There is a moment in episode one of Michael Palin in the Philippines where our host surveys a group of children swimming gaily in the harbour of Pagasa, a tiny island in what western atlases traditionally refer to as the South China Sea. “Oh, if only I were young again,” he muses. “Eighty-one would do!”
Palin is now 83 and into his fifth decade of travel presenting, which is longer than he spent as an active member of Monty Python. Naturally, he is not a dynamic or imposing presence on screen. His insights are applied with a soft, broad brush and jokes like the one about pining for the lost vigour of his early 80s are his metier now: simple, classic, corny, even.
