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Received 5th November 2004
Mountains Successfully Climbed (but still a few peaks left to scale)
The privations of the journey and the helter-skelter rush to complete the book and series suddenly seem to have paid off. Viewing figures for the first episode of the great adventure, broadcast on October 3rd,
averaged out at 9.1 million and put Himalaya firmly amongst the Top Twenty Programmes of the week.
That was the highest altitude that our viewing figures reached, but they remain around 8 million, a figure which I need
regular doses of oxygen to take in.
The book went straight to the top of the Non-Fiction Bestseller list and is still there as far as I know.
For that I'd like to thank all those who have overcome their inherent
meanness to buy one or more of these lovely volumes, and an especial thank you to all those who stood in long queues to see me on my recently completed national tour. You were brilliant. I shall never forget the great
atmosphere at the signings. Wildest of all was The Peak Bookshop in Chesterfield, where, in the middle of a thunderstorm, many hundreds of doughty Peak District readers were undaunted. People were coming into the shop
wind-blown and sodden, as if they'd come off the bridge of a ship in a hurricane. All were exceedingly friendly, patient and tolerant as they bought their books then vanished into the tempest again. This was the adventurous
spirit at its best. And I signed 847 copies!
Although I signed for at least three hours at every shop, there was never quite enough time for me to sign dedications to everybody and I apologise to all those who didn't
get to see me. In the spirit of the Dalai Lama I do try to have a word with everybody, which means less books signed but the alternative is just to scribble a name without looking up and that seems pointless to me.
So
thank you all who came along in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Carlisle, Oldham, York, Chesterfield, Lincoln, Nottingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Worcester, Solihull, Milton Keynes, Norwich, Cambridge and Oxford.
I'm
pleased to see that many of the reviews have given high praise to Nigel Meakin's photography. With him, and Basil Pao on stills, I am extraordinarily fortunate to have two of the best in their profession working with me.
Himalaya is very much a team show, and I wish that the media would acknowledge that by occasionally putting names to all those who keep the quality of the series so high. Without my directors Roger Mills and John-Paul Davidson
I would never have been able to assemble all the places and people and the thoughts and ideas to go with them. John Pritchard's fine ear for the sounds of the world has given the shows extra depth and helped create powerful and
evocative atmospheres to go with the pictures. And Alex Richardson, the series editor, has woven all these sights and sounds together into a narrative that has been one of the strong points of this series. Alex (and Saska
Simpson who edited episode 5) has made programmes into darned good stories!
After the initial nervousness I've enjoyed watching the shows myself. There's so much that I never saw when I was doing the journey. Only on
television can I see what was behind me as I coughed and sneezed my way up the Annapurna Trail. Amazing and beautiful scenery that I never had time to look at!
The Round Britain signing tour was just the start of a
journey, much longer than Himalaya, which will take me to Holland, New Zealand, Australia as well as Belfast and Dublin in the next four and a half weeks. I shall be doing a lot of talks and scribbling in a lot of books, but as
ever, it's a good chance to find out what people actually think about the series. It brings television to life.
On plane journeys and long nights in terminals I shall look forward to reading a few other books apart from
my own, and indulging my addiction to travel as the work takes me to places as far apart as Tasmania and Amsterdam.
Many people have asked what next and where next. Because Sahara and Himalaya practically ran on from
one to the other without a break, I feel I've been planning, shooting, writing, narrating and publicising shows for most of the twenty-first century. In little more than three years we've produced ten hours of television, two
books and two photo albums of the journeys. I need some time to cool off and look around, to work on friendships that I've put on hold and generally enjoy looking at the world for a bit, without having the world looking at me.
So for a year at least I'm taking a break from the big TV journeys.
A year that will give me time to decide where, why, how and whether to go on the TV trail again.
Watch this space!
Michael Palin
London November 2004
General News
As you may have already noticed, Michael's Himalaya is now live on Palin's Travels (http://www.palinstravels.co.uk/static-187). The new Himalaya section features exclusive photos
from Basil Pao, video, audio and, of course, the entire book text.
We're running a competition ( http://www.palinstravels.co.uk/static-150
) to accompany the launch of Himalaya on Palin's Travels, and you only need to answer three series-related questions to win fantastic prizes!
You can also look forward to an
insider's view into Himalaya - we'll soon be adding previously unseen photos taken by the series' sound recordist, John Pritchard. We'd like to thank John for his extreme generosity in giving Palin's Travels these lovely
photos, and hope you enjoy looking at his pictures as much as we have!
That's it for now - happy reading, viewing, hearing, etc...!
The Palin's Travels Team
____________________________________________________________________________
13th September 2004 Letter from London
Himalaya Progress Report
To all Palin Travellers. By the next time we talk my new book (fantastic value at £3,000, reduced to £20, Basil Pao's gorgeous gallery
of delights (50p, increased to £30) and 6 hefty chunks of Himalaya on TV will be rolling down a hill towards YOU!
