Michael Palin - Extras
Michael Palin on…
Sheffield
'Sheffield, the place where I was born and brought up for the first 22 years of my life, had such a character. It still does. Unlike Manchester or Birmingham, which are pretenders for second-city status, Sheffield has it’s own particular character. It’s always been a little bit bloody-minded, but I like that. It has a good streak of independence. I think it’s partly because they used to make iron and steel there and it was dirty work. My father used to tell me about how he would go to the factories of Sheffield and the foundrymen would refuse to wear hard hats. They preferred to wear their own flat caps, felt they were nice and easy: they could take them off and cool themselves down with it. It took a long, long time before they could be persuaded to wear hard hats. There was molten steel pouring out all over the place and they were stood there in their flat caps. That’s very Sheffield.'
Travel heroes
'I’m an enormous admirer of David Attenborough. He talks about the world in such an uncluttered, down-to-earth, expert way. He delivers knowledge so lightly but, yet, so concisely. I don’t think travel is just about going out and covering the ground, admirable though that is. I admire the courage of the Shackletons and Scotts in this world enormously, but it’s also important to be able to write down and make sense of what you’ve discovered. So in a sense Darwin and Wallace, and people like that, are my sort of heroes. They might not seem so physically courageous but – my God – how they changed things. Their legacy was enormous. And John Hemming, the director before Rita [Gardner], was brilliant. His work in South America, the Incas, the Amazon... He goes everywhere, he does the journeys, but he also manages to describe them, and I think being able to communicate what you’ve seen is as important as the travel itself.'
Air travel
'I wouldn’t have been able to do half the travel I’ve done if it wasn’t for air travel, and I think travel is so important – I can’t go around saying, "Close airports, take airlines out of the sky". But when I say "travel", I mean going to a country and learning something about it, not just going on a cheap flight to the south of Spain to sit on a beach or in a bar (but it’s absolutely about freedom of choice, and maybe some of those people learn about Spain). And I think these are quite good times and part of that is cheap air fares. People haven’t been able to travel as much as they can now, and who am I, as a traveller, to say they shouldn’t do that? I think it’s a very, very difficult debate, but I would say it’s like any other debate – you can’t say, “You’ve got to stop this and do that”. You’ve got to make the alternative something attractive. So it’s not about being dogmatic and waving the finger, but some of the best journeys I’ve ever done in my life have been the slowest journeys: a battered old bus from Marrakech across the Atlas Mountains, and the week I spent on an old wooden dhow traveling from Dubai to Mumbai for Around the World in 80 Days.'
Slowing down
'I’ve travelled all over the world filming the series over a 20-year period, and one thing I’ve learned from people is to take your time. I’ve never have enough time in any one place. I just skim the surface and that’s it. But occasionally, the best moments have been when I can’t go anywhere else. Once, I was travelling down a river in Bangladesh and I met this wonderful woman, and she sang these songs. I can see in certain circumstances you’d think, “That’s all I need now – a Bangladeshi song in the middle of my busy life”, but in that place it was absolutely perfect. The song was related to the countryside, and the vulnerability of the landscape. I learnt more about flooding and renewal than I’d ever thought of before. Very often, we think only poor people come from Bangladesh, but it’s also a very rich country, and you get enormous rainfall so it’s very productive. And to hear someone celebrating that and saying these fields are only green like this because of all the rain, I thought, “Oooh, yeah, I’ve really learned something today by travelling slowly”.
Sheffield
'Sheffield, the place where I was born and brought up for the first 22 years of my life, had such a character. It still does. Unlike Manchester or Birmingham, which are pretenders for second-city status, Sheffield has it’s own particular character. It’s always been a little bit bloody-minded, but I like that. It has a good streak of independence. I think it’s partly because they used to make iron and steel there and it was dirty work. My father used to tell me about how he would go to the factories of Sheffield and the foundrymen would refuse to wear hard hats. They preferred to wear their own flat caps, felt they were nice and easy: they could take them off and cool themselves down with it. It took a long, long time before they could be persuaded to wear hard hats. There was molten steel pouring out all over the place and they were stood there in their flat caps. That’s very Sheffield.'
Travel heroes
'I’m an enormous admirer of David Attenborough. He talks about the world in such an uncluttered, down-to-earth, expert way. He delivers knowledge so lightly but, yet, so concisely. I don’t think travel is just about going out and covering the ground, admirable though that is. I admire the courage of the Shackletons and Scotts in this world enormously, but it’s also important to be able to write down and make sense of what you’ve discovered. So in a sense Darwin and Wallace, and people like that, are my sort of heroes. They might not seem so physically courageous but – my God – how they changed things. Their legacy was enormous. And John Hemming, the director before Rita [Gardner], was brilliant. His work in South America, the Incas, the Amazon... He goes everywhere, he does the journeys, but he also manages to describe them, and I think being able to communicate what you’ve seen is as important as the travel itself.'
Air travel
'I wouldn’t have been able to do half the travel I’ve done if it wasn’t for air travel, and I think travel is so important – I can’t go around saying, "Close airports, take airlines out of the sky". But when I say "travel", I mean going to a country and learning something about it, not just going on a cheap flight to the south of Spain to sit on a beach or in a bar (but it’s absolutely about freedom of choice, and maybe some of those people learn about Spain). And I think these are quite good times and part of that is cheap air fares. People haven’t been able to travel as much as they can now, and who am I, as a traveller, to say they shouldn’t do that? I think it’s a very, very difficult debate, but I would say it’s like any other debate – you can’t say, “You’ve got to stop this and do that”. You’ve got to make the alternative something attractive. So it’s not about being dogmatic and waving the finger, but some of the best journeys I’ve ever done in my life have been the slowest journeys: a battered old bus from Marrakech across the Atlas Mountains, and the week I spent on an old wooden dhow traveling from Dubai to Mumbai for Around the World in 80 Days.'
Slowing down
'I’ve travelled all over the world filming the series over a 20-year period, and one thing I’ve learned from people is to take your time. I’ve never have enough time in any one place. I just skim the surface and that’s it. But occasionally, the best moments have been when I can’t go anywhere else. Once, I was travelling down a river in Bangladesh and I met this wonderful woman, and she sang these songs. I can see in certain circumstances you’d think, “That’s all I need now – a Bangladeshi song in the middle of my busy life”, but in that place it was absolutely perfect. The song was related to the countryside, and the vulnerability of the landscape. I learnt more about flooding and renewal than I’d ever thought of before. Very often, we think only poor people come from Bangladesh, but it’s also a very rich country, and you get enormous rainfall so it’s very productive. And to hear someone celebrating that and saying these fields are only green like this because of all the rain, I thought, “Oooh, yeah, I’ve really learned something today by travelling slowly”.
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