat on this old dhow
with an older bloke
and Michael was listening
to this old Walkman
which, for anyone who's significantly
younger than me
was our early MP3 player type
It played something called a tape
and you had to press a button
and you had these headphones
that went over your head.
Now, you put them on like that.
OK?
How's that, Kasim, alright?
Now, prepare yourself
for a bit of Bruce Springsteen.
This may have very serious effect
but tell me to stop if you don't like it,
alright?
You like it?
Good beat?
MUSIC PLAYS FAI NTLY
This must be one of the oddest audiences
for The Wild, The Innocent
and the E Street Shuffle ever recorded.
It's good, isn't it?
MICHAEL CHUCKLES
SAILOR CHATTERS IN ARABIC
It was just brilliant and beautiful
and honestly, it was a bit of a revelation.
It was a "Oh, my goodness!
They're just like us,
these strange foreign people!"
And that was a big difference, on telly,
to what had gone before.
MICHAEL: It was supposed to be a five,
ten—minute sequence at most
and it was the
the editor who looked at all this and said
"I think it'll work better at 55 minutes"
and so the dhow
became a complete episode.
SAI LORS SING RHYTHMICALLY
THEY CONTINUE SINGING RHYTHMICALLY
MICHAEL:
"The grey mist is lifting
and revealing the Gateway of India.
So, the time comes to say goodbye
to the people in whose hands
we've entrusted our lives for the last week."
Bye—bye, Suleiman.
Bye—bye, Suleiman Two.
Bye—bye, Yousef.
Bye, Mohammed.
Bye.
— Bye!
Bye—bye, Arun.
Bye—bye, Yaqub.
Bye—bye, Kazmir. Oh!
Oh!
— SAILORS LAUGH
Oh, look at that, look at that!
Oh, thanks very much.
Very nice people, very good crew.
I'll always sail with you, thank you.
Oh, well, here we go.
It's about these people he meets
and those little moments
those little sparks of interaction
that are the purest joy of travel
and he shows us that, and he
he relates it to us
and we have it,
we keep it ourselves a little bit
we benefit from his little encounters.
CAR HORNS HONK
MICHAEL:
In India, there's so much going on
and so much to sort of take in.
This busy, seething city
in the middle of this busy,
seething country.
There was an awful lot happening
on the street
and we had to make sense of it
and make our way through it.
CROWD CHATTERS
We were then going to be staying
at the Taj Hotel
so, I went from seven days on the dhow
to this very expensive, posh hotel.
I was almost disgusted by what I saw.
I could see people sort of, you know
shouting at porters and things like that
and being very overbearing,
and just pointing at things
demanding things be done.
But it was a very powerful feeling
when I got to the Taj,
it was like I was sort of distanced from it
like I'd come from another planet
to see just how people behaved
in what we would call our familiar world.
Ah!
"Bombay is the most difficult place
to film yet."
CHILDREN CHATTER
"The people who stare at the camera,
the dripping humidity
the extraordinary locations."
VENDOR CHATTERS
"Watching a mongoose
driven to draw blood from a snake"
VENDOR CHATTERS
"in amongst grinding poverty.
It's wearing us all down."
I don't remember that, I
You know, I look back
on those journeys and think
"We all had such a wonderful time,"
but of course you didn't.
You know, you had doubts,
you had worries.
You got very tired, and of course,
filming in Bombay, it looks terrific
uh, in the end,
but actually, working through it
was pretty tough.
HORNS HONK
MICHAEL ON TAPE:
Dadar Station.
Twenty minutes before departure
of the Madras Express.
No one seems to know what they're doing.
People are being got in and out,
scrambling about, changing places.
Is this a permanent state of affairs?
I do notice on the book stall
there's a copy of Jeffrey Archer
and a copy of Spycatcher
in the middle of all this.
MICHAEL:
Yes, we weren't there for long.
Not just about destinations,
we've got to remember that the whole thing
is a journey which has to be done
in under 80 days.
TRAIN CHUGS
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
Are you travelling all the way to Madras?
Yes, from Bombay to Madras.
— Ah.
What will the, erm
what will the south be like?
I've never been there before.
— It's like another country.
SIMON: Of course, the programmes
are about Michael and his journey
of course they are,
but also I think, fundamentally
they're about the people he meets
and I think that's been one of
the great endearing, enduring
successes of his adventures.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
MICHAEL:
The Indians, they're very friendly people.
It was quite nice working there.
They were very involved
in what we were doing
and very interested
and genuinely felt that they could show us
a better way of doing it.
TRAIN HORN BLARES
MICHAEL ON TAPE:
Rather beautiful views down now to our right.
Fields, trees, stretches of water.
Now a party of children walking, um
along the downline, now.
Little kids with their plastic bags.
Striding off very purposefully.
Looks idyllic out there, really, for them.
It's the sort of thing that
never loses its appeal.
So, completely emotional and nostalgic,
I know.
There we are, you see, as I'm rambling on
expressing what is essentially
the heroic nature of train travel
which, from very early on,
when I was very young
there was something heroic about trains.
