TV Factual

    Author/Presenter: Michael Palin

One hundred years after the birth of Ernest Hemingway, Michael Palin sets out to discover the man behind the legend: a hard-drinking womaniser who liked cats and shooting – but wrote like a dream and left an indelible impression on the twentieth century through his work.

Fuelled by intensive reading for his best-selling novel, Hemingway’s Chair and, as always, driven by a desire to discover new places, Michael Palin attempts to put himself into Hemingway’s World. The past and the present intertwines, sometimes to startling effect, as Michael travels from Chicago to the forests and lakes of north Michigan, and from the First World War battlefields in Italy, to Paris, and Spain where he pauses to learn about the art of bullfighting and to experience Pamplona during the feria and the famous running of the bulls.

 He visits Venice at Carnival time and samples the infectious madness of the unique Fallas festival in Valencia with its burning effigies and ear-splitting fireworks. Hemingway’s wanderlust draws Michael to the island of Key West in Florida, once unspoilt, but where the Hemingway industry now flourishes and a look-alike competition is the high point of the centenary celebrations. It takes him …

Author/Presenter: Michael Palin

In the autumn of 1988 Michael Palin set out from the Reform Club to circumnavigate the world, following the route taken by Phileas Fogg 115 years earlier. The rules were simple. He had to make the ‘journey in 80 days and never use aircraft, only forms of transport that would have been available to Fogg.

But if the rules were simple, nothing else was. Palin’s Passepartout was not a loyal French manservant but a 5-person BBC film crew, there to record his every move. The golden age of sea travel with regular timetables and ocean liners was, he discovered, long since dead. State cabins and deck quoits were replaced by crowded Red Sea ferries, mattresses of date sacks on an open dhow, hospital beds on a Yugoslav freighter and bunks on eerily creaking container ships.

He discovered, too, that the days are past when a signed photo of Queen Victoria was enough to admit an Englishman anywhere. Passports, visas, customs forms, carnets delayed him at every frontier – and there were 17 of them.

Whether seeing Venice from the back of a rubbish barge, riding round the Pyramids on a camel called Michael, drifting helplessly in the …