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Hemingway Adventure
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(Hemmingway is hosten on Guba.com)
One hundred years after the birth of Ernest Hemingway, Michael Palin sets out to discover the man behind the legend: a hard-drinking, controversial figure who wrote like a dream. Pole to Pole was out in the autumn of 1992, but it was well into the Spring of '93 by the time I finished a long haul of international promotion for both book and series. By then all I wanted was to be at home and never go anywhere else ever again.
The trouble is I was never very good at sitting at home and doing nothing, so I sat at home and started work on what was to become my first novel, Hemingway's Chair, published in 1995 almost to the day that I started work on the film "Fierce Creatures" with my tall friend Cleese. The post office worker who is the hero of the novel is obsessed with Hemingway and knows everything about him. So I had to know everything about him too. What struck me most forcibly in my researches was that Ernest Hemingway, boozer, brawler and dangerous friend, loved to travel. He lived most of his working life outside America in places like Spain, France, and Cuba. And he wrote powerfully well about these places. 1999 was the centenary of his birth and this pushed me into suggesting to the BBC a series based on his travels. I always intended it to be a little different from my other journeys, and used a new director, David F Turnbull and a new producer, Martha Wailes, and we had some fun with the Hemingway legend. The audience was a little confused. Was this an old style Palin journey or not ? What was this bloke Hemingway doing in there ? Why was it only four episodes ? The ratings reflected the confusion and though both book and series did well they attracted lower audiences than my previous trips. Which is a pity, because I think the book is some of the best work I've done and Basil's photos are some of the best things he's done. Though people may have missed the simplicity of one single long journey we did visit some exotic places and do some very strange things - which is why it was called The Hemingway Adventure. I'm very proud of it. I used the same crew as on Sahara - so it looked wonderful, and John Pritchard won the BAFTA award for best sound. So there. I'm delighted that the Hemingway Adventure is now available online. It's a bit of a hidden gem, I think. But you can judge for yourself . And of course, let me know what you think. Happy adventures !
Michael Palin, 6th January 2003.
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Make your choice
 Michale Palin - Festival of St. Fermin
Load episode Festival of St. Fermin: "The programme starts out with Palin reading a novel of Hemingway and then, after being chased by a fake bull, he ends up in Pamplona, Spain. There he watches the famous bull run and then goes to interview a professional matador. Hemingway loved the bull run, and Palin confides that it must be an age thing- he can't stand to watch it. Travelling to Africa where Hemingway did his safaris, Palin goes to a local Masai circumcision where the teenage boys are dressed up in finery. "Which of you is the most beautiful here?" he asked. "We are all beautiful," replies the boy, "except you!" Afterwards, he catches a view of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest point.
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 Michale Palin - Birthplace
Load episode Birthplace: "In Chicago, Palin spends a bit of time exploring the city before going to Hemingway's birthplace, Oak Park. After strolling through Hemingway's first home and singing some of his childhood songs , he goes back to Chicago and enters a local shooting range, hoping to be like Hemingway. Mostly, Palin just jumps at the recoil.
Hopping up to Michigan, Palin looks at the area where Hemingway first learns to fish, and attempts to catch a few himself. He finds none and ends up hooking the cameraman's ear. Going to the local grocer, Palin asks for things that might have been on Hemingway's grocery list to see if the modern grocer would still carry it. In the process of asking for canned meat, ("We have Spam," the grocer says,) he ends up singing the Spam song from the famous Monty Python sketch, and then off he goes to Italy.
In Italy, Palin goes to the area where Hemingway was wounded and supposedly buried a ten pound note in the ground. After a fruitless search, Palin buries his book in the ground. After attempting to drive an Italian ambulance and become a Red Cross nurse, he ends up travelling into France.
Paris, France was "...the city I love most in all the world," according to Hemingway. Now Palin goes through the City of Lights and reenacts perhaps the strangest part of Hemingway's life in 1928- when the writer was reaching for the string for the lavatory, he ended up pulling the skylight string, and the pane of glass crashed on top of his head."
 Michale Palin - Key West
Load episode Key West: "In a random twist of events, Palin pops up in the Florida Keys and sees a Hemingway look-alike contest at the local restaurant. He also goes to visit a man who boxed with Hemingway.
Going to Uganda, Palin looks at the site where Hemingway's plane crashed and the newspaper headlines declared that the famous author and his wife were dead. This was not the case, as Palin soon flies over to Venice, Italy, to keep following Hemingway's always moving footsteps.