Just went through the cities
and through the country
and at a sublime confidence.
I would be happy to watch Michael Palin
look out the window of a train for an hour.
Like, I'm I don't know what it is!
He always looks so centred.
There's always such hustle and bustle
as he's trying to get on them
and there's always this missed connection
there's always,
"Will we make the boat?" It's just
You can feel him breathe,
and you breathe with him.
You kind of go, "Here we go.
We're making up time now.
We're going and we can watch"
I mean,
it's a great way to see a country.
There's a lot of little boy
in the whole enterprise, really
in all the travels.
I think when I've lost
the little boy sense of wonder, it's
I've lost something quite significant.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO: This magical train ride
will be my last overland journey
for quite a few days.
From Madras,
I caught a cargo ship to Singapore
and then a container ship on to Hong Kong
a new continent and a new culture
to try and get to grips with.
Good morning, Mr Palin.
Welcome to Hong Kong, sir.
— Thank you very much.
METAL CLANGS
MICHAEL (VO): But in some ways,
Hong Kong was just a prelude
to the most exciting stage
of the journey yet
Communist China itself
China and Saudi Arabia,
the only two countries on the journey
where you had that extra element of fear
of offending some authority
so, everything was potentially
much more loaded going into China.
MICHAEL ON TAPE:
Now, outside the window is China
my first glimpse of China.
It's, erm it's different from Hong Kong
because on the shoreline
there are a lot of small, thatched huts
standing in the water,
I suppose they're fisherman's huts.
A lot of small fishing boats.
Um, but it's a very broad
grey—green estuary here.
There was a frisson, going to China
because it was a communist country,
and communism then
was still a very sort of potent,
threatening image for Westerners
and it was not long after
the Mao Tse—tung era
people being forced to go off
to the fields and all that
so, I didn't quite know
what I was going to find.
I was enjoying being far from home.
This is what I wanted to travel for,
I wanted to find places
that were very different,
not similar to home.
Sometimes I see the programme of BBC
in our television.
— Yes?
And sometimes,
I listen, I listen to the radio.
Ah!
— BBC in shortwave.
Shortwave, shortwave.
— Yes. Shortwave, that's right.
SIMON: Look at the clothing there,
look at what they're wearing!
I mean, he's travelling
at such a fascinating time of change.
They're all in flipping Gucci and Levi's now.
That's what so cool about it.
It kind of feels like
you're being let into a world that
that's been forbidden.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
Shanghai is the largest city of China
with a population of more than 12 million.
Though the street atmosphere
feels medieval
there's a definite trickle of modern goods.
You can buy an electronic calculator
but the price will still be added up
on an abacus.
What I realised, as we went through China
was that the Chinese
were very, very preoccupied
with their own lives
and this enormous transition
from being a sort of agricultural
peasant economy
to an economy where big cities were growing
buildings were going up all the time.
So, something was going on in China
that preoccupied the Chinese completely
and that was the feeling in China
that there were a lot of things
you didn't know and you couldn't know
and they didn't want you to know,
and there was no way of finding out.
It wasn't sort of evident in
in sense of a sort of obvious oppression
people with guns,
pushing people around and all that.
But there was a kind of acceptance that
um, this was a huge,
potentially very powerful country
run by a sort of totalitarian government.
TRAIN HORN BLARES
ANNOUNCEMENT IN MANDARIN
MICHAEL: On the train, on the other hand,
there were one or two people to meet.
Trains are always good
because every sort of
estate of man or woman is
uses trains, you know,
from the richest to the poorest.
Do you, er, carry an umbrella with you
every day?
HE LAUGHS
Is that true or not?
No.
— No?
If I If I set out of the house
with an umbrella
I'd lose it within a day, anyway. No, no.
No, no, no.
— No, I don't, I just get wet.
Oh, just get wet. OK.
You get the impression,
"Oh, he just met that person
and it's rather a surprise to him
and the cameraman and everybody else
that they should actually have a conversation
and share a joke.
MICHAEL (VO):
Leaving, I felt we were on the home straight
even though we were still two oceans
and a continent away
from completing the circle.
From Japan, we sailed to California
a ten—day voyage that gave me time to reflect
on everything I'd seen and experienced.
Then, after one last epic train journey
right across America
we finally set sail for England.
"I lie in bed this morning
and seriously consider
what it would be like to be back home.
I think that the journey has, in a way,
calmed and settled me.
It's been much nearer to sanity
than the phone—ringing
celebrity—conscious world I left at home.
At sea, the pace of life
slows to a very agreeable level
and the thought of a return to city life
is not, this morning
as tempting as I expected it to be.
In fact
I could easily go round again."
There we are,
packing up my bag for the last time
on board the Danish ship, the Leda Maersk
that had taken us from
New York to Felixstowe
and look, I'm looking tired, let's face it.
AIR HISSES
It's been a long, long journey.
I've been on camera for
HE LAUGHS
79 days.
Look at that,
there's a man who's knackered.
Absolutely knackered, no acting required.
I want to get home, want to have a beer,
I want to get to bed.
