Michael Palin on the Philippines, China and the Fish-Slapping Dance

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The president suddenly appears and he says, Michael Palin. Oh, yes. I'm so glad to meet you. And it turned out he was really interested in how we'd written Monty Python. I was trying to get, you know, the diplomacy that's being worked out with the Chinese. And he just wanted to know about the fish slapping dance.

Michael Palin. Actor. Comedian. author and traveller. And where do you think or dream of going next?

I don't know. I'm at the stage, Michelle, at the moment of not knowing whether I'm going to travel again.

So you really might not do a journey like this one again?

Well, never say never.

From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain. Way back in the 1980s, someone in British television production had the idea of getting one of the Monty Python actors to front travel programmes. Let's give it a go, I imagine them saying. He's popular. People will watch.

And they did. Michael Palin went from railway journeys to recreating Jules Verne's epic Around the World in 80 Days and travelling from pole to pole. Since then, his travels have taken him to more than 100 countries, with books accompanying the programmes, each of them based on the diaries that he keeps along the way. He's been to places that are incredibly scenic and incredibly hard, inhospitable even, to visitors, like North Korea. In fact, the harder journeys are the ones that he's focused on in recent years– Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela– And when we heard that he was just back from his latest trip across the islands that make up the Philippines, we knew we wanted to hear about it. It turned out that most of us on the team had a

Palin book squirreled away somewhere at home. Producer Chris brought in his grandparents' copy of Around the World in 80 Days, the book that he said made him want to see the world. Producer Jess had a volume of Monty Python dialogue. And in the end, there was a whole collection of books here on the table in the studio when Michael Palin came in. Today, some people's main hope is that the Pythons will gather again to make us laugh. I was curious, too, to ask about the impact of what are pretty gruelling trips on Michael himself, whether traveling will continue to be part of his life. So this is a conversation about seeing the world, about capturing people and places on camera and the written word, and really about

finding common ground with strangers, because that's what Michael Palin does time and again. The new book and TV series is called Michael Palin in the Philippines. And as ever, Bloomberg subscribers can find more in my written notes which are at bloomberg.com forward slash Michelle. And here's what happened when Michael Palin walked into our studio in London.

Oh, dear.

You've spotted the bugs.

Yes.

I tell you what's rather lovely about this particular collection is that this is very organic. They've all been gathered from members of the team. This is actually producer Chris's grandparents' copy of Around the World, which... first interested him in the wider world. So you've had this incredible impact on.

Well, Around the World in 80 Days, which for me had the least kind of intense travel content of all the ones I've done, remains the one which people really love. And when they talk about being encouraged to travel, they always go around to 80 Days.

Why do you mean it wasn't that intense?

Because a lot of it was just, you know, it was a game. We had to get there in 80 Days. A lot of it was just on big ships crossing the Pacific and the Atlantic and there wasn't much time to do anything.

So you actually had some downtime in a way, which is quite a contrast to the way you travel now.

Yes. I mean, now it's sort of every day you've got to get two or three stories.

So when I started to think about this journey to the Philippines, I did feel there was a connection to your original travel show, Around the World in 80 Days, because I thought that That was a huge epic. But this was also pretty grueling going around the Philippines in that you were always on the move. You write about how there's always another island to see when it's a country as diverse as that.

I mean, that's a very good point because people think, oh, Michael, you've been to Venezuela, you've been to Nigeria. But you've seen a tiny bit. You can go 10 times and see different things each time you go. Whereas I was a bit worried about going to the Philippines because I had been there before. But going as we did to various places we did this time, it was a whole different kind of areas of the Philippines we went to.

And this was more of a sort of journalistic experience than the one before.

Yes, you see some really tough situations and people like right on the edge. But I wondered also more broadly about a journey like this. You do write and say that long-haul travel, you know, you do find it intense and tiring. But I felt that as you see the Philippines, as you come into Manila, that you get energized, the thought of the journey ahead.

