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Catriona Luke talks to TV star Michael Palin about his travels in the Himalayas, the joys of community and the future of mankind
It is nine years since Michael Palin made a tour of northern Pakistan for the BBC as part of a longer journey over the Himalayan rooftop to Bangladesh via Nepal, Tibet and China's Yunnan province that has long since vanished into the ether. But he kept a diary that was published (Himalaya, 2004) and among the nice details about the hats with red pom-poms that Malik Ata Muhammed Khan's bulls wore, the curious gazes of the Kalash women and a trip to the dentist in Qissa Kwani Bazaar, there was a simple line: 'Pakistan was a revelation.'
We're sitting on the second floor of the premises of his production company in London, a pleasantly tumble-down house with a very faint musty smell around the hallway, as he takes a break from editing a four-part journey through Brazil for the BBC which is due to go out in the late autumn. That makes seven long-haul trips with a camera crew which began in 1988 with a circumnavigation of the globe in 80 days and now includes north pole to south pole, Sahara, Pakistan to Bangladesh via Nepal, Tibet and Yunnan province, and a peregrination through eastern Europe by train, a total of about 80,000 km the vast majority of which has been covered by land on trains and buses.
Although his head must be full of Brazil, he's kindly agreed to cast his mind back to the trip he made to northern Pakistan in 2003. As his diaries show, this was quite a time in the May heat: watching bull-racing with Malik Ata Muhammed Khan, visiting the Kalash, as the guest of Siraj Ul-Mulk in Chitral, up to K2, down to the Muree brewery and on Yusuf Salahuddin's introductions night-filming in Lahore with Shaan Shahid. On heading to the Wagah border, he wrote: 'Give or take a few cold beers, I leave it with regret.'
"I want to go back very much," he says. "Everyone in Pakistan was so friendly, I felt very endeared towards the country." With the advantage of crossing the border at Wagah - "the superficial things were different, like women on motorbikes on the Indian side, but the landscape and architecture were the same" - he remembers that he felt that Pakistanis knew they were being unfavourably compared with India, but weren't going to apologise for being themselves.
His view of the Pakistani character is that people were playing less of a role as citizens. In India ("I'm just as fond of the country," he wants to make clear) there is a conscious national identity and to some degree this was about being quite full of itself. "India very much does ring its bell, the world's largest democracy and so on and it appears to bristle with self-confidence, and is certainly more pleased with itself, whereas in comparison and because in my travels it had less self-conscious identities it seemed to me that Pakistan felt freer," although he says he can't claim to have visited the whole country and his journey was limited to the north.
I ask if there has been one indelible mind image, something that comes back to him years later but with regularity. "The mountains and the Chitral valley - we were very fortunate to get into it. Chitral was a near image of what is the cliche of Shangri-La, and as close to it as I have ever come. The view from the Hindu Kush hotel of the valley and the river and then at 180 degrees the huge peaks, the Karakorum and the Pamir mountains. I've not seen anything else in the world like it."
A gunsmith in Darra Adam Khel
He thinks the country is missing a trick on lots of levels. "India has literary festivals all the time, and there should be one in Lahore," and the night filming he watched at Lahore's Bari studios was less formal and more fun than Bollywood. He thinks he was meant to feel crossing the border into India that he was coming from the provinces into the 'big city', but Lahore is a very fine city and he was very taken with the Badshahi Mosque and the fort. "And Pakistan has a lovely, old-fashioned quality. There was a great feeling of gusto and enjoyment amongst the ordinary people, many of whom were very poor, wherever we went." He's keen to stress that he and the crew never felt threatened and this was just two months after the US and UK invasion of Iraq.
I remark that Pakistanis are also very funny people and amongst the educated urban young Monty Python clips often do the rounds on twitter. A Lahore friend used to describe Pakistan to me as an 'upside down, back to front country', and when the BBC's Aleem Maqbool narrated an encounter with a local businessman and landowner at Mianwali who told him that India had caused the rainfall that drowned a fifth of the country in 2010 because "Don't you know they have the technology to create artificial clouds and send them across the border?" it seemed to me that Pakistan struggles not so much with magic realism, but with Monty Pythonism - "and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped." King Arthur: "This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes - into which, like antidotes to phlegmy sneezy viruses come the remedy of cunning plans."
