Michael Palin Visits North Korea In New Documentary

michael palin
Via ITN productions

Last year saw Michael Palin – founding member of Monty Python and superlative travel journalist – star as bumbling Deputy Premier Vyacheslav Molotov in Armando Iannucci’s hard-edged and hilarious The Death of Stalin. Now, Palin has returned from a lengthy trip through another authoritarian dystopia-on-earth – the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, a.k.a. North Korea.

Developed in association with ITN Productions and Britain’s Channel 5, the series will follow Palin on a journey of more than 1,300 miles through the notoriously closed-off nation. However, this is not technically his first time in the country. In his series Full Circle With Michael Palin, the septuagenarian national treasure did briefly cross the DMZ when he visited the Korean peninsula, but was forbidden from passing beyond Panmunjeom’s Joint Security Area – despondently noting that, despite the division being in place for over sixty years now, North and South Korea are really a single nation divided against itself.

Now, after a series of negotiations which were reportedly two years in the crafting, Palin was allowed unprecedented access to the country and its populace – including their reactions to the recent meeting between head of state Kim Jong-Un and his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-In.

“To visit North Korea was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down,” Palin told Hollywood Reporter. “For somewhere that is so often in the forefront of the news, it remains a complete mystery to most of us. That we were able to travel across the country and get some sense of everyday life was enormously exciting. The visit was an eye-opener for me, and I’m sure it will be the same for others. In all my travels around the world I have never had the same sense of fascination and revelation as on this journey to North Korea.”

Palin has a long history of travel journalism, including fully circumnavigating the globe in Jules Verne style in his 1989 series Michael Palin: Around The World In 80 Days, and has previously visited countries in turmoil – passing through the Soviet Union shortly before its collapse, and South Africa shortly after the abolition of apartheid, both in the same trip. Still, a trip to North Korea, one of the world’s last classic-model dictatorships, would be a gutsy endeavour for any 75-year-old Westerner, let alone one who brings a camera crew. And this will likely put a pin in the so-called ‘Palin effect’, where countries Palin has visited experience an uptick in tourism.

Despite North Korea’s frosty attitude to the rest of the world, this is one in a series of little thaws in their isolationist attitude. Most notably, there were the meetings between Kim Jong-Un and Moon Jae-In earlier this year, and the two nations’ decision to field a single unified team in the 2018 Winter Olympics. The country has also seen a tentative degree of openness to Western media – in 2015, the Slovenian industrial group Laibach (whose entire shtick is mocking totalitarianism) performed live in the capital, Pyongyang. However, it’s not as if the hermit kingdom suddenly started broadcasting MTV and American Pie – Laibach were strictly forbidden from performing their cover of the patriotic North Korean song ‘We Will Go To Mount Paektu’ (which you can find below).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3fYbSfDSmU

The series, whose working title is Michael Palin in North Korea, is due to air later in 2018.

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