That's always the way when I'm in a different country. It's the most intense pleasure because I just love the way people eat, the way people dress, what they talk about, the transport they use, the geography, the hotels. I mean, everything is different from home. And the fact that you can get there fairly quickly. I mean, it was a long journey. It's 16 hours out to the Philippines. But, you know, you're going to the other side of the world and suddenly there it is, all outside your window.

And that energizes me. And I want to go and see more and I want to meet the people there. But the journey is becoming increasingly difficult. And I found, especially after the Philippines, that I was very, very exhausted. Not from seeing places and getting experiences, but just the physical effort involved. of being 83 years old and having to wait for four hours because the plane's been delayed and then your seat's been changed and all that. I mustn't grumble because I'm very, very lucky. But it's when I'm in the place I'm in, I'm absolutely happy. I've never been somewhere and felt, why am I doing this?

But I wonder if the reason it takes more out of you perhaps than it did before is also because you go to tougher places in the recent choices of countries, Iraq, North Korea, Venezuela, Nigeria. These are places often off the tourist track.

Yeah. We've sort of coined countries on the edge as a sort of title for where we go. They're countries where something has happened, usually something bad has happened, and they're either recovering or they're about to face up to it. And that makes it much more intriguing. It's not just a place of entertainment like the Philippines, how they're going to deal with the Chinese threat in the seas around there.

In Nigeria, 220 million people there, but the country just doesn't function very well. And in both places, a great gap between the rich and the poor. Iraq, we went there just to see what happens to a country that has been despoiled by war and absolutely shattered and brought to its knees. But people still have to live there.

And I mean, you yourself know from all your work that you've got children of the new generation who don't know what happened, don't know about Saddam Hussein or anything like that. And so how do people make a living? What keeps them going? How do they deal with what's happened?

And does that make the journey even more interesting to you? Because there are beautiful places you go, but when you see people up against it, and I can think of numerous moments like that in the Philippines, from the people who are losing their land to the nickel extraction to the people who are eating recycled waste food, frying up the food scraps.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I find that much more meaningful. I'm not very good at sort of dealing with success because that comes with its own sort of confidence and people can say what they want to say and successful people generally have access to the media and can talk about things and everything is slightly sort of coated with this sort of where all right feeling. Whereas at the bottom and some of the places we went to, the markets where you say they're eating recycled food, but also a community where Duterte's people were following the sort of philosophy of just killing anybody who's involved in drugs.

This is the former president who had this massive and deadly crackdown.

Yes, that's right. And Duterte said the way to deal with drug dealers and all that is just to shoot them. And he went on television and said, I would shoot them myself. Mind you, he's now in the Hague facing sort of charges of criminal damage and all that. But the people who would never normally get a chance to speak, I find that really, really interesting.

Two women really stood out to me on exactly this theme. Yes. One was the woman who lost her son to the police opening fire. And another one who says that what Duterte did with the drug gangs and the war on drugs was essentially needed, or at least a version of it was needed.

Yes. Well, they were two different classes of Filipinos, I think, really. The second one, who made a very good case for living in Davao, which was her city. She was sort of middle class, saw some terrible terror attacks in her own city. Church was bombed with people inside. and all that. And she made out this case, well, also, you know, the drugs and the drug gangs there shouldn't have been allowed to sort of run the city the way they did.

The lady whose son had been shot and killed at the age of 15 I mean, no one had talked to her about it. The police had never come to see her. No one had ever apologized for something that might have gone wrong. And when she was telling us her story, it was about 10 years after it had happened, and she was still tearful.

So are you the first person or one of the first people who actually asks her how she feels?

Yeah, I should think so. I mean, I don't know that definitely, but that's the impression I got.

And what does that give you a sense of purpose, a sense of responsibility?