Palin laughs and says, actually, there were a couple of Monty Pythonesque episodes in Pakistan when they made their journey. The bull-racing on Malik Ata Muhammed Khan's estate - "Who would think up the idea of racing a bull on a tin tray? No one ever got the end and the bulls didn't want to do it anyway and as quickly as they could having got rid of their riders they wandered off into the countryside." They went to Darra Adam Khel, a "potentially very dangerous place for us two months after the invasion of Iraq by the US and UK. We were handed over from the care of the Peshawar police to the NWF police." At one point a young man became a little aggressive in conversation and Palin says for the first time he felt quite glad of an escort, except when he looked around there was absolutely no-one to be seen. "Eventually I tracked them down to the main street where the ten frontier corps police standing in a line beaming having their picture taken by our photographer Basil Pao."
Before Palin started going round the world with suitcases, he used to spend his time making people laugh. This, after all, is the man who gave the world's two billion Internet users the term 'Spam' in the sketch with Terry Jones. I will him to have come up with the line 'He's not the messiah. He's a very naughty boy' in The Life of Brian, but when I ask him he just says, "Can't remember. It was a group thing." I have a soft spot for the Proletariat sketch from the Holy Grail particularly. "I told you," he says, "we're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to be a sort of executive officer for the week..." The Life of Brian, which was about unthinking religiosity, got them into enormous trouble, but John Cleese's Silly Walks clip almost certainly paved the way for Yes Minister. Maybe making people laugh and traveling the world have a common basis?
Human beings are basically good, Palin thinks. "I've met more people I like and admire than the opposite. The point of traveling is to be open, to enjoy the differences and to learn. You have to leave your preconceived ideas at home." But 25 years of filming and writing his travels has interestingly made Palin more critical of the West.
"We have societies in the west arranged around the creation of wealth, in order to keep other people in work. It has created all kinds of problems, people trying to deal with what happens when you are comfortable. In the UK we're in an individualistic post-Enlightenment society... " I think it's a little harsh, but he carries on: "We've gone from being communities that look after each other in the West to functioning as economic units and we don't know what to do about it. In poorer parts of the world people feel a responsibility to their communities."
Shandur - The hills are alive.Pitch invasion after Gilgit's victory. The red roof of the permanent stand is in the far distance.
He says Western consumerism and obsession with money embarrasses him when he goes round the world. He's most content when he's in contact with the poorest. "If you're a traveller, you are welcomed and protected and made safe. In the West, for example in California, if people are very rich you can't get near them because their houses are so barricaded. Western society sees other people as a threat. Pakistan was a very easy country to work in because people were leading simple lives, they were leading successful lives."
I ask who are the happiest people he has met on his travels. There isn't a flicker of hesitation and his choice is a Muslim community in the south of the Philippines. "This is a community that is marginalised, living in a shanty town built on stilts in the city of Zamboanga. It's a refuge, just like the favelas in Brazil. But the people who live there don't behave as if they feel oppressed at all. They had made a mosque and its roof was made of beaten tin cans. They were so proud of it." Nothing, he says, makes him feel better than seeing places where there's pride instead of fear.
I remind him of his account of queuing up behind Flashman's hotel for whisky and his one slight acknowledgement of personal thoughts about religion ("agnostic - with doubts"). I ask if he had had any spirtual experiences in his travels, where something suddenly makes sense. There's an abrupt "No" and then a short laugh. "It doesn't happen like that." Hours later I feel I missed something there and that he was going to tell me something interesting about how things maybe come together over a long period of time. But he's off for the first and only time into Monty Pythonism and The Life of Brian - "The sign, the sign" .... "There is no sign".
"Travelling has made me much more at ease with the world. Mankind isn't doomed..." I interject that hedgehogs have been around for 15 million years and they have just found that there were palm trees in Antarctica 53 million years ago, and we humans on those timelines are just on the nursery slopes, so it's not looking too great to me for human life, but he's having none of it. His assistant comes in to say that he's going to be late to have lunch with his publisher, so half out of the door almost as an afterthought and despite his protests, something almost spiritual comes through.
"We're not doomed. We're very skilful at adapting and we're on a strange fortuitous journey."