We finally get to the Reform Club.
And, you know, this is wonderful.
We've done it in 79 days, seven hours.
We go up the steps
and one more indignity
ready to be heaped upon us.
Well, there we are,
this is the Reform Club.
This is where Phileas Fogg
started his journey.
This is where I began my journey
on September 25th 1988,
79 days and seven hours ago.
Unfortunately,
for reasons of their own
the Club do not want me to go in there
and film this afternoon
so, I have to say,
this is the end of the journey
on the pavement outside
104 Pall Mall, that's it.
MICHAEL: British Clubs, you know,
it's not about letting people in
it's about keeping people out.
So, I learnt a few lessons
about the English that day
which left me very depressed
for about a week.
HE CHUCKLES
MICHAEL (VO): Still, I was home,
reunited with my family
back in my old life
and anxiously waiting
for the moment of truth.
What would the viewers make
of my journey around the world?
JAYNE IRVING: And we're here to take
your calls on anything to do with television.
Let's have a look at what you've been
calling about already
in our Open Line.
PHONES DIAL AND RING
WOMAN:
Regarding Around the World in 80 Days
I have never enjoyed a programme so much.
He has taken me to
personally, to places I'd never seen.
So many of you have phoned in
about this programme last night
er, David Templeman from Camberley.
"Congratulations,
this is what television is all about."
MICHAEL:
The fact that it rated so highly was
a surprise, in a way, because there hadn't
been anything like that before
which was quite so sort of spontaneous
improvised, unplanned.
JOANNA:
It was game—changing.
It's changed travel
travel programmes forever.
SIMON:
Total beautiful melting mix of cultures
and just humanity shared.
MICHAEL:
I learnt that my desire to travel
my love of travel wasn't something false
wasn't something I had romanticised.
It was very real.
I didn't really ever expect it to unleash
all the other programmes
or the freedom to do other programmes.
This is it.
I'm standing on the top of the world!
Pole to Pole, this was a greater challenge.
You know,
countries that I'd never been to.
The USSR
and all the way through Africa.
Then to Antarctica itself.
Thrilling stuff.
Now, let's have a look.
Let's see what we've got here.
Oh, yes.
MICHAEL (VO): When I was growing up,
I dreamed of travel and adventure.
CROWD CHATTERS
Bye. Thank you!
MICHAEL (VO):
Then one day, that dream came true.
This is it.
I'm standing on the top of the world!
For three decades,
I've been lucky enough to travel the world
making documentaries
and sharing my adventures
With millions of viewers.
Michael Palin set the tone for, I think,
all travel TV today.
Ooh! Ah
It's a bit like a very friendly steamroller.
He came at the right time,
he had the right daring qualities.
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH:
He has huge warmth.
And it's a warmth that spreads across
all kinds of people.
Bye—bye, Suleiman Two.
Bye—bye, Yousef.
Bye, Mohammed.
It expanded my little horizons
to the rest of the planet.
MICHAEL (VO):
All through my travels, I kept a diary.
MICHAEL:
I've always felt, when I've travelled
it's really, really important
to keep a record.
I mean, every day is precious.
You're seeing things you'll probably never,
ever see again in your life.
Now, for the first time, I'm looking back
re-visiting my most memorable journeys
and opening my diaries to find
forgotten moments from my travels.
My way of looking at each journey
as something different
new, special, exciting
dramatic and challenging
as not really knowing exactly
how it was going to turn out.
"AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS"
INTRO MUSIC PLAYS
I can't deny that I was very, very excited
about traveling.
It was adventure
and it was seeing the world.
All these things I just loved since
I was very young, growing up in Sheffield.
MICHAEL (VO):
But before I was a traveler, I was a Python.
Shaking up comedy, offending people,
and being very silly.
But like all good things, it came to an end
and it was time to decide what next.
And then out of the blue
comes this suggestion from the BBC.
PHONE RINGS
Hello?
Yeah.
BBC, yes, I know. Mm—hmm.
You want me to what?
You want me to go round the world?
Yeah.
But, I mean Yes, well, I don't see why,
I mean, you go round the world in 36 hours.
Ah, 80?
Eighty days, yes.
One of the things that we felt
we should do at the beginning
was talk to an experienced traveller
and I emphasised that I was a novice,
I was a learner
so people wouldn't expect too much from me.
So, who better to go and see
than Alan Whicker?
Alan Whicker did these big travel programmes
called Whicker's World
which were very much about
him and his journey
quite formal, quite reporter—y.
ALAN: They seem an absolutely cracking
people to me, actually.
Are they what they appear to be?
— MAN: Yes, they are.
All the time?
— They're like that all the time.
They're the kindest, most happy people
I've ever lived with.
They're just fantastic.
How do you cope
when things sort of fall apart
or something completely unusual happens?
I become tremendously British, er, erm
and, er, you must always speak English.
You mustn't try and speak
the local language
because when the Tonton Macoute
are sticking guns into your ribs
you mustn't try and say,
"Please don't" to them
you must say in English,
"Do you mind standing aside?