Well, it gives you a real sense of indignation, the fact that someone can say, well, this was a good thing that the drug gangs were dealt with, albeit brutally, and someone at the other end who say, well, the mistakes that were made or the ability of the police to be allowed to just shoot where they wanted killed her 15-year-old son, who she adored. So, you know, it makes you just aware of there's no no settled way of doing these things and sorting out these things. Everyone will have a different voice. But I do think, as you said, we were probably the first people to go and talk to her.

Can I tell you what came back to me as I read your description of flying into Manila, the airport named after Bernino Aquino?

Yes.

I remembered that in 1983, I was a 10-year-old child, and the assassination of Aquino, the exiled leader, as he returned to his home country... on the tarmac of that airport was probably one of the first news stories I ever became aware of. And you also remembered that moment as you flew into that airport.

I mean, it's interesting because he was assassinated at the airport and he generally considered to be a good man. And Duterte, the president before Marcos, he was actually arrested while trying to get out of the country at that airport and taken off to The Hague and is still imprisoned.

So it's seen a lot.

So, you know, don't go to the airport is the main thing. Take a train. Yeah.

And that was the time of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. And now his son is back in power. And you get to meet President Marcos Jr. while you're there. And I felt for you because the instructions you get given, you can interview the president, but can you submit three questions in advance? Yes. and you have to work out what they're going to be.

Well, we tried from the very beginning to see if we could get to talk to the president. We were continually rebuffed. And just the day we were leaving, someone said, tomorrow at the palace, the president will meet you. But as you say, you've got to have, it mustn't talk about anything controversial. There must be three questions. They must all be vetted by the people at the palace. And so there we were in this state all overnight trying to think of these questions. What do I ask? What do I not ask? How do I avoid saying anything incriminating?

And yet keep it interesting and relevant because you've seen lots of tough stuff in this country.

And I'm not particularly interested in meeting people of power because generally they have a story and they have their own backers and they have their own way of safeguarding themselves from difficult questions. Anyway, we go there and we all stand around and it's rather impressive, the palace itself. Largely, I think, because Imelda Marcos spent a huge amount of money on carpets and wallpaper.

And she's still alive.

She's still around.

Does she still live there?

Does she live with her son? No, she doesn't. No. I thought she might make an appearance because she sounds like a terrifying woman. Even the current president seems scared of her. Oh, we all say she should sit down more, but she's not a person for sitting down. Anyway, the president suddenly appears without any retinue or anything like that.

And he comes up and he says, Michael Palin. Oh, yes. I'm so glad to meet you. And it turned out that in the 1970s, he was studying in London and it was the heyday of Monty Python. They all watched Monty Python late at night in the college. And so he was really interested in how we'd written Monty Python sketches.

I was trying to get the, you know, the diplomacy that's being worked out with the Chinese at the moment, you know, the, the problems with the Islamists in the South. And he just wanted to know about the fish slapping dance.

Well, it's not the first time the fish slapping dance has come into your work, right? Venezuela.

Yeah.

Don't the guards in Venezuela look you up on the internet and they find it? Yeah.

And like it? Yes. Well, it's my calling card. And usually in moments of crisis, and that was, we were detained, I don't think exactly arrested in Venezuela. And nobody knew what was happening, just couldn't film all day long. We're sitting there and they're one of their guards, the paramilitaries, all their sort of rifles and everything, asked who I was.

And someone said, oh, he's a comedian from England. So he looks me up. So that's when he found the fish slapping dance. And then you just had this table full of guys heavily armed with their night vision goggles still on top of their helmets and all that. just going like that you see it wasn't just shaking with laughter and after that we knew we'd be safe so yes it is with my get out of jail card it's.

A minute of television isn't it roughly and it's had this incredible yeah yeah incredible life.

Well it's some one of those things that i mean i would play to anyone who you have to detect if that anyone has a sense of humor or not because there's no words in it or anything like that it's just me hitting john with fish and then hitting me with a bigger fish.

So has it failed on anyone? Have you discovered in a tough situation or in any situation where you've showed it to someone and you have discovered they have no sense of humor? Because your North Korean interpreter did love it.

