Around the world with the perfect Englishman abroad
Journalists should not bring their biases to work, but I’m afraid on this occasion it couldn’t be helped. I knew I was going to award five stars to the first episode of Michael Palin: Travels of a Lifetime (BBC Two), before it even began. It revisited Around the World in 80 Days, the series Palin made in 1988. And that series is, without question, the best travel programme ever made.
I watched Travels of a Lifetime twice, just for the joy of it. The voyage from Dubai to Bombay in a dhow, in the company of an Indian crew who barely spoke a word of English, remains the most wonderful piece of television. The programme’s editor thought so too, Palin told us, turning what should have been a 10 minute clip into an entire episode. Who could resist the sight of Palin and an elderly crew member bopping away to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on a Sony Walkman? And when Palin said goodbye in Bombay, after a week together at sea, and told them: “I’ll always sail with you,” well, it was lump-in-the-throat time.
And there were other moments that had somehow lodged themselves in the memory for more than 30 years. The Egyptian ship’s captain with a love for Liverpool. The Bombay street barber offering shaves with a cutthroat razor. The hairy carriage ride through Alexandria, with Palin joking: “I feel like Ben Hur on the M1.”
Nowadays it is perfectly normal for the camera to follow a presenter for weeks on end, but Palin was a pioneer. Not that he was the first Englishman to report from abroad; the programme replayed the moment Palin sat down with Alan Whicker and asked the great man for advice on what to do if things go wrong. “You must always speak English,” Whicker told him. “You must say, ‘Do you mind standing aside? Excuse me, BBC Television.’”
Palin wasn’t sure what his approach would be, but as the journey got going we saw him stick to some fundamental principles: be open to new experiences, and treat everyone you meet as fellow human beings rather than foreigners. As he said of his dhow voyage: “I can’t imagine any other circumstances in which you’d become so close, so quickly, to people quite different from us in wealth, class, race and religion.” And I can’t imagine a better travelling companion. Anita Singh
At 94, there are few corners of the globe to which David Attenborough hasn’t ventured, ever since exploring Sierra Leone for the BBC’S Zoo Quest in 1954. Back then, no one tuning in had ever seen a pangolin before. Over the better part of a century, Attenborough’s been in an ideal position to observe how our natural world has changed – and how this environmental crisis is one we’ve brought upon ourselves.
A Life on Our Planet (Netflix), is described by Attenborough as a “witness statement”, and offers a series of reflections on his career, amounting in part to a greatest-hits travelogue with the clock ticking on climate change. As our elder statesman of natural history, he’s never seemed more of an ambassador for protecting endangered species and safeguarding the wild places we still have left.
Borneo’s rainforests are a case in point. Attenborough visited the island in 1956, where he encountered an orangutan in the wild for the first time. The rampant logging of the forests have halved Borneo’s tree cover since he first went there, and the orangutan population – to pick just one species threatened by the industry – is projected to drop 82 per cent by 2025.
The film has something of a whistlestop quality, and you occasionally wish it would slow down to savour more personal details. There’s a sciencefictional middle act where Attenborough intuits the various apocalypses awaiting us, but the brightest idea is the film’s framing device. The first we see of Attenborough, he’s treading through the skeletal ruins of Chernobyl, picking over the fragments of Pripyat. The site remains one of the eeriest reminders of what unchecked human rapacity can cost us.
But a pull-back awaits – to the overgrown surroundings, with foxes wandering through old homes. It’s a neat fit with Attenborough’s mission statement to “re-wild the world”. He says our population must be stabilised. Our diets need recalibrating with less meat consumption. The oceans should be respected as a resource; fossil fuels phased out. These programmes of action are old news, but it doesn’t make them any less urgent. Take it from Attenborough. Tim Robey
Michael Palin: Travels of a Lifetime
★★★★★
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet ★★★