Interview: "I want to go back to Pakistan very much" by Catriona Luke
It is nine years since Michael Palin made a tour of northern Pakistan for the BBC as part of a longer journey over the Himalayan rooftop to Bangladesh via Nepal, Tibet and China's Yunnan province that has long since vanished into the ether. But he kept a diary that was published (Himalaya, 2004) and among the nice details about the hats with red pom-poms that Malik Ata Muhammed Khan's bulls wore, the curious gazes of the Kalash women and a trip to the dentist in Qissa Kwani Bazaar, there was a simple line: 'Pakistan was a revelation.'
We're sitting on the second floor of the premises of his production company in London, a pleasantly tumble-down house with a very faint musty smell around the hallway, as he takes a break from editing a four-part journey through Brazil for the BBC which is due to go out in the late autumn. That makes seven long-haul trips with a camera crew which began in 1988 with a circumnavigation of the globe in 80 days and now includes north pole to south pole, Sahara, Pakistan to Bangladesh via Nepal, Tibet and Yunnan province, and a peregrination through eastern Europe by train, a total of about 80,000 km the vast majority of which has been covered by land on trains and buses.
Although his head must be full of Brazil, he's kindly agreed to cast his mind back to the trip he made to northern Pakistan in 2003. As his diaries show, this was quite a time in the May heat: watching bull-racing with Malik Ata Muhammed Khan, visiting the Kalash, as the guest of Siraj Ul-Mulk in Chitral, up to K2, down to the Muree brewery and on Yusuf Salahuddin's introductions night-filming in Lahore with Shaan Shahid. On heading to the Wagah border, he wrote: 'Give or take a few cold beers, I leave it with regret.'
"I want to go back very much," he says. "Everyone in Pakistan was so friendly, I felt very endeared towards the country." With the advantage of crossing the border at Wagah - "the superficial things were different, like women on motorbikes on the Indian side, but the landscape and architecture were the same" - he remembers that he felt that Pakistanis knew they were being unfavourably compared with India, but weren't going to apologise for being themselves.
His view of the Pakistani character is that people were playing less of a role as citizens. In India ("I'm just as fond of the country," he wants to make clear) there is a conscious national identity and to some degree this was about being quite full of itself. "India very much does ring its bell, the world's largest democracy and so on and it appears to bristle with self-confidence, and is certainly more pleased with itself, whereas in comparison and because in my travels it had less self-conscious identities it seemed to me that Pakistan felt freer," although he says he can't claim to have visited the whole country and his journey was limited to the north.
I ask if there has been one indelible mind image, something that comes back to him years later but with regularity. "The mountains and the Chitral valley - we were very fortunate to get into it. Chitral was a near image of what is the cliche of Shangri-La, and as close to it as I have ever come. The view from the Hindu Kush hotel of the valley and the river and then at 180 degrees the huge peaks, the Karakorum and the Pamir mountains. I've not seen anything else in the world like it."
A gunsmith in Darra Adam Khel
He thinks the country is missing a trick on lots of levels. "India has literary festivals all the time, and there should be one in Lahore," and the night filming he watched at Lahore's Bari studios was less formal and more fun than Bollywood. He thinks he was meant to feel crossing the border into India that he was coming from the provinces into the 'big city', but Lahore is a very fine city and he was very taken with the Badshahi Mosque and the fort. "And Pakistan has a lovely, old-fashioned quality. There was a great feeling of gusto and enjoyment amongst the ordinary people, many of whom were very poor, wherever we went." He's keen to stress that he and the crew never felt threatened and this was just two months after the US and UK invasion of Iraq.
I remark that Pakistanis are also very funny people and amongst the educated urban young Monty Python clips often do the rounds on twitter. A Lahore friend used to describe Pakistan to me as an 'upside down, back to front country', and when the BBC's Aleem Maqbool narrated an encounter with a local businessman and landowner at Mianwali who told him that India had caused the rainfall that drowned a fifth of the country in 2010 because "Don't you know they have the technology to create artificial clouds and send them across the border?" it seemed to me that Pakistan struggles not so much with magic realism, but with Monty Pythonism - "and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped." King Arthur: "This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes - into which, like antidotes to phlegmy sneezy viruses come the remedy of cunning plans."
