Palin’s Traveling Circus : Great Britain’s Nice Guy Vaults From ‘Pole to Pole’ in New A&E; Series

It follows Michael Palin wherever he goes. He’s haunted by it. But it’s really his own doing.

Palin is known in Great Britain as the nicest man in show business. People who know him personally confirm just how nice he is. And those who only know him through his work in “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” his films, TV shows and books, invariably say that he seems really nice.

And he is really nice. Spectacularly so. But it’s a characterization that irks him.

“I pretty much loathe it,” he says, working his way through a spinach and goat cheese salad in the cafe of one of this city’s posh furniture stores. “It’s sort of a benign millstone. ‘Nice’ to me tends to have overtones of being agreeable, harmless. There are many other things I’d like to be called rather than nice.”

Such as?

“I hate to say it myself,” he says, “but ‘decent,’ ‘honorable,’--all those things that other people get called. Or just being called a complete s--- would be better than ‘nice.’ ”

American television viewers will have plenty of opportunity to form their own opinions in the coming weeks as the Arts & Entertainment network begins showing Palin’s epic travel series “Pole to Pole.”

A follow-up to the 1990 acclaimed series “Around the World in 80 Days,” in which Palin recreated the global journey of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg, “Pole” takes him, literally, from the top of the world to the bottom.

The eight-hour documentary follows Palin as he travels 23,000 miles through 17 countries in five months on a journey from the North to the South Pole.

Committed to using local ground transport as much as possible, Palin rides trains, trucks, ships, rafts, skis, buses, bicycles and balloons. In seeking a route for this trans-global adventure, Palin and his team from the British Broadcasting Corp. decided to follow the 30 degree east line of longitude, which would take them from the Arctic, down through Scandinavia, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, the long way down Africa and on to Antarctica.

A deadline looms: Palin must reach Capetown, South Africa, in time to catch a ship that makes a once-a-year voyage to Antarctica. What complicates matters is that the shipping company will not guarantee him a place on board, even if he reaches it in time.

By traveling north to south, rather than around the globe, says Palin, “we encountered extremes that we never really got in ’80 Days.’ It means crossing much more land, you meet many more people, you cross more borders.”

The route, along with the timing of the trip, during the latter half of 1991, meant that Palin witnessed incredible political changes.

“That year was an extraordinary year,” he says.

During the trip, Palin and his crew found themselves caught up in the momentous upheavals gripping places such as the former Soviet Union, the Sudan, Ethiopia and South Africa.

“It was quite by coincidence that we chose a year that, within two days of leaving Odessa in the Soviet Union, the generals’ coup happened and the whole thing fell apart. We talked to people from Ukraine and Estonia who said, ‘Well, maybe in 30 years or 40 years we’ll get our independence.’ And they were independent by the time we came back at Christmas.

“We found ourselves locked in Sudan because of a civil war and yet able to get out through Ethiopia, which had only been open for a couple of months after 30 years of civil war. Then, in Zambia, we entered on the day that Kenneth Kaunda, the only president Zambia had ever had in 27 years, was voted out.”

In South Africa, Palin is reunited with old friends he had known in Britain--exiled ANC members who had only been allowed back in their own country within the previous two months.

“It was a zig-zag through tremendous change,” says Palin.

But his series is only tangentially about politics. Many of the best moments simply concern traveling and the joys of encountering new people and places. And all the while, Palin proves to be an amiable guide who is never condescending or pretentious. His fast wit is always on display.

As Palin’s journey begins, he is flying to the North Pole, where he will plant a flag to mark the start of the trip.

“Landing at the North Pole was not something I would wish to go through again,” he says. “We were in a fairly ancient airplane, at least 500 miles from any kind of help, from fuel of any kind, and we were trying to land on a moving ice floe. It was the equivalent of an airport that was moving 20 feet to the left and then 20 feet to the right as you approached it. My heart was, well, above my mouth. It was coming out of the top of my head.”

Heading south he stayed with a hermit trapper and later met a drunken Norwegian lighthouse keeper intent on getting Palin to ditch his camera crew and come relax at his lighthouse.

One night in Finland, just before midnight, Palin was about to doze off in his hotel room when the phone rang. A man with a thick Finnish accent identified himself as a local student and asked if he could interview Palin for his university newspaper.

Recalls Palin, “I said, ‘Look, it’s just too late. I’ve got a long journey tomorrow.’ He said, ‘I’m down in the lobby, I could come up now.’ ”

Palin told him, sorry, it was too late.

Finally, the Finnish student said “You know, I want especially to talk to you about your work with John Cleese. I’m a big fan of Mr. Cleese. If you could only give me a comment or two.”

“In that case,” Palin fired back, angrily, “I really just don’t have time. It’s really late, I’m leaving for Estonia in the morning and I’m not doing a promotional tour for John Cleese.”

Sudden splurge of laughter at the other end as the Finnish student turned out to be Cleese himself.

“He’s very good at Scandinavian accents,” says Palin. “He really got me completely.”

Moving beyond Scandinavia, Palin joins a Russian kissing dance in Novgorod, takes a mud bath in Odessa, a Turkish bath in Istanbul and rafts down some of the world’s most ferocious waters on the River Zambezi in Zambia (where he cracks a rib off-camera while attempting a white-water swim).

The cracked rib was ominous, as well as painful, coming shortly after a witch doctor had informed Palin he had an evil shadow following him.

Eventually, Palin does make it to Antarctica. But his method and route will remain a secret for now.

“Pole to Pole” already has proved to be a hit in Great Britain, where it was screened on the BBC at the end of last year.

An accompanying book, Palin’s diary of the trip, has remained in the top spot on Britain’s best-seller lists for weeks, even pushing its way past Madonna’s “Sex.” (Surely his publishers must have discussed whether to tout the book as being “more popular than Sex.”)

Who says nice guys finish last?

“Pole to Pole” premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. and moves to its regular time Monday at 5 and 9 p.m. on A&E.;