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Q: Was "Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure" done in one long trip, like his previous series?

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Author: 
Adam Thomlison / TV Media

Michael Palin ("Monty Python's Flying Circus"), the great comedian who found a second career as a great travel documentarian, shared a note on the website devoted to his 1999 series "Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure." It offered some warm personal details about his motivation for recreating the travels of legendary author Ernest Hemingway, some behind-the-scenes info, and a fair bit of sass.

He admitted up front that this one drew fewer viewers than his previous specials — namely "Full Circle" (1997), "Pole to Pole" (1992) and "Around the World in 80 Days" (1989) — and acknowledged it may have been due to people missing the spirit of the big trip that was such a feature of those previous shows. But in the same sentence, he also launched into a spirited defence.

"Though people may have missed the simplicity of one single long journey, we did visit some exotic places and do some very strange things," he wrote. He also called it "some of the best work I've done."

"I'm very proud of it. I used the same crew as on 'Sahara,' so it looked wonderful, and John Pritchard won the BAFTA award for best sound. So there."

The fact that it was not a single journey is never addressed directly in the series. It's edited in such a way that he does appear to just be hopping from place to place around the world — from Hemingway's birthplace in Illinois to Europe, Cuba, Africa and ultimately back to the U.S.

But the premise of his previous specials was specifically that he was tracing one long, continuous path from a start point to an end point, and the challenges of doing so are part of the story.

That's not to say there's no arc to the Hemingway special — it's arranged in chronological order, with Palin visiting all the significant places in Hemingway's life in the same order the great man did.

 

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