Yes. No, no, it works. It really does work. I've never known anyone just say, what's the point of that? Which is the obvious reaction, I think, really.

How much do the Python years come back to you? I mean, in your own thoughts, because it's a 15-year span, really, of your life from the end of the 60s into the 80s.

I mean, it's extraordinary that people still remember it and have an affection for it and feel that they can laugh at it, even if they're sort of 30, 40 years younger than me. And that's great. My eldest grandson, Archie, he hasn't seen Monty Python, really, but he says that people use The Monty Python lines like, you know, it's just a flesh wound. He said, we always say that.

It comes from Monty Python. I said, yes, it does. Oh, well, you've done something in your life.

And Andy Burnham, when he came in to take his seat in Parliament, his return to Parliament, someone said, he's not the Messiah.

Not the Messiah, yes. To which he replied slightly sheepishly, I'm not a very naughty boy. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. And Margaret Thatcher tried to do the parrot sketch at one time I got the words slightly wrong. It didn't really work.

Well, yeah, I'm not surprised. So there you go.

We should sue them all.

Is there going to be some kind of reunion? Another one. I mean, I know the 2014 one really meant a lot to you. And I know not everyone is still there, notably Terry Jones. But John Cleese has sort of hinted that there could be more.

Yeah, John Cleese goes around hinting that there are going to be Python reunions. But you can't really have a reunion when two of the main people oh, we're all Maine people, have died. When Graham Chapman died in 1988, I felt even then Python was like a sort of table with six legs. You take one leg away and it's just going to be slightly wobbly. It won't work quite as well. And I don't think we should really do another show unless all the Pythons are there because everybody was really important, both as writers and performers. Everybody was very different. Graham did things that only he could do.

Terry J could do these wonderful sort of ladies, which only he could do. So I think we should say that 2014 was the sort of last farewell tour. And it was great. And that was something we had to be persuaded to do. We're all in our 70s. And whereas Mick Jagger and all that, they always get on stage. Because I think with musicians, it's easier. But when you're doing a sort of comedy and you've got to be playing lots of different characters, You've got to be fairly light on your feet.

So if I can call it your second career started at the end of the 80s with Around the World in 80 Days, which have this immense global resonance. And I can't help thinking that the world of travel was easier then. It was the end of the 80s and then you did Pole to Pole in the early 90s. And so much of the world has become harder to see since then. And even when you were on the road in the Philippines... you're conscious that the Iran war is happening at that time. And you've been through the Straits of Hormuz yourself.

Yes, yeah. On the Da'at. Around the world. In around the world in 80 days, yes. And then it was sort of quite a congenial place. Everybody sort of knew each other and gave each other space and room and all that. So that's somewhere we couldn't go again. Central Africa, Mali, Timbuktu, around there, we probably couldn't go there now to film.

So actually, I think the The general feeling, I would think, is the world is a harder place to film in now than it used to be.

And even some of the changes of... modernity. I mean, I was thinking about China because in the Philippines, you see the really hard edge of Chinese power because you see a Chinese warship pretty close to you when you're filming. And the contrast to the pictures in Around the World in 80 Days, the book, where there's like almost an antique The pictures of China look almost, I mean, it is another century, but it looks more than another century.

Well, you see there's a picture, I don't know if it's there, on the Nanking Road of a traffic jam. And the traffic jam is entirely made up of cyclists. Go back there now. It's a traffic jam entirely made up of cars going sort of stretching miles back.

So when you saw Chinese power in the way you did in the Philippines, because... They call it the South China Sea. The Filipinos call it the West Philippine Sea. What was your experience of seeing the way that China's encroaching onto those waters?

Well, you can see it quite clearly. There are islands in the middle of the South China Sea or the West Philippine Sea, which are being sort of taken over by one side or the other. And the Philippines have taken over this island of Bagasa, which is about two hours flying time from the Philippine coast. They built islands.

an enormous runway there, and there was a small community of about 140 people. And they're doing that to lay down their claim to that particular sea. The Chinese, at the same time, are just using force, which they can. So when you get to a place called Pegasus, you don't see any Philippine ships at sea, but you see on the horizon at least 20 Chinese ships. Apparently fishing.