Excuse me, BBC television, do you mind?
Just back a bit. That's right."
And that's exactly what we did.
And they were absolutely staggered,
and it worked like a dream.
That's the way he travelled.
Uh, in a suit, in a suit and tie
always the rather detached Englishman
and I, you know,
I realised I couldn't travel like that.
I hadn't got a tie.
Well, I did have a tie, I had one tie.
Right, where are the porters?
The 40 bearers who are going with us
on this trip.
At the very last moment,
I remembered to bring a tie.
You never know, might come in useful
for strangling muggers or whatever.
When I was growing up, I mean, 1950s,
no one travelled very far.
You know, Nottingham maybe, or Leeds,
but that was about it.
WHISTLE BLOWS
lBye—bye!
— Righty—o. Bye!
Bye—bye, everyone!
BRAKES SCREECH
MICHAEL: So, suddenly,
to find myself being out there
doing things that, you know, would be
so unbelievable when I was growing up
it was so exciting,
and it was so
liberating.
MICHAEL (VO):
The idea was beautifully simple.
It was a race against the clock.
I would trace the journey of Phileas Fogg
the hero of Jules Verne's
classic 79th—century novel
across land and sea,
with no planes allowed.
Could I make it
round the world in 80 days?
I saw it as something almost theatrical,
you know?
It was all there in my mind already,
the longest journey of my life.
I don't think anyone had ever,
the BBC ever said
"We're going to go with one traveller
and we're going to spend 80 days with him
and he's going to be watched
by the camera every single moment."
You know,
there's hardly a moment of privacy.
That hadn't been done before.
We were sort of toying with a completely
new way of doing documentaries.
This is on the Espresso Egitto,
which was the ship
from which we went from Venice
to Alexandria.
You know, exotic part of the journey
but I was clearly
at the beginning of the journey
and I was very unsure of myself.
This is what I wrote.
"Occasionally, the realisation
that this whole project
is supported on my shoulders
demands not just my survival,
but my wit, energy
exuberance and enthusiasm
quite terrifies me.
It's going to be a supreme test
but I'm determined to pull this off.
Failure is unthinkable."
HE CHUCKLES
That used to keep me awake at night.
Thinking, failure is unthinkable.
The enormity of the task itself
had me worried
and it was tied in with
how I was going to present myself.
Could I be funny for 80 more days,
could I be funny for one more day?
And because everyone agreed, well,
it's got to be Palin being spontaneous
no one was going to really step in and say,
"You shouldn't say this.
You shouldn't say that."
That was against the spirit of it
but at the same time,
it fed on a sort of insecurity in my mind.
CAR HORNS HONK
— TRAFFIC BLARES
This was arriving at Alexandria.
And it was quite a moment for me,
because it was the first real
sort of moment of foreignness.
Up till that point,
I was within a European perspective.
Suddenly I'm in an African perspective.
CAR HORNS HONK
It was a world you didn't know at all.
Suddenly being somewhere foreign, strange
really different,
everything felt different.
The heat, the smells, the sounds.
You can't relate to it
in your English way, particularly.
You certainly can't be all colonial about it
and saying, "Come on, excuse me!"
You've just got to go with it,
and I realised I was quite excited by that.
That was where the fun began, I thought.
MICHAEL (VO): As well as keeping a diary,
I also carried a tape recorder.
And although I kept the tapes,
I've hardly ever listened to them.
Until now.
MICHAEL ON TAPE: Now proceeding
at a manic gallop on the old
horse—drawn carriage.
— HOOVES CLATTER
It is just extraordinary.
Lots of little individual enterprises.
The untidiness, really.
I suppose if I were on my own,
I'd be pretty scared.
TAPE STOPS
Says it all, really, it sort of
just spills all around you, all these
all these different sensations
and the fact that everyone seems to be mad.
HE LAUGHS
Mad but happy, I would have to say.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
I finally reach the handsome station
resolved to shed some English inhibitions,
and become a part of Africa.
CROWD CHATTERS
— INDISTINCT ANNOUNCEMEN
My first experience of fending for myself
in a very difficult environment
which I knew very little about.
There were no sort of English lettering,
English signs or anything like that.
"Just go in there, Michael,
ask for a train ticket to Cairo"
and honestly, at this point, I just didn't
quite know what I was supposed to do.
Cairo?
Cairo?
INDISTINCT CHATTER
Goes to Cairo?
Cairo?
Cairo?
Cairo? OK, here we go.
Right.
Palin, look at you! You look like a child.
Look at your boyish looks.
That's what they always say about Palin,
his boyish good looks.
MAN SPEAKS ARABIC
— One?
One?
— Yes, one—way to Cairo.
MAN SPEAKS ARABIC
It's real life, it's happening
it's not scripted, they're not all extras
they are It's reality.
And we're seeing a little moment of it,
we're seeing a little
a little fragment of existence,
in that train station at that time.
I love it.
Cairo?
— Yes.
Today?
— Yes.
CROWD CHATTERS
— INDISTINCT ANNOUNCEMEN
Go there?
Ah! I've just come from there.
