Opening up the window on the world

Picture: Channel 5/ITN Productions/Jaimie Gramston

Let me share a personal secret with you. Some years ago, while living in Paris, I visited a therapist every other Saturday morning for a while. It was no biggie. There was no personal crisis that led me to those hour-long chats. There were, though, two triggers for seeking a friendly ear: I’d only recently moved to France from the Netherlands, separating from my-then girlfriend in the process. I was in a new and somewhat pressured job, while getting my head around a new town and a new language. I wasn’t struggling - living in Paris had been a long-held aspiration (blame a lot of Inspector Clouseau and Alain Delon films) and I revelled in it, but with a lot to process, and no local friends to unload on (and I wasn’t going to burden my new colleagues with any of this), I needed an outlet. On top of all that, The Sopranos had shown that it was OK to talk about ’stuff’, not that I was trying to equate myself with Tony Soprano, or that I harboured any latent desire for my therapist.

So the point of bearing my soul here is that one of the themes that came up regularly in my hour-long Saturday morning chats in the 20th Arrondissement was ‘escape’. To be clear, I wasn’t looking to escape the very city I’d dreamed of living in, but whenever I looked up and saw a plane above Paris it triggered a form of FOMO. I wanted to be on that plane, going somewhere – anywhere. We never did get to the bottom of this wanderlust, and to be honest, newly single I didn’t do badly for travel. 

Whether business trips to New York and Miami, or private weekends in Milan, Hamburg or back home in London, the Air Miles added up. But when I look back on all of that travel, nothing could be classed as adventurous. Even though a week spent driving Route 66, from Chicago to Los Angeles, was a marathon that took me through states and cities I wouldn’t have otherwise found time for, it was America. Familiarity. Chain hotels and drive-throughs, classic rock on the radio.

I never did find out which branch of pyschotherapy my therapist subscribed to (Freudians and Jungists don’t tend to telegraph their associations) but I’m sure she would have readily concluded that I’m a creature of both habit and familiarity. When it comes to travel, I probably still am. Language, culture and now, thanks to a health condition, food seem to present too many barriers. Which, I know, are all ridiculous reasons not to go somewhere in the modern age, and after centuries of human exploration. 

I genuinely wish I could be more dauntless. Television doesn’t help: I’ll watch Simon Reeve nosing around a Brazilian favela and wonder ‘why couldn’t I do that’? The answer is that, probably, I couldn’t. Television makes it look easy. Even if Reeve has the look of a backpacking student, he’ll be accompanied by a film crew, and probably hired security, interpreters, and that sort of thing. But television, to quote Lord Reith, really does provide a window on the world. The trouble is that, in the midst of all the endless celebrity travelogues, few really do open it. 

The exception is surely Michael Palin. For a comic actor many of us still associate with Monty Python, his travel series - ever since his own version of Around The World In 80 Days in 1989, have been compelling, engaging and truly educational without being preachy. And unlike many comedian-driven travelogues, free of over-wry ‘look at that thing!’ wackiness. From travelling between the North and South poles or encircling the planet’s middle, to the Sahara, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe, Brazil and North Korea, Palin has conducted the journeys most of us would or could never do, either because we don’t have the means, or the inclination.

Picture: ITN Productions/Jaimie Gramston

His latest, Michael Palin: Into Iraq, has done it again. Beneath an undoubted affability, Palin found humanity thriving in a country which has a claim to being the cradle of civilisation, and yet has been scarred by frequent bouts of humankind’s destructiveness. The narrative of Iraq for at least the 30 years since the first Gulf War is that it has been one of the world’s great basket cases, much like Afghanistan. But despite the seemingly perpetual turmoil – war with neighbouring Iran, then the first Gulf War and its sequel, followed by the post-Saddam collapse into tribalism and the rise of ISIS - humanity has prevailed. As Palin showed, Iraq is not a bombed out desert land. Travelling the length of the Tigris, from just over the border in Turkey to Basra, one of those names we now only know for its place in conflict, Palin found Iraq’s beauty, its stunning architecture, the culture that made it the centre of the civilised world at one point in history, and most importantly, its people.

The experience had a profound effect on him: “By the end of March we were back from battle-hardened Iraq having travelled for almost three weeks and seen things, people and places the like of which I’d never seen before in all my travels,” he wrote in a blog post. “The scenes weren’t always happy. Many of them reflected the violence of the past few decades when Iraq was disfigured by war and the threat of war. But we met some souls who’d been through it all and whose resilience was an inspiration.”

Indeed, amongst the still-chaotic administration, and latent dangers that prevail in areas where the Western military is still present, Palin found reassuring normality. The flamboyant tailor in Erbil running up a smart suit, the café society that draws both men and (surprisingly) women out for tea in the evenings, and the children on a bombed out street in Mosul that reduced the normally genial presenter to blurt out “Fuck me!” at their stoicism. In a classroom, eloquent school kids spoke in perfect English of their desire for Iraq to be treated as a ‘normal’ country, like those in Europe. It was a truly levelling moment.

This, though, is still the contemporary narrative, and here’s what drew me in. Palin admits to having been fascinated by Iraq since childhood, when he was given a copy of Arabian Nights. It’s this connection to history – real history – that should spur us into visiting places that might be unfashionable, that don’t have McDonald’s drive-throughs and familiarities, but which may have contributed more to the world than, to quote Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday, “an ’ot dog.”

Palin’s “relentless optimism” in the Iraq series wasn’t meant to airbrush out the turmoil, and it certainly wasn’t a glorified advert for the country’s tourist authority. In one scene he visits the site of the Camp Speicher massacre in 2014, in which 1,500 Iraqi cadets were killed by ISIS. The undoubted gloom of Iraq’s recent past can’t be undone, but Palin showed that, actually, there should be plenty for tourists to come and see for themselves, if they’re willing and able. 

The people, first. Simplistic to say, I know, but they’re not all Kalashnikov-wielding monsters. They are young, aspirational, ambitious, thriving, even. There is wealth and prosperity amid the prevailing dysfunction. I can’t help feeling that it would be nice to contribute to it, as a Western tourist. Perhaps, for now, we have to accept that modest adventures are our limit, and let television be our gateway to more exotic or harder to reach places. One day, though. One day.