Palin laughs and says, actually, there were a couple of Monty Pythonesque episodes in Pakistan when they made their journey. The bull-racing on Malik Ata Muhammed Khan's estate - "Who would think up the idea of racing a bull on a tin tray? No one ever got the end and the bulls didn't want to do it anyway and as quickly as they could having got rid of their riders they wandered off into the countryside." They went to Darra Adam Khel, a "potentially very dangerous place for us two months after the invasion of Iraq by the US and UK. We were handed over from the care of the Peshawar police to the NWF police." At one point a young man became a little aggressive in conversation and Palin says for the first time he felt quite glad of an escort, except when he looked around there was absolutely no-one to be seen. "Eventually I tracked them down to the main street where the ten frontier corps police standing in a line beaming having their picture taken by our photographer Basil Pao."
Before Palin started going round the world with suitcases, he used to spend his time making people laugh. This, after all, is the man who gave the world's two billion Internet users the term 'Spam' in the sketch with Terry Jones. I will him to have come up with the line 'He's not the messiah. He's a very naughty boy' in The Life of Brian, but when I ask him he just says, "Can't remember. It was a group thing." I have a soft spot for the Proletariat sketch from the Holy Grail particularly. "I told you," he says, "we're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to be a sort of executive officer for the week..." The Life of Brian, which was about unthinking religiosity, got them into enormous trouble, but John Cleese's Silly Walks clip almost certainly paved the way for Yes Minister. Maybe making people laugh and traveling the world have a common basis?
Human beings are basically good, Palin thinks. "I've met more people I like and admire than the opposite. The point of traveling is to be open, to enjoy the differences and to learn. You have to leave your preconceived ideas at home." But 25 years of filming and writing his travels has interestingly made Palin more critical of the West.
"We have societies in the west arranged around the creation of wealth, in order to keep other people in work. It has created all kinds of problems, people trying to deal with what happens when you are comfortable. In the UK we're in an individualistic post-Enlightenment society... " I think it's a little harsh, but he carries on: "We've gone from being communities that look after each other in the West to functioning as economic units and we don't know what to do about it. In poorer parts of the world people feel a responsibility to their communities."
Shandur - The hills are alive.Pitch invasion after Gilgit's victory. The red roof of the permanent stand is in the far distance.
He says Western consumerism and obsession with money embarrasses him when he goes round the world. He's most content when he's in contact with the poorest. "If you're a traveller, you are welcomed and protected and made safe. In the West, for example in California, if people are very rich you can't get near them because their houses are so barricaded. Western society sees other people as a threat. Pakistan was a very easy country to work in because people were leading simple lives, they were leading successful lives."
I ask who are the happiest people he has met on his travels. There isn't a flicker of hesitation and his choice is a Muslim community in the south of the Philippines. "This is a community that is marginalised, living in a shanty town built on stilts in the city of Zamboanga. It's a refuge, just like the favelas in Brazil. But the people who live there don't behave as if they feel oppressed at all. They had made a mosque and its roof was made of beaten tin cans. They were so proud of it." Nothing, he says, makes him feel better than seeing places where there's pride instead of fear.
I remind him of his account of queuing up behind Flashman's hotel for whisky and his one slight acknowledgement of personal thoughts about religion ("agnostic - with doubts"). I ask if he had had any spirtual experiences in his travels, where something suddenly makes sense. There's an abrupt "No" and then a short laugh. "It doesn't happen like that." Hours later I feel I missed something there and that he was going to tell me something interesting about how things maybe come together over a long period of time. But he's off for the first and only time into Monty Pythonism and The Life of Brian - "The sign, the sign" .... "There is no sign".
"Travelling has made me much more at ease with the world. Mankind isn't doomed..." I interject that hedgehogs have been around for 15 million years and they have just found that there were palm trees in Antarctica 53 million years ago, and we humans on those timelines are just on the nursery slopes, so it's not looking too great to me for human life, but he's having none of it. His assistant comes in to say that he's going to be late to have lunch with his publisher, so half out of the door almost as an afterthought and despite his protests, something almost spiritual comes through.
"We're not doomed. We're very skilful at adapting and we're on a strange fortuitous journey."
Interview: "I want to go back to Pakistan very much" by Catriona Luke
