Into Iraq: Michael Palin

Product Information

A fascinating and rare insight into the history and culture of Iraq, by Britain's best-loved travel writer. Behind Palin, on the wall, there is a picture of him with the then Prince of Wales. The new King is a Monty Python fan and Palin recently attended Camilla the new Queen Consort's 75th birthday lunch – he shows me a card from her thanking him for one of his books. Palin went on to read Modern History at Oxford – it was there he performed his first comedy material at a Christmas party. Afterwards, life took off rapidly: he married Helen Gibbins, a farmer’s daughter, in 1966, a year after graduating, by which time he was also writing for various TV shows including The Frost Report, whose cast included John Cleese, later his Monty Python collaborator. But it wasn’t until the late 1980s that his travel broadcasting career accelerated, following BBC documentary series, Around the World in 80 Days. The theoretical spine of this new journey is the Tigris. In truth it feels less like a picturesque profile of a river than a line to follow on a map which took him to places where stories cluster: in this first episode, the story of Kurdish identity, or of life with and after Islamic State. There is also joy when Palin goes to the mountain town of Akre for the celebrations of Nou Roz – the Kurdish New Year. The place is crowded and chaotic and the celebrations are loud and exuberant.

Sir Michael Edward Palin, KCMG, CBE, FRGS is an English comedian, actor, writer and television presenter best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for his travel documentaries.The Arts Theatre, Botanic Avenue, Belfast, birthplace of my first-ever one-man show. It doesn’t look much, but it meant a lot to me. The end of the railway bridge can beseen rising on the left. Noise from passing trains could kill a joke. It’s not there any more. Photo credit: Northern Ireland Historical Photographical Society You just see this devastation and they are smiling," he says. "It’s quite something in the middle of all this. I was very moved." The interest in war-battered Iraq is really pleasing. I feel people are interested in how countries get through tough times. Not that I really needed to leave our shores. Always balanced - he has always possessed an open and friendly conversational style. Although not a journalist he is well read and seems to find the balance between people and place. Consequently, he brings clarity and charm to the places he goes and humour in all his interactions.

I’m really sorry it’s been so long since my last post, and for all those of you who still find time to read this stuff I should follow my apology with an explanation. The first couple of months of the year were spent in the great waiting room of life whilst the possibility of another travel series was being debated. In the meantime I spent thirty hours in a basement studio in Clerkenwell trying to stop my tummy rumbling as I recorded the unabridged version of my first volume of Diaries, The Python Years. Voormalige en huidige grote steden liggen op zijn pad: Mosul, Bagdad, Babylon, Basra, ... Waar de gelegenheid zich aandient gaat Michael Palin op zoek naar geschiedenis, maar hij heeft tegelijkertijd veel aandacht voor het roerige nabije verleden en de toestand vandaag. Ontmoetingen met gewone mensen onderweg krijgen veel aandacht. Diaries are quite personal things, they’re not like a blog which anyone can see. Also, [my family] are there living the life around me, so they probably didn’t feel the need. In the south of Iraq, Palin found a place dominated by the Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr and his acolytes, a land whose very seriousness seemed to go against everything he stands for. ‘In southern Iraq people didn’t look at you in the eye, they didn’t come up to you in the street,’ he says. ‘What they seemed to care most about was ensuring that their version of the Koran At the same time, Michael charts the course of one of the great rivers of the world, showing how the water that gave life to such ancient settlements as Babylon and Ur is now becoming a scarce and hotly contested resource. And he considers the role that Iraq's other great natural resource - oil - plays in both providing wealth and threatening political stability.

In May, as my 79th birthday rolled by, despite my trying to ignore it, I worked through my Iraq diaries and voice recordings whilst they were still fresh in my mind and within a month had put together a book of the journey. Last year, Palin disclosed that his wife had moved into respite care after she failed to respond to pain medication. That response becomes more muted as the journey plays out. There’s a hopefulness in Kurdistan, typified by a young man he meets in Mosul who describes in detail all he has witnessed, then confesses to loving British literature. ‘He’d been through five years of IS occupation,’ Palin tells me. ‘He would have been killed if they’d found his phone. To come through all that and say, “I love Jane Austen”!’ Having grown up watching him on television – first in Monty Python, then in his second career as a travel writer and explorer – it’s almost unsettling to see how much he still looks like the young actor who shaped the world of comedy in the 1970s and ’80s, despite being 79, a knight of the realm and a grandfather of four.

Rather undoing this image of a man stepping cautiously through late life is the fact that Palin has just returned from Iraq, where he set off fireworks with Kurds, drove through mountains where IS militants were in hiding, and suffered the discomforts and indignities of travel in a country little prepared for tourists of any age.Michael Palin: Into Iraq airs on Channel 5 at 9pm on Tuesday 20 September. His book of the same name (published by Hutchinson Heinemann) is out on Thursday. Two episodes of the series have now been transmitted and from the latest figures it looks as if some 2 million people have been getting into Iraq each week. And yesterday was the first night of my stage tour, From North Korea Into Iraq. Friendly audience at the Arts Depot in North Finchley for a mixture of photos, reminiscences, and some of the most memorable clips from the series. Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and permeated with his warmth and humour, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country. In the diaries he has been publishing since 2006, Michael Palin reveals a vulnerable side in his habit of recording the compliments paid to him. It’s as if his confidence needs to be shored up by the praise of others. Well, he can another one to the list, because Michael Palin: Into Iraq (Channel 5) is a worthy addition to his long travelography. He has a high opinion of the monarch and seems to suggest that he, and his work ethic, have been underestimated. ‘When Charles and Camilla travel around the world, they connect very easily with people. I know Charles... sometimes looks a bit formal, but he does have a real ease with people, which I think is so important. I’m very pro him.