They say, well, it's just they're fishing and these are no one's territorial waters. Philippines say it's theirs. Chinese say no, it's no one's. But when you actually go out there, and we did with the Philippine Coast Guards, you realize that two or three of the ships you can see in the distance are warships. They have nothing to do with fishing. And also the ship, the big ship that was nearest to us, we heard messages, very strong messages from the Chinese ship. On the radio? Yeah, on our ship's radio, saying, you're entering Chinese territorial waters. Please return.

Get away as soon as you can. Go away. Leave the area. And this was quite sharp. And the Chinese ship itself was coming towards us. It kind of turned. It was side on. It turned with its bows coming menacingly towards us. And a small boat, a dinghy, was lowered. And in it were about six people who came towards us quite fast. And they were obviously, I mean, I imagine they were armed and would fire a few shots over your head. This happens quite a lot. It wasn't just because we were there. But it's quite clearly the Chinese saying, this is our patch. And whatever you do, you will never push us out. So it was quite a scary business.

Were you prepared for that? Because I guess when you go to these places... there's some kind of briefing, you know, you're a well-read, well-informed person, so you know the background. But when you actually see it for yourself, when you hear that voice on the ship's radio, and you see the small boat coming towards you, what goes through your mind?

No, I wasn't prepared for that. I've been told about the issue over ownership of the rights of the sea and all that sort of thing. But when it actually happens on a human scale, it's all very different. I mean, in Iraq, I knew there were going to be checkpoints all along the road into Baghdad and everywhere we went.

But you're never prepared, really, for the human element involved. And at the checkpoints, it isn't just machines and cards being checked in. It's people come out and talk to you. And some of them are very belligerent and get you out of the car, and they've got rifles, and they couldn't knock you around if you didn't behave yourself. I remember one place in Iraq The checkpoint, just the guy said, oh, you must come and have some tea with us. I said, well, we actually got to go on our way. No, no, you must have tea. So it's kind of, we were threatened with not having tea. And I wouldn't like to have been arrested for not having tea with the.

But there is that jeopardy because at a checkpoint, anything can happen. Someone could be having a bad day, an accident can happen. Are you really prepared to travel like that, like into the future?

Yes, I'm afraid to say I am. That's quite exciting. I don't know. I'm not a fatalist. I'm an optimist. And I think generally, and this is borne out by all the traveling I've done, there are very few occasions where people hate you and want to get rid of you. So, you know, you choose where you go and you choose the people you talk to as much as you can.

But there are going to be emergencies. There are going to be things that you don't expect.

Have you ever said no? Or do you ultimately trust your team who've done recces and thought about these things?

Yeah, that's the problem. I ultimately trust my team.

So you never say no.

I refuse to do bungee jumping.

Very wise, I feel.

Yeah. Well, what is the point in the middle of a series of hurling yourself at rocks 200 feet below and hoping you'll come up again and then go down again?

How many countries is it now that you've been to? 101.

How many have you been to?

Well, good question. But nowhere near 101. Really? I think maybe 30 or so. But I was thinking what a contrast it is to how you grew up, where your holidays with your family were in the UK. And even your early years of building your career, you were very much UK-based. Like this travel period really took off with these programs. Yeah.

At school, I was quite a shy boy. I wasn't volunteering for all this, that and the other. I read quite a lot. I used to go out on lone bicycle rides and make up journeys. But I was always interested in what happened over the next hill, around the next corner. And read avidly all the National Geographic magazines and Biggles stories of wherever he went in the world.

I lapped all that stuff up. So that was it. It was all in my imagination. I really loved other parts of the world in my head. But quite extraordinarily, through various coincidences, I eventually ended up with the perfect see-the-world job. People say, well, it must be a complete break with what you were doing. I say, no, I think Monty Python was always slightly getting away from real life.