I've one commentary left to write and record. At the same time I'm having to stick my head above the
parapet and tell newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV chat-shows and all three of my cats just what it's all about. I know publicity is important but in a way I'd much rather talk about the book and series after they've
gone out than before. Then at least we'll have something to talk about.
I'm really most concerned about all of you who have loyally supported the site. I mean if you don't like it I might have to sell the site to Des
Lynam or Loudoun Wainwright or someone.
Well, all I can say to you is that I hope you'll find the whole mess well up to standard of our previous messes. We like it, anyway. As the end of the production process looms
everyone involved is completely out of breath, like we've run a marathon in 10.3 seconds. But the rewards - when we can get together and celebrate over a drink or three -are not far off.
How hard has it been? Well, I
enjoy my work, so I can't pretend that I've suffered, but a recent chance encounter made me do a few sums. Which I shall share with you if you care to read on.
Last week someone on the south coast asked me how much time
it will have taken me to make the book and film of the Himalaya journey. I thought about it and, though it seemed almost unbelievable, replied with a certain quiet modesty, "About eighteen months from start to finish".
His reply knocked me back a bit.
"That long!" he said.
I don't want to moan on and become all precious about how hard we work, but I think there is still a feeling that we're having too good a time for
it to be hard work. Well, it's true, most of the time we are having a good time, but we have to make sure on each day of the filming that someone is shooting and someone is recording and someone is telling the audience-to-be
why we are having a good time and what the good time looks like.
And that's where the lines of fun and work blur a little, and sometimes after a week of continuous days trekking, camping out, and filming at the same
time we become almost numb to the beauty of the world and would swap another fabulous mountain view for a smelly old pub any day.
Let's tot up the figures. First there's the preparation. You can't just turn up at the
Khyber Pass and start work. It's on the North-West Frontier, which like many other places we visited on our journey, is a potentially dangerous and unstable area, where terrorists live. So a great deal of chatting up,
flannelling and soothing of egos has to go on before we can even leave home. Some of this work was done from our office in London, (thank you the wonderful Natalia, Mirabel and later Sue, team) but most of it had to be done on
the ground. Step forward directors Roger Mills and John Paul Davidson and location managers Vanessa Courtney and Claire Houdret. They set the ball rolling, scouting the world, talking to potential contributors, checking out
possible stories and wheedling permissions from reluctant governments while I was still at home looking at maps and deciding which kind of toilet paper to take.
So that's about 3 of the 18 months gone before we've left
home. The actual shooting took up 6 more months. This involved some 2,000 miles travelling and 7 separate flights out to Asia and back. India, Nepal, Tibet and Yunnan in China was one continuous shoot, as was Pakistan and
Assam-Bhutan-Bangladesh, but three short individual trips had to be made in addition. One to a 12,000 foot high polo match in Pakistan, one to a week-long horse fair in the centre of the Tibetan Plateau and one to an amazing
annual festival in Bhutan. By my reckoning that's 14 doses of jet lag. In between the jet lags I was writing hard to keep up with deadlines for the book, so months off became months on. Add two.
Ever since staggering
off the plane for the last time in April, after our festival shoot in Bhutan, I have been re-living the six months of our Himalayan journey almost day and night. By night in strange dreams in which I find palm trees halfway up
Annapurna (my subconscious reminding me that perhaps I shouldn't have taken on Himalaya quite so soon after Sahara), and by day in deciphering the scrawled details in my black notebooks, which together with Dictaphone
transcripts I made at the time, form the basis of the copy for the Himalaya book. At the same time Basil Pao was going mad back at his home in Washington DC selecting the best from thousands of photos he took for my book and
for his spectacular Inside Himalaya companion volume.
110,000 words and several hundred photos had to be sent to the printers by early June, two months after the end of shooting. So add 3 to 6 to 2 to 2 and I make that
13 months' hard labour.
Meanwhile Alex Richardson was working 25-hours a day, 8 days a week up in trendy Scrubs Lane trying to squeeze all the material into six bite-size, hour-long chunks. Our filming ratio (what's
shot to what's used) is about 12 to 1, so he has to weed out the waste before he can begin to start making the good sequences work. Meanwhile the DVD material has to be assembled. Quite a lot of this is in the form of add-ons;
an interview with me and a selection of out-takes of perfectly good material for which there was no time in the shows.
Once editor, director, myself and the executive producers are happy with the cuts I begin work on
writing a commentary for each one. The entire package, 6 finished shows at one hour each, plus a ten-minute shorter international version (so they can put breaks in the hour. Grrrrr!!!) has to be handed to the BBC by the end of
September, which by my reckoning means another 4 months added to our 13.
Which makes the total time taken for full Himalaya books and series to 18 months. No sorry, 17.
"That long?"
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