I shall walk to Cairo at this rate.
This is even cleverer than I thought.
That it was actually unrehearsed.
I mean, he turns up at a ticket booth,
and says
"I want to go to somewhere or other,"
and it's a real exchange
and if there's a confusion
about understanding one another
there's confusion about understanding,
which is how it is.
I personally think that one of the reasons
viewers like
telly travel programmes
is that they are quite hard to script
and over—produce.
The very nature of going on a journey
where serious travel is involved
means stuff is gonna go wrong
people are gonna appear
who you weren't expecting
and there's gonna be spontaneity,
and I think people enjoy that.
They like the sense
that this isn't running on rails
and somebody's feeding lines
through an earpiece
and certainly watching Around The World
you had that
You had that sense that these
perhaps this entire team don't entirely know
what they're doing
but focussing on Michael
in front of the camera
clearly the bloke hasn't got a clue,
and that's great!
That's fun for us
and you can see he's open
to the experiences he's having, as well.
MICHAEL: The Englishman
trying to make sense of it all
hanging on to his Englishness,
"But surely they shouldn't have done that
people shouldn't shout on stations,
they shouldn't argue in public"
and all that sort of thing,
but that's what they do.
It happens all the time.
Hello!
I saw you before, you're trouble.
Cairo?
After buying the ticket, I just thought,
"This is hopeless.
I'm going to look completely incompetent."
In the end, it was this sort of incompetence
which people quite enjoyed.
They sort of felt comfortable with that,
like, you know
"Well, we'd have been in the same situation
if we'd had to buy a ticket at Alexandria
and we didn't know any Arabic."
TRAIN HORN BLARES
ADE: The thing about
when you have had a career
and you're moving into something new
is you're almost like a baby
because everything is fresh and new again
and you could see that.
The thing that makes it special
is when you have hardened travellers
that kind of newness,
that sense of excitement is gone
you know, but it was there with Michael
and people connect to that.
TRAIN HORN BLARES
CAR HORNS HONK
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
Back across the Nile to the city centre
to search out a room for the night.
Eschewing the Hiltons
and the InterContinentals
I plump for the classy ring of something
older and more dignified.
JOANNA:
When Michael surfed into the travel shows
we knew it was going to be different.
We knew it would be quite,
what we call in the business, roughty—toughty
not all smart hotels and lovely clothes.
It would be a real travellers' piece of work.
PIPE JUDDERS
MICHAEL ON TAPE:
There is no hot water.
There is no stopper on the bath
even if there were hot water
and the fact that so many fittings don't work
add to the sort of magical anarchy of Cairo.
Mm. Gosh.
I know that's something
of a romantic notion.
But it is just how you have to
approach the place.
It's good to hear that, actually,
"magical anarchy"
and things like that, that I've said,
are probably
exactly what I felt,
and I feel a slight regret
that I've never felt quite like that again
because the next time you go somewhere,
it just is less
of a surprise,
and this was just boom!
And a real assault on the senses.
Unfortunately, we were going rather slowly.
It got rather late,
and things really began to fall apart.
MAN :
Allahu Akbar.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
MICHAEL (VO): First, we missed the ship
that was meant to take us on to wards Muscat
then forced to travel overland
we hit a snag in Saudi Arabia.
The situation is this,
it's gonna put us at least four days late
if I catch a boat round to Dubai.
That's the quickest we can do it.
However
I thought we were scuppered,
but at 3:30am this morning
the Saudi Minister of Information
came up with this letter
which gives me permission to travel
right across Saudi Arabia
as far as Dubai overland.
However, it only extends to me.
It doesn't include you lads, as well.
Sorry about that, but
tis the way it goes,
and at least it gets me as far as Dubai
then maybe we'll catch up some time
on the dhow, so
this is it, lads.
See you in Dubai in two days.
Sorry about that!
You'll get a lift, pretty boys like you.
MAN:
Drive carefully, Michael.
Yeah, bye!
Bye, good luck.
MAN:
Pretty boys like us
I did feel, on this journey,
that anything could happen
and you had to be able to deal with it.
At the same time,
there was a part of me
that really wanted to get this done
in less than 80 days.
From Saudi Arabia onwards,
began to lose days
four days behind.
So, it was a combination of frustration
because I wanted
to get the thing done properly
but exhilaration that we were having,
you know
These weird and wonderful things
were happening.
There are times when everything seems
to go wrong when you're travelling
and you just think
"Oh my gosh, what am I gonna do?"
and there's this intense frustration.
What was lovely about that moment
was that he
he showed that frustration,
he was like, "Urgh!"
But, um
but you find a way round, and he did.
He found a new way, a new route
and that was just brilliant and just lovely.
He just kept on going.
MICHAEL (VO): Today, Dubai resembles
a space—age city of the future.
When I got there, it was still a working port
on the Persian Gulf
and I needed a lift.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO: That I'd arrived
in Dubai at all was a small triumph
and I'm even more cheered
when I look out next morning
onto a most promising waterfront.
And at last, my first sight of a dhow.
