ALWAYS LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE
Palin’s travels take him deep into a little-known spot
North Korea Journal
Michael Palin Random House
Michael Palin has experienced two memorable birthdays in his lifetime.
The first happened 46 years ago on the day he turned 30. He and his Monty Python pals were performing live at the Birmingham Hippodrome, and he was hoping the gang might get together afterward for a quiet birthday drink. But no.
“We ended the show doing the dead parrot sketch,” Palin says. “And then onto the stage comes Eric Idle’s mother bearing a cake. And the whole audience, about 3,500, sang Happy Birthday.”
Palin figured at the time that nothing could match that birthday party. But he was wrong.
“My 75th topped that in surreal quality,” he says with a chuckle. That was the day that began with Palin in a field in North Korea helping with the weeding. And what was he doing in the world’s most secretive and paranoid country? Well, he was on Day 10 of a visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — where he was filming a two-part documentary for Britain’s Channel 5 television.
Palin had arrived at a co-operative farm as part of his mission to get a glimpse of life in the countryside, and even here he was conscious of being under the watchful eye of the state and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. “The ubiquitous patriotic music blares out across the fields, and each plot is marked with red flags,” Palin reports in his latest book, the witty and observant North Korea Journal.
On this day, he joined a farmer named Mrs. Kim in weeding a plowed field in final preparation for a crop of corn and beans. It seems he was awful at this task. Mrs. Kim tersely declared that his presence was “unnecessary” — an observation that led Palin to jot down this note in his journal: “not really what you want to hear … especially on your birthday.”
By the end of a day that would also have them touring an airport devoid of passengers, Palin and his colleagues were tired, hot and hungry.
Arriving at their approved restaurant, they were led into a room surprisingly decorated with balloons. Palin’s Korean minders, their customary reticence thrown to the wind, materialized bearing flowers and an enormous cake, and then joined in a robust Anglo-korean chorus of Happy Birthday.
“They were all very friendly and got me this huge cake and they gave me gifts, and they all smiled and we had a good evening,” Palin says. He’s on the phone from his home in London, where he’s recovering from recent heart surgery. And yes, he sees that night in 2018 as “the most extraordinary and wonderful birthday of my life.”
It was also one of those occasions that saw some relaxation in the careful demeanour maintained by his Korean minders, who were ever fearful that something might happen to give offence to the Supreme Leader. That surprise party helped Palin in his quest to give North Korea a human face.
“Travel isn’t just ticking off the number of countries you’ve been to and trying to find a comfortable hotel,” says Palin, whose books and documentaries have taken to him to many countries. “You’ve got to absorb the place, you have to live close to the people as much as you can, and that’s more difficult in
North Korea because all the people we met were kind of ‘lined up’ for us — the schoolchildren, the farmers in fields, whatever.”
What surprised him was that he enjoyed himself far more than he expected. He never felt threatened — “at no point did I feel I’d be thrown into prison if I did something wrong” — but he was aware that he and his crew were under close surveillance. “They watched most of our moves … but they were relatively friendly after the first few days.”
But he did blunder in photographing an imposing statue of Kim Il-sung, revered founder of the ruling dynasty, from the rear.
“That was my big faux pas,” Palin admits. “There was this huge statue of Kim in this military outfit. I thought it was a fine piece of work. It was very impressive — about 60 feet high. So I thought I’d wander around and have a look at it. I took photos from the front and then I took a photo from behind — which I thought was rather striking — and was immediately told to put the camera away because it was very disrespectful to photograph one of the Great Leaders from behind.”
Palin is still trying to get his head
around the degree of reverence shown the present dictator, Kim Jong-un, and his predecessors.
“I think what shocked me the most was that intelligent people in this country absolutely believed in the god-like status of the Kim family. Even with the brightest people we met, you could not mention a single thing that might be deemed ‘irreverent.’ I at first thought it might be due to fear of the police and that sort of thing, but to be honest I didn’t see much evidence of that.”
This is a nation paranoid about contact with the outside world. “You can’t watch foreign television, you can’t use iphones that connect outside and they have their own controlled internet system inside the country.”
But Palin also found a country of endless fascination — where he would awaken in his Pyongyang hotel room every morning to citywide speakers broadcasting the hymn Where Are You, Dear General? and where barber shops offer 15 state-approved styles of haircut.
Palin’s earlier claim to fame is the surrealistic comedy of Monty Python. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the troupe’s founding, and Palin talks of those early days with affection.
“This later career is the very thick extra icing on the cake,” he says now. But it has also instilled in him a sense of responsibility. In the course of televised travels now going back nearly four decades, finding a country’s beating heart is always what counts for him.
“That’s what drives me on in my travels — trying to find the real people in a particular country. What can I learn from them? I’d never go anywhere and say, ‘this is a basket case,’ and just look for the worst. I tend to look for the best.”
I think what shocked me the most was that intelligent people in this country absolutely believed in the god-like status of the Kim family. Michael Palin