A few weeks ago I watched Monty Python’s Michael Palin toss an inflatable globe to a classroom full of North Korean schoolchildren. The sight took my mind back across the Pacific Ocean and more than a quarter-century in time, from my current home in Seoul to the childhood home in California where I first saw that same inflatable globe — or one very much like it, anyway — on Around the World in 80 Days, the series that made Palin, already long famous as a Python, a beloved television traveler as well. I’ve watched each and every one of what are now called the Palin’s Travels shows since, following along as the onetime dead-parrot salesman went from the North Pole to the South, circled the Pacific Rim, crossed the Sahara and the Himalayas both, and made his way through a great deal of the rest of the world as well.
The announcement earlier this year that Palin’s latest journey would take him into North Korea thus struck me as the logical extension of the enterprise. Any fan could sense that Palin has wanted to enter that most secretive of all countries at least since 1997’s Full Circle, whose Pacific Rim-tracing itinerary naturally included South Korea. Here he found, as he writes in the series’ companion book, a country tirelessly at work “making itself bigger,” channeling its historical resentment into an “intense commercial competitiveness” and an “almost manic drive to modernize in the international way.” Its sense of national destiny, it seemed to him, “transcends individual aspirations. Things like privacy, holidays and time off, which we value so much in the West, are considered luxuries, always ready to be sacrificed to the national effort.”
Palin’s travels took him through this country many years before I arrived, but his observations of the developmentalist South Korea in the mid-1990s, just before the Asian financial crisis took the wind out of its sails, jibes with other accounts of that time. Now, though, the bit about all the sacrifices for the national effort sounds more like a description of North Korea, which at that time Palin and his crew could barely even see over the border, let alone enter and shoot a documentary. “North Korea is not really interested in seeing you, especially if you’re from the West and carrying a film camera,” he writes in the book of his first serious obstacle to progress around the Pacific Rim. “Global glasnost has barely dented the protective shell of one of the last remaining communist dictatorships and the closest we can get to it is the Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ, which has separated the two countries since the end of the Korean War in 1953.”
Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.