Preceded by the provisions
I board our dhow, Al—Shama
which means "candlelight", in Arabic.
No one really spoke English, but the captain
spoke a few words of English.
The other 17 members of the crew
and our own crew
had to sleep there on that deck,
on those sacks and all that.
There was no cabins or anything.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
It's all very strange.
We're setting off for six days
on the high seas
out of radio contact
on a boat with not a lifebelt in sight.
We're heading out into the Persian Gulf
where nine years of war
are just coming to an end.
MICHAEL:
Nothing like this had been done before
which made the whole thing
quite sort of alarming,
but also exciting at the same time.
You were sort of making up the rules
as you went along.
ED: This is a totally beautiful
piece of television.
There's nothing rigged or contrived
or organised about this.
They are just out in the middle
of the ocean for days
with people who have done this journey,
just like this
every day for centuries, for generations
and so we're getting an insight
into the reality of how these guys live
in a way that
television finds
Would have found so hard to show
until Michael Palin and these guys
decided to do six days on a dhow.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
The plumbing is basic.
They favour the hole in the barrel system.
But using it is nowhere near as alarming
as getting to it.
The approach is scorchingly hot by day
and suicidal at night
but once installed,
one enjoys direct contact with nature.
This is rather a shock
and causes my bowels to lock solid
for three days.
ADE:
Oh, I remember this!
Yeah, I think it's kind of
a reoccurring theme with Michael
when he goes on boats,
he talks about his bowels
and how they get locked solid.
That's another thing you never talk about
but travellers only talk about your bowels,
"What's the water like?"
You know, "Oh, I had the runs,
I was constipated. I had this, that."
It becomes something that you don't
you don't get shy about.
It's terribly important.
I think the British public know more
about Michael's bowels
than his GP or his doctors.
I'm telling you, we all know that his bowels
are probably a national treasure.
HE LAUGHS
I've been on squatters, my God,
hanging out over precipices.
You've got to face up to grim—ish things.
You've got to know that maybe
you won't be able to shave.
You've got to know that sometimes
you're not seen in your best light
as it were, and you always want to
Even if you're a clown, which he is
an entertainer and not a vain man
which he's not remotely
you kind of want to look good onscreen,
and sometimes you can't.
H E G ROANS
Oh!
This is not for prime—time television.
Ah.
This is for indigestion, I hope he knows.
Short walk on the
MICHAEL GROANS
Englishman.
MICHAEL GRUNTS
Ah!
Being ill, and suddenly
old Kasim comes and walks all over me.
HE SIGHS
MICHAEL (VO): This was a time before
technology took over our lives.
The dhow had no sat—nav,
no wi—fi, no phone
and the crew navigated by sextant.
I felt a great curiosity
about the people I was with.
I wanted to get things on a personal level
and that's where the dhow really worked,
it had to be personal
because there was no way of us
getting away from anybody else.
MEN CHATTER AND CHUCKLE
SIMON: There was one moment in particular
that really stuck with me at the time
where he sat on this old dhow
with an older bloke
and Michael was listening
to this old Walkman
which, for anyone who's significantly
younger than me
was our early MP3 player type
It played something called a tape
and you had to press a button
and you had these headphones
that went over your head.
Now, you put them on like that.
OK?
How's that, Kasim, alright?
Now, prepare yourself
for a bit of Bruce Springsteen.
This may have very serious effect
but tell me to stop if you don't like it,
alright?
You like it?
Good beat?
MUSIC PLAYS FAI NTLY
This must be one of the oddest audiences
for The Wild, The Innocent
and the E Street Shuffle ever recorded.
It's good, isn't it?
MICHAEL CHUCKLES
SAILOR CHATTERS IN ARABIC
It was just brilliant and beautiful
and honestly, it was a bit of a revelation.
It was a "Oh, my goodness!
They're just like us,
these strange foreign people!"
And that was a big difference, on telly,
to what had gone before.
MICHAEL: It was supposed to be a five,
ten—minute sequence at most
and it was the
the editor who looked at all this and said
"I think it'll work better at 55 minutes"
and so the dhow
became a complete episode.
SAI LORS SING RHYTHMICALLY
THEY CONTINUE SINGING RHYTHMICALLY
MICHAEL:
"The grey mist is lifting
and revealing the Gateway of India.
So, the time comes to say goodbye
to the people in whose hands
we've entrusted our lives for the last week."
Bye—bye, Suleiman.
Bye—bye, Suleiman Two.
Bye—bye, Yousef.
Bye, Mohammed.
Bye.
— Bye!
Bye—bye, Arun.
Bye—bye, Yaqub.
Bye—bye, Kazmir. Oh!
Oh!
— SAILORS LAUGH
Oh, look at that, look at that!
Oh, thanks very much.
Very nice people, very good crew.
I'll always sail with you, thank you.
Oh, well, here we go.
It's about these people he meets
and those little moments
those little sparks of interaction
that are the purest joy of travel
and he shows us that, and he
he relates it to us
and we have it,
we keep it ourselves a little bit
we benefit from his little encounters.