It was playing with the realities of life. for people who couldn't make their minds up what they wanted to do.

Do you feel that when you're being filmed now, because for a series like the Philippines and the ones before, I imagine the camera is on you pretty much throughout your day? I mean, you're being filmed all the time?

Well, not exactly. I mean, we work with a very small crew. There's only five of us and one cameraman, and he has to do the lot, really. He has to take where I am. what I'm looking at. He has to take shots of me sort of talking to people there and all that.

Do you feel that you are performing or even acting in some way when you're being filmed for.

One of these? No, I don't. I got over that. I got over that in the first three episodes of Around the World in 80 Days. I said yes, because I'd love to go around the world. When you're actually leaving to go, you wonder, well, how do you do this? There's no script. Am I a reporter? Am I an actor playing sort of Phileas Fogg and being sort of sending out British travelers and all that? But on the Dow, because the Dow was manned by 18 Gujarati fishermen and we all slept on the deck, there was nothing else, no privacy or anything like that. So we all had to get on. And that whole experience there taught me an awful lot. And You're on this boat for seven days.

And by the end, we got to know them. We each learned a little of the language. The boat broke down at one point. We helped out. They cooked us wonderful meals. And I completely forgot that I was part of a BBC film crew. And when we got off that boat in Mumbai, I felt, I know what this is about. It just got to be me. There's no point in trying to be someone else. Be yourself. Because I wasn't very confident in myself to start with. I thought, how do I interpret all these things I'm seeing? How do I come up with sort of clever lines here and there? But I realized that just listen to the people you're with. The stories will come out. You don't have to say very much. And that actually my own shortcomings or getting confused or angry or whatever, they will

come anyway and should not be sort of concealed. That's all part of what I am.

You haven't left acting behind though you had a long break from major roles and you did Death of Stalin and now you've done the BBC series Small Prophets which I'm watching at the moment and really enjoying what do you think today acting gives you and how does it fit into the mix?

Well it's there's something about playing a character who is people are going to like or be entertained by want to see more of. That's something I can do. I know I can act to a certain level. I wouldn't want to be acting all the time because I'd forget quite who I was. So it's a nice mixture, traveling and being myself, and then coming back and being an 80-year-old in a care home, which is almost me, but not yet.

I do want to ask you, Michael, also about your writing. And the travel books are written in diary form. And of course, you yourself keep a diary wherever you are in the world. You write every morning. I assume you've written before coming here today?

No, not every morning. No, I'm getting a bit lax these days.

How often then?

Well, I do try and keep an account of every day, even if it's sometimes just retrospectively nothing happened.

Do you ever write those words, nothing happened, but you still.

No, I'm not courageous enough. Evelyn Moore did write in his diaries one day, you know, today I believe nothing happened. And that was it. Wonderful. I always try and make up something because something has happened every day. It's just, for me, it's an acknowledgement of the day being, you know, part of your life. You never forget a day. You should never dismiss a day. You should never think, well, that's just a bad day. I'll never... never remember that.

Bad days, good days, they all teach you something, and I haven't got a great memory. So I can go back now and look at the diaries going right back to 1969, and you know, why did I take on Around the World in 80 Days? Probably in the diary somewhere I would have sort of written a few sentences about what I was thinking at the time. How did I feel when I was doing it? So very often if you're asked to do something which is maybe a bit difficult, But you've had a sort of similar experience before.

It's very helpful to look back on what you felt then.

And it's a record of your family life.

Yeah.

Your life with your wife, Helen.

Yeah, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That just comes into it. And very often it's not sort of sitting down and saying, I'm going to describe what we did or a holiday we had or even during her death and all that. I kept the diary. It's just, you do. It's the day. And you go back and... All these things highlight little moments and encourage you to sort of remember things that didn't seem significant at the time, but may much later be quite significant.

I can't help thinking about your homecomings and how different they must be now that Helen's not there anymore. And if that's part of what keeps you traveling, but not that she ever stopped you. But home must feel a different place.

