Product Details

• Actors: Michael Palin
• Writers: Michael Palin
• Producers: Anne James, Clem Vallance
• Format: Box set, Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 4
• Studio: A&E Home Video
• VHS Release Date: December 23, 1996
• Run Time: 400 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302659736
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #284,163 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Michael Palin, star of Monty Python's Flying Circus and A Fish Called Wanda, is in a comic race against time to get from the North Pole to the South Pole. Palin balks at nothing, tries just about anything, and always finds time for a spot of tea. En route Palin stars in a crayfish documentary in Novgorod, attends a baby-rolling ceremony at a Cypriot wedding, gets stuck in a Nile traffic jam, buys chicken in Wadi Halfa, goes camel shopping in Khartoum, and is prescribed tree bark by a Mpulugu witch doctor to get rid of his evil shadow. Even when things go according to plan, Palin travels in unusual ways--by dogsled on Spitsbergen, barge down the Dnieper, train roof across the Nubian desert, van through the Sudan, hot-air balloon over Kenya, and down Lake Tanganyika on the "African Queen." With curiosity, courage, and his standard aplomb, Palin plunges himself into the local cultures, beating himself with birch branches in a Finnish sauna and wallowing in mud in an Odessa sanatorium. Reminiscent of his Around the World in 80 Days, Palin once again brings some of the world's most inaccessible cities right into your home. An armchair traveler's delight, this collectors' edition of Pole to Pole is ideal for anyone interested in the funny world we live in. --Tara Chace

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Travel Book, June 8, 1998

By 

R. Vosik "vosmo" (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pole to Pole With Michael Palin: North to South by Camel, River Raft, and Balloon (Companion to the Pbs Series) (Paperback)

In this, the best of his travel works (see also Around the World in 80 Days and Full Circle), Palin travels along the 30 degree longitude line, which takes him to many rarely-travelled places, including Chernobyl and parts of Africa where there simply are no roads to travel.

Throughout, Palin is witty and insightful, and one wishes they were with him (except for the scene with the maggots). While travel writing might seem boring, Palin makes it interesting, and exciting. I devoured all his travel books within a very short period of time, and was left wanting more.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars On top of the world, and underneath it, October 24, 2007

By 

Allan M. Lees (Novato, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Michael Palin - Pole to Pole (DVD)

After the success of Around the World in Eighty Days, Michael Palin embarked on a highly successful career as an adventure tourist. Each of his journeys has a hook: circumnavigating the Pacific Rim, going across the Sahara Desert, or in this case making the journey from the north pole to the south pole following as best as possible longitude 30 degrees.

Along the way, from snow to savannah, from Norway to Nairobi, the charm of Palin's travels comes from the unassuming way he interacts with the people he meets on route. His personality carries the relatively unstructured travalog along on a sea of well-meaning interest and curiosity. He tells us when he's tired, anxious, and bored. We are touched by the genuine friendships he makes, however fleetingly, and the partings are often touching. In Pole to Pole the meat of the journey is Africa and we travel from relatively cosmopolitan Egypt to what in politically incorrect days was referred to as Darkest Africa. Even in 1991 witchdoctors outnumbered the western kind, and random violence was never far from view. Indeed, at one point Palin stays with a European estate owner in Zambia and his family and after the visit is concluded we learn from the voice-over that they were slaughtered six months later.

I spent a few formative years in southern Africa and it was shocking to me to see how little had changed since last I saw it. If anything, most of the change was for the worse: the old trains and buses simply have grown older, the disorder greater. Only in South Africa did time seem to have moved on. For the casual viewer the sheer range of experience in Africa should be fascinating, even though we get the merest glimpse. How can one capture a continent in just a few minutes of video? Like many people, I suspect, my favorite moments were of Palin sitting on top of the slow train creaking its way through Sudan, talking with those who can't afford to travel any other way, and seeming perfectly at home. Somehow Palin makes us forget how unlikely it all is: a well-paid BBC personality squatting among the illiterate and impoverished, interacting with them as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Perhaps no other TV presenter could really pull it off convincingly.

In the end the "hook" seems a little forced: Palin flies in to the north pole and he flies in to the south pole. It's not really much of an epic journey but it was more hazardous than it might seem: when he made the trip to the South Pole there was inadequate navigation and infrastructure and it would have been all too easy for him to have perished due to half-baked preparation and execution on the part of those tasked with ferrying him around. Fortunately all survived and went on to make several other telejourneys to various parts of the world; journeys which are now slowly being remastered onto DVD and released by the BBC. If you don't have the chance to travel much beyond the usual tourist haunts, by all means pick up a copy of Palin's travels and experience the sights, sounds, and people you will otherwise never know of.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superhappyterrific fun-time video series, September 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Pole to Pole [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Michael Palin takes us on a voyage from North to South Pole and along the way introduces the interpid couch-traveller to some great sights, inateresting people, and the usual Palin humor. Highlights include the fjords of Norway, Russia and the Ukraine before the general's coup and a crazy long trip through the heart of Africa. Lots of fun...a great way to spend a cold autumn saturday.