ravelling by dhow from Dubai to Mumbai, Michael Palin gently placed some headphones over a sailor’s ears. It was 1988 and the former Monty Python star was reprising Phileas Fogg’s journey in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. In those scarcely believable times, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, Dubai’s skyscrapers were unbuilt, Hong Kong was British, the cold war was not quite over, TV adventurers accessorised long socks with shorts, and there was this little thing called a Walkman, into which you put tapes. Palin pushed the play button and, unheard by us, Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Shuffle kicked into the man’s brain with surprising results. Can you do a Middle Eastern hand jive to the Boss while rising and falling on a tiny craft in the Persian Gulf? Me neither, but this guy could. Palin’s remembrance of journeys past for the BBC was a sweet affair, but also a niggling reminder of all the stories that never got told. What did that sailor really think of Springsteen? What did the blind barber in Mumbai who gave Palin the best shave of his life think about his subject? We may never know. Then there was the film crew. What did they feel as they shot Palin collapsing on to yet another hotel room bed while their working day was not yet done? We saw them only once, the erased of TV history, as Palin abandoned them on the roadside in Saudi Arabia. He hadmanaged to wangle just one visa to get across the desert from Jeddah to Dubai. They would have to hitch. “You’ll get a lift. Pretty boys like you,” he said, before driving off. We never did find out how they managed to continue their journey. Camels don’t care for carrying TV cameras. Abroad thoughts from home are all very well, but I would have preferred to see him tracking down the man he met in Hong Kong who took his caged bird for a walk, or revisiting Shanghai, where, as in Dubai, in 1988 the skyscrapers were unbuilt. We also did not see the Palin Effect, namely how the places he has visited for TV (the Sahara, the Himalayas, Brazil, both poles, North Korea, among them) experienced tourist booms in his wake. Instead, what we saw was a charmingly diffident, if bowel-clenching, Englishman getting constipation. Which is understandable given that, during his six-day dhow voyage, the toilet was essentially a hole and his bottom was washed by the ocean. An obliging gent on board got Palin to lie on his tummy while he walked on his thighs to soothe the pain. The cure was not just of physiological interest: the uptight Englishman was loosening up as he travelled east. Whether this was Orientalist fantasy in the manner condemned by Edward Said, whether Palin’s TV revolution was effectively British colonialism replaced by anglophone cultural imperialism are matters for greater minds than mine. On the train from Bombay (Mumbai) to Madras (Chennai), Palin told an Indian lady he had been brushing up on his Hindi. That, she said gently, was folly: few speak Hindi so far south. For the most part, Palin adhered to the advice given him by an earlier era’s icon of the TV travelogue, Alan Whicker, namely never to attempt to speak the local language. When someone is jabbing a rifle in your ribs, Whicker counselled, tell them you are from the BBC and they should step aside. In China, he came across official censorship. On the train from Shanghai, a DJ broadcasted to passengers over the PA. She declined to play Palin’s tapes of Springsteen or Billy Joel, but agreed to put on another. We never discovered if his fellow travellers would have preferred Uptown Girl to Mozart, though the former is a trenchant critique of class politics. It was back in London, though, that Palin ran into the worst censorship. He tried to get into the Reform Club for the film’s final shot, reprising the moment Fogg arrived home to collect his wager, but the authorities wouldn’t let him in. “British clubs were not about letting people in but keeping them out,” he realised. Home was transfigured by his travels, and not in a good way.