In Venice, Palin walks in the midst of an ancient festival that had been gone for 200 years and was revived only in 1975. The people wear masks and cloaks, so as Palin decides to get into the spirit, he dresses up as a Gumby from the Monty Python television series. After this, Palin goes to a dinner before the duck hunt begins, and interviews the Italian people at the meal. Putting on a jacket and gloves, Palin and the Barone, his duck-hunting partner, wait for three and a half hours for a duck to come."
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Michael Palin - Hemingway Adventure |
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Around the world -
Countries Around the world
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 Michael Palin Although it lacks the "Will he make it?" excitement of the earlier series, the relatively leisurely pace of this journey allows Palin to dig a little deeper into his subject. He has an extraordinary knack for finding fascinating people on his travels, and his unassuming style encourages them to open up in front of the camera. The Hemingway trail offers particularly rich pickings, including a centenarian boxer who sparred with Hemingway and a gathering of portly, bearded Papa look-alikes in a Key West bar. Moving easily from the hilarious (tales of Hemingway sailing sans underwear) to the moving (describing the writer's last days from the room where he died), Palin is the perfect travel companion, and this is his most personal journey yet.
Michael Palin turns his wandering eye to the life and locales of Ernest Hemingway. The series moves in and out of past and present to the places that meant so much to Hemingway: Chicago, his birthplace; Italy, scene of his injuries in World War I; Paris; Pamplona and the running of the bulls; his beloved Havana; Key West, where his presence is still felt today; Uganda, where he went on safari; and Ketchum, Idaho, where he died.
 Hemingway Adventure Although he had begun to appear in sketches on the shows to which he contributed material, Palin's major break as a performer was with the series Do Not Adjust Your Set (ITV, 1967-69). Ostensibly a comedy sketch show for children, but one that quickly gathered an avid adult audience, it featured Palin alongside Jones and Idle (with all three co-writing the series), David Jason and Denise Coffey, with short animation inserts provided by yet another future Python, Terry Gilliam. Palin and Jones followed this with their own series, The Complete and Utter History of Britain (ITV, 1969), a sketch series with, as the title implies, a history-based theme, although it failed to repeat the success of Do Not Adjust Your Set. Their next project, however, succeeded on a scale they could not have imagined. Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC, 1969-74) finally saw Palin and Jones united with Cleese, Chapman, Idle and Gilliam to create what was to become one of British television's most influential series, comedy or otherwise. Launched without any fanfare, the show quickly drew a cult audience for the sheer originality of its humour, turning the writers/performers into arguably the most important and internationally influential comedy team ever to work in television.
Palin followed Monty Python's Flying Circus with his own superbly realised series, Ripping Yarns (BBC, 1976-79). Palin starred in each episode of this anthology series parodying early twentieth century Boys' Own adventure stories, and co-wrote all the stories with Terry Jones. However, despite the success he enjoyed with Ripping Yarns (it won a BAFTA award in 1980 for best light entertainment series) it was the only post-Python comedy television series in which Palin appeared. He concentrated instead on feature films, co-writing and co-starring in all four Python feature films between 1971 and 1983, and gaining his first solo lead role in Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky (1977), an uneven fantasy-comedy with a medieval setting, loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll's poem.
Lead roles followed in The Missionary (d. Richard Loncraine, 1981), a period-set story of a refuge for prostitutes in the East End of London which he also wrote and co-produced; A Private Function (d. Malcolm Mowbray, 1984), an Alan Bennett-scripted comedy set in a small rural town in a post-war Britain ruled by austerity and rationing; and American Friends (d. Tristram Powell, 1991), a gentle romantic comedy set within the environs of Oxford University in the 1860s, co-written by Palin and based on the story of his great-grandfather, an Oxford don. He also won a BAFTA award as best supporting actor for his performance in the comedy A Fish Called Wanda (d. Charles Crichton, 1988).
Although he co-starred in the Alan Bleasdale-scripted drama series G.B.H. (C4, 1991), playing a teacher in this story of political corruption, acting, whether in comedy or straight drama, increasingly took a back seat from the late 1980s, as he began to steer his career into new territory. Since the phenomenal success of the documentary series Around the World in Eighty Days (BBC, 1989), in which he followed the route taken by the fictional Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's novel, Palin has enjoyed renewed success with a spate of travel documentaries. All written and presented by Palin, they are - to date - Pole to Pole with Michael Palin (BBC, 1992), Full Circle with Michael Palin (BBC, 1997), Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure (BBC, 1999), Sahara with Michael Palin (BBC, 2002) and Himalaya with Michael Palin (BBC, 2004).
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Maza is born in the Netherlands about 40 years ago and has studied economics in the 90's. He is very much a travel buff. He has also a hughe intrest in science and astronomy. At the moment he is working for the local municipality. If you like you can contact him at info @ mazalien.com.© Mazalien 1999 - 2010
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