Yes. Yeah, I mean, it is. But at the same time, home for the last four or five years of Helen's life was coming back to someone who was in pain, you know, and not terribly happy and all that. And that was the worst thing. So I thought, should I have gone away at all? But she was always very good. I mean, Helen was very pragmatic, feet on the ground.

Don't you worry, I'm fine. Don't worry about me. I'll be all right. Stop bothering. Just carry on. So now it is a bit different. I just come back and actually, I suppose, I don't quite know what I feel. It's always been part of the joy of traveling is to be able to talk about it a bit to people, but not immediately you come home. That's fatal. The idea that the family are all waiting by the front door as you come in and say, oh, Where have you been, Daddy, Grandpa?

Tell us about it. Tell us about Venezuela and all that. A lot of them don't even know I've gone abroad half the time. So it's important to keep a sense of reality and a sense of balance. But I miss Helen from that point of view because she was very, very balanced about it all and where I traveled and was interested. But for her, home life was the most important thing. And I registered that as soon as I came back. That was more important than where I'd be.

And where do you think or dream of going next?

I was going to say south of France, but Venice or somewhere like that, somewhere really grueling and tough. But I don't know. I'm at the stage, Michelle, at the moment of not knowing whether I'm going to travel again. In fact, I might do a journey in the UK, possibly.

So you really might not do a journey like this one again to a country on the edge?

Well, never say never. I'm so susceptible to good sort of travel publicity and all that and meet somebody who's been to a place like that and it could totally change your mind. So I wouldn't say never again. The appetite for seeing other parts of the world is still very, very strong. And yet I love, you sort of alluded to this, I love being at home. I love being in London. I'm very happy. That's where most of my friends are And the idea of living somewhere else, I would say, well, yeah, two weeks holiday, that's about it.

But otherwise, let me be at home.

But it is very special what you've done in showing other people parts of the world that they might be prejudiced about or they might think they can't relate to in any way. And those are people who might as well be from another planet. And when you go there, it's almost like you're a bridge from one world that you come from to these worlds. to these people and places?

I'm very lucky because the way is sort of prepared for me. We work with someone from that country. We don't just randomly turn up and turn the camera on. I like talking to people. When I was young, I thought I'll never travel because I can't speak any languages. And I still can't speak many languages, but it's not important.

You can gesture, being a similar situation, sort of a bit of slapstick or children playing there, wherever. Wherever you are in the world, there's a sort of similarity to where you've come from. I think that's very, very important. And I do feel that, especially in the world now, there's a lot of anger at certain people for doing certain things because they come from certain places. And it's not like that. The world is not lots of blocks of black and white. It's just a lot of people, some of whom are thrown into a conflict which they didn't want and they don't know how to be part of.

And yet they're the people who, in the end, have to suffer. And I suppose it's my own little way of saying, you know, that's got to stand up for people like that. Not let the big people push you around and the people with rifles, as I call them. Because everywhere I've been in the world, I've never found any problems apart from people with a rifle. Give someone a rifle, that's it. Then they totally change. lay the rifle down, take their uniform off. You're probably going to have an evening with them and a beer and it'll be absolutely fine. But it worries me really that still we can't seem to sort of find our way out of violent situations and the feeling that violence is the way we can sort this out on any side.

Do you ever find yourself explaining for the outside world or the Western world or your country? I'm wondering about Iraq and whether people ever say, well, your government or... did this or I wish they had done this.

Yes, but it's a funny thing and it's going to sound pathetic, but people are very polite. People like to talk to you generally. If you're interested in them, they'll be interested in you. But you always find somebody, a driver somewhere or someone in the army or whoever, who will say, you know, you shouldn't have come into Iraq the way you did and all that. But there's very little of that. People don't want to wallow in the discomfort and the horrors of what they've been through And it was like that in the First World War, which I've done a lot of study about. Because at the end of the war, nobody really wanted to talk about it.