CAR HORNS HONK
MICHAEL:
In India, there's so much going on
and so much to sort of take in.
This busy, seething city
in the middle of this busy,
seething country.
There was an awful lot happening
on the street
and we had to make sense of it
and make our way through it.
CROWD CHATTERS
We were then going to be staying
at the Taj Hotel
so, I went from seven days on the dhow
to this very expensive, posh hotel.
I was almost disgusted by what I saw.
I could see people sort of, you know
shouting at porters and things like that
and being very overbearing,
and just pointing at things
demanding things be done.
But it was a very powerful feeling
when I got to the Taj,
it was like I was sort of distanced from it
like I'd come from another planet
to see just how people behaved
in what we would call our familiar world.
Ah!
"Bombay is the most difficult place
to film yet."
CHILDREN CHATTER
"The people who stare at the camera,
the dripping humidity
the extraordinary locations."
VENDOR CHATTERS
"Watching a mongoose
driven to draw blood from a snake"
VENDOR CHATTERS
"in amongst grinding poverty.
It's wearing us all down."
I don't remember that, I
You know, I look back
on those journeys and think
"We all had such a wonderful time,"
but of course you didn't.
You know, you had doubts,
you had worries.
You got very tired, and of course,
filming in Bombay, it looks terrific
uh, in the end,
but actually, working through it
was pretty tough.
HORNS HONK
MICHAEL ON TAPE:
Dadar Station.
Twenty minutes before departure
of the Madras Express.
No one seems to know what they're doing.
People are being got in and out,
scrambling about, changing places.
Is this a permanent state of affairs?
I do notice on the book stall
there's a copy of Jeffrey Archer
and a copy of Spycatcher
in the middle of all this.
MICHAEL:
Yes, we weren't there for long.
Not just about destinations,
we've got to remember that the whole thing
is a journey which has to be done
in under 80 days.
TRAIN CHUGS
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
Are you travelling all the way to Madras?
Yes, from Bombay to Madras.
— Ah.
What will the, erm
what will the south be like?
I've never been there before.
— It's like another country.
SIMON: Of course, the programmes
are about Michael and his journey
of course they are,
but also I think, fundamentally
they're about the people he meets
and I think that's been one of
the great endearing, enduring
successes of his adventures.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
MICHAEL:
The Indians, they're very friendly people.
It was quite nice working there.
They were very involved
in what we were doing
and very interested
and genuinely felt that they could show us
a better way of doing it.
TRAIN HORN BLARES
MICHAEL ON TAPE:
Rather beautiful views down now to our right.
Fields, trees, stretches of water.
Now a party of children walking, um
along the downline, now.
Little kids with their plastic bags.
Striding off very purposefully.
Looks idyllic out there, really, for them.
It's the sort of thing that
never loses its appeal.
So, completely emotional and nostalgic,
I know.
There we are, you see, as I'm rambling on
expressing what is essentially
the heroic nature of train travel
which, from very early on,
when I was very young
there was something heroic about trains.
Just went through the cities
and through the country
and at a sublime confidence.
I would be happy to watch Michael Palin
look out the window of a train for an hour.
Like, I'm I don't know what it is!
He always looks so centred.
There's always such hustle and bustle
as he's trying to get on them
and there's always this missed connection
there's always,
"Will we make the boat?" It's just
You can feel him breathe,
and you breathe with him.
You kind of go, "Here we go.
We're making up time now.
We're going and we can watch"
I mean,
it's a great way to see a country.
There's a lot of little boy
in the whole enterprise, really
in all the travels.
I think when I've lost
the little boy sense of wonder, it's
I've lost something quite significant.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO: This magical train ride
will be my last overland journey
for quite a few days.
From Madras,
I caught a cargo ship to Singapore
and then a container ship on to Hong Kong
a new continent and a new culture
to try and get to grips with.
Good morning, Mr Palin.
Welcome to Hong Kong, sir.
— Thank you very much.
METAL CLANGS
MICHAEL (VO): But in some ways,
Hong Kong was just a prelude
to the most exciting stage
of the journey yet
Communist China itself
China and Saudi Arabia,
the only two countries on the journey
where you had that extra element of fear
of offending some authority
so, everything was potentially
much more loaded going into China.
MICHAEL ON TAPE:
Now, outside the window is China
my first glimpse of China.
It's, erm it's different from Hong Kong
because on the shoreline
there are a lot of small, thatched huts
standing in the water,
I suppose they're fisherman's huts.
A lot of small fishing boats.
Um, but it's a very broad
grey—green estuary here.
There was a frisson, going to China
because it was a communist country,
and communism then
was still a very sort of potent,
threatening image for Westerners
and it was not long after
the Mao Tse—tung era
people being forced to go off
to the fields and all that
so, I didn't quite know
what I was going to find.
I was enjoying being far from home.
This is what I wanted to travel for,
I wanted to find places
that were very different,
not similar to home.
Sometimes I see the programme of BBC
in our television.
— Yes?
And sometimes,
I listen, I listen to the radio.
Ah!
— BBC in shortwave.
Shortwave, shortwave.