People didn't come back and write lots of books. I mean, the war poets and all that. But generally speaking, people did not want to talk about it. And I find that's the thing where there's been some violence anywhere. People don't really want to say exactly what happened or how they were involved. Because it's all so complicated. Sometimes, some days you do the right thing. Some days you do the wrong thing. A lot of people haven't really thought out how they're involved and why they're involved. But there can be communal anger, and we saw that in the Philippines with a big protest march the day we got there, because it was the 40th anniversary of the overthrow of President Marcos and Imelda, who had sort of squirreled away

public money to build palaces and all that sort of thing. There was real anger. But you only talk to people after the demonstration and all that. They'll have a chat with you and they're interested to show you where they live and all that. People have to be given a positive and have to be able to show you a positive.

I was thinking about moments of great contrast in the Philippines, sort of joy and hardship. You went to see a prison where the prisoners live in incredibly overcrowded cells, which you see, but also have compulsory dancing, which they do incredibly well.

Yes, yeah. Yeah, that was very, very strange. This prison courtyard and part of the therapy for the prisoners there. And these are people on remand. Not all of them have been convicted. They're just waiting to hear. And the prison system is so overcrowded. There have been people there for 10 years still waiting to know when the case is coming up. Someone had the idea of doing these wonderful dance routines. And it's as good as anything you'll see on the stage in the West End. It's absolutely tremendous.

And then they go back to their cells and some of them are 15 people to a room. It's quite unbelievable. I couldn't really make sense of that. Yes, it was upsetting. But again, people smile, say hello and all that. And yet, what is their life like, 15 of them in there, in this one room, one place to make food, and that's about it.

You see a whole demonstration of the dancing, and you say that your role as Pontius Pilate in Life of Brian comes back to you because you're standing there looking at this expanse of people in front of you.

They put me on a sort of floor up looking over the courtyard of the prison where all the dancing took place. It was just me there on a special chair and all that. I thought, as it was happening, I thought, no, I've done this before. This was the Pontius Pilate scene where everybody laughs whenever he says, release Wodewijk and all that. So I could see a little glimpse of how power only gets you so far. Then you're on your own.

Finally, Michael, what do you take on your travels? What do you read on your travels? What's your companion along the way?

Well, the most important thing is a notebook. And I do write longhand notes all the time. And I usually take a novel of the country because I think guidebooks tell you so much and they can be useful. But a novel gets you into the heart of people of that country who've written good books. Nigeria, particularly, some absolutely excellent novelists. So I take a novel, some water. Always a roll of toilet paper for that moment when, you know, you kind of... The camera's off. But, yeah, as little as possible, really. Because I lose things very easily, spectacles and all that. So the less I take, the less I lose. That's my philosophy.

I'm going to wish you good travels and safe travels.

Well, thank you, Michelle. Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you for being with us today.

Oh, it's lovely.

Honestly, I could have talked to Michael for even longer, but we had to stop somewhere and there were those books on the table. I've got quite a lot of books for you to sign. There are quite a few members of the team who you need to make happy, so I'm going to send them your way, which did take him a while to sign. That might be a first edition of Around the World in 80 Days. I think it's got fabulous pictures.

This may be so valuable, I'll have to take it with me. I think she was rather florid. I signed somewhere in Northampton or somewhere, and the lady said, is that Arabic?

This time, in my written and illustrated notes, there are some great photographs of Michael on his travels. And as ever, you'll find those notes at bloomberg.com forward slash Michelle. And so to the team, the producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martlew. Our guest booking is by Elan Bird and social media is by Alex Morgan. The video producer is Andy Haywood and John Canfield was running the studio. Our music is by Bart Walshaw. The executive producer is Louisa Lewis.

At Bloomberg Weekend, our thanks to Brendan Francis Newnham and our executive editor, Catherine Bell. And thank you for listening. Until next time, goodbye.

Michael Palin on the Philippines, China and the Fish-Slapping Dance

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