— Yes. Shortwave, that's right.
SIMON: Look at the clothing there,
look at what they're wearing!
I mean, he's travelling
at such a fascinating time of change.
They're all in flipping Gucci and Levi's now.
That's what so cool about it.
It kind of feels like
you're being let into a world that
that's been forbidden.
MICHAEL ON VIDEO:
Shanghai is the largest city of China
with a population of more than 12 million.
Though the street atmosphere
feels medieval
there's a definite trickle of modern goods.
You can buy an electronic calculator
but the price will still be added up
on an abacus.
What I realised, as we went through China
was that the Chinese
were very, very preoccupied
with their own lives
and this enormous transition
from being a sort of agricultural
peasant economy
to an economy where big cities were growing
buildings were going up all the time.
So, something was going on in China
that preoccupied the Chinese completely
and that was the feeling in China
that there were a lot of things
you didn't know and you couldn't know
and they didn't want you to know,
and there was no way of finding out.
It wasn't sort of evident in
in sense of a sort of obvious oppression
people with guns,
pushing people around and all that.
But there was a kind of acceptance that
um, this was a huge,
potentially very powerful country
run by a sort of totalitarian government.
TRAIN HORN BLARES
ANNOUNCEMENT IN MANDARIN
MICHAEL: On the train, on the other hand,
there were one or two people to meet.
Trains are always good
because every sort of
estate of man or woman is
uses trains, you know,
from the richest to the poorest.
Do you, er, carry an umbrella with you
every day?
HE LAUGHS
Is that true or not?
No.
— No?
If I If I set out of the house
with an umbrella
I'd lose it within a day, anyway. No, no.
No, no, no.
— No, I don't, I just get wet.
Oh, just get wet. OK.
You get the impression,
"Oh, he just met that person
and it's rather a surprise to him
and the cameraman and everybody else
that they should actually have a conversation
and share a joke.
MICHAEL (VO):
Leaving, I felt we were on the home straight
even though we were still two oceans
and a continent away
from completing the circle.
From Japan, we sailed to California
a ten—day voyage that gave me time to reflect
on everything I'd seen and experienced.
Then, after one last epic train journey
right across America
we finally set sail for England.
"I lie in bed this morning
and seriously consider
what it would be like to be back home.
I think that the journey has, in a way,
calmed and settled me.
It's been much nearer to sanity
than the phone—ringing
celebrity—conscious world I left at home.
At sea, the pace of life
slows to a very agreeable level
and the thought of a return to city life
is not, this morning
as tempting as I expected it to be.
In fact
I could easily go round again."
There we are,
packing up my bag for the last time
on board the Danish ship, the Leda Maersk
that had taken us from
New York to Felixstowe
and look, I'm looking tired, let's face it.
AIR HISSES
It's been a long, long journey.
I've been on camera for
HE LAUGHS
79 days.
Look at that,
there's a man who's knackered.
Absolutely knackered, no acting required.
I want to get home, want to have a beer,
I want to get to bed.
We finally get to the Reform Club.
And, you know, this is wonderful.
We've done it in 79 days, seven hours.
We go up the steps
and one more indignity
ready to be heaped upon us.
Well, there we are,
this is the Reform Club.
This is where Phileas Fogg
started his journey.
This is where I began my journey
on September 25th 1988,
79 days and seven hours ago.
Unfortunately,
for reasons of their own
the Club do not want me to go in there
and film this afternoon
so, I have to say,
this is the end of the journey
on the pavement outside
104 Pall Mall, that's it.
MICHAEL: British Clubs, you know,
it's not about letting people in
it's about keeping people out.
So, I learnt a few lessons
about the English that day
which left me very depressed
for about a week.
HE CHUCKLES
MICHAEL (VO): Still, I was home,
reunited with my family
back in my old life
and anxiously waiting
for the moment of truth.
What would the viewers make
of my journey around the world?
JAYNE IRVING: And we're here to take
your calls on anything to do with television.
Let's have a look at what you've been
calling about already
in our Open Line.
PHONES DIAL AND RING
WOMAN:
Regarding Around the World in 80 Days
I have never enjoyed a programme so much.
He has taken me to
personally, to places I'd never seen.
So many of you have phoned in
about this programme last night
er, David Templeman from Camberley.
"Congratulations,
this is what television is all about."
MICHAEL:
The fact that it rated so highly was
a surprise, in a way, because there hadn't
been anything like that before
which was quite so sort of spontaneous
improvised, unplanned.
JOANNA:
It was game—changing.
It's changed travel
travel programmes forever.
SIMON:
Total beautiful melting mix of cultures
and just humanity shared.
MICHAEL:
I learnt that my desire to travel
my love of travel wasn't something false
wasn't something I had romanticised.
It was very real.
I didn't really ever expect it to unleash
all the other programmes
or the freedom to do other programmes.
This is it.
I'm standing on the top of the world!
Pole to Pole, this was a greater challenge.
You know,
countries that I'd never been to.
The USSR
and all the way through Africa.
Then to Antarctica itself.
Thrilling stuff.