Michael Palin's New Europe : Complete BBC Series [DVD]

Having read some of the other reviews of this series, you would think that this
travelogue of The New Europe was a massive letdown. All I can say is that it least such a thing has been attempted and that for me it was for the most part informative and interesting. With so much ground to cover in such a short span of film, really it was going to offer no more than a taster. You do see things in this series that you are unlikely to have seen before and although not underplaying the difficulties that many of these countries have, also highlights some of their charms. By no means perfect but still very watchable.

Over last few years while living in Old Europe, I grew increasingly conscious of my family's Eastern European roots. I now take every opportunity to explore the lands and people previously familiar to me mostly from childhood stories. I have also with much interest followed Michael Palin's grand escapades since the very first episode of Around the World in 80 Days. With these two loci converging, I keenly anticipated his New Europe series. I was curious whether Palin would confirm my own impressions of the countries I already know, while offering additional insights and interpretations. Similarly, I hoped that he would provide insightful appetisers of the countries I have yet to visit, and help me prioritise my next few journeys. That's what a good travelogue should accomplish.

New Europe, to employ the label this series adopted, is a semi-continent of contrasts and contradictions, of a strident embrace of the future and its new possibilities, as well as a new insecurity and nostalgic clinging to recent past, no matter how painful and deceitful it actually was. Palin's series had an outstanding opportunity to illuminate these tensions, and give us a balanced analysis of our newly rediscovered neighbours.

It is sad that Palin's series fails to achieve this. It is badly let down both by its format and execution. There may be many effective ways of approaching the subject, but the "artificial vignette" style was a poor choice, lazily executed. Backed by the Palin powerful brand and BBC's enterprising resources, a team of researchers were presumably sent out months ahead to various East European capitals with the mission to arrange, typically,
1. a local twenty-something babe to welcome Palin and show him around,
2. a local "character" for Palin to interview ("make sure it's someone quirky and colourful") and,
3. a couple of equally quirky activities for Palin to self-depreciatingly engage in - you know the type, an "impromptu" invitation to get onstage with some performers, drive a steam train, and so on.

City visits often end with a "surprise" invitation by colourful locals for a singalong barbecue - to demonstrate that a typical extended family in New Europe consists of a band of pig roasting folk musicians, forever on the lookout for a lone foreigner to invite along (providing he has an international film crew in tow). Rather than destroy stereotypes, Palin and his team of researchers appear to go out of their way to reinforce them.

Palin visits a health spa and ends up "unexpectedly" sitting in a mudbath next to the current Miss World, who happens to have the next day or two free to accompany him around the city. Pleasant experience for Michael I'm sure and a coup for the research team, but how did this advance our understanding of New Europe?

The formula is tired, predictable and above all dishonest. This side of WWF, once an audience start feeling duped, they rapidly loose empathy with a programme and its presenter. I watched three episodes at random, and I grew increasingly frustrated. The interviews were superficial, with Palin politely asking shallow and uninspired questions. There was no real engagement and debate, no trying to unravel the real web of tension that is New Europe, just Palin majoring in his role of the slightly awkward but polite uncle at a family wedding.

As for the Boratesque historical and cultural insights - hey, we are not that dumb! In these days of budget airlines, one can safely assume that much of Palin's audience have themselves walked across Wenceclas Bridge, suntanned on the Adriatic and/or skied in Bulgaria. We know about the Berlin Wall, many of us have pieces at home. We watched Ceausescu's fall on TV in 1989. Some of us can even recall the essence of the Yalta Agreement. Yet these are the places and events presented by Palin like he's exposing some astounding novelties, and even these are dealt with superficially. This felt painfully patronising at times. Even in our soundbite times, BBC's target audience can surely cope with more substance.

There is little useful travel advice. I do not feel I got to know the places Palin visited any better, and I picked up precious little that would help equip me further for my travels. I cannot replicate most of Palin's exploits and encounters, as I do not have a team of researchers working months ahead to organise these.

The series fizzled out on a Baltic beach. I was expecting Palin to finally synthesise his trip, to distil some interpretation and present his decomposition of the complexities of New Europe. Here was his chance to balance the superficiality of his "artificial vignettes" with some gravitas. I almost physically held my breath, willing him to turn things around with a closing piece of insightful analysis. No chance. After a couple of slender platitudes, Palin turned his back on the camera and walked along the Baltic beach. As another helicopter shot funded by TV licence payers panned across, the question that must have resonated in a thousand households was "is that all?!?".

If I sound bitter, it is because after decades of suffering from dictatorships, hardships, discontinuity and uncertainty, New Europe deserves much better that this superficial, artificial, formulaic and above all lazy treatment.

Previous great adventures by Michael Palin have been interesting because of the insights we've gained into the places and people. But in New Europe the show seems to be mostly about Michael Palin himself, and what he thinks of everything, and precious little about the countries he visits.

Just when you get to something interesting -- like, for example, the woman in a thoroughly modern clinic who was treating patients with leeches in all seriousness -- the programme dissolves into nudge-nudge humour. There's no proper translator so we don't know what the nurse (doctor?) was using the leeches for. Instead it's a good excuse for Palin to wiggle his eyebrows and make some jokes.
Similarly, when something interesting hoves into view -- a fascinating historical ship on which Palin stays for a night -- you don't get to hear its full story. Or even very much about it. This is really frustrating.

In the final epsiode, Slovakia was dismissed with a short segment about rural folks slaughtering a pig and making sausages. Then the Czech Republic was represented by Palin going to another health spa, meeting the current Miss World, and bathing in mud baths and being given a hot-stone massage. You can see this at your local spa; there must have been something more revealing to film in Czech, surely?
To be fair, that light-hearted segment was balanced with a more in-depth and serious review of the Stasi and their activities in East Germany. But this was a small proportion of the programme; if only all of it had been so relevant and interesting. And if only it had focussed on the people and places, and not Palin's reactions to them...

At the end of each programme it feels as if you've been sent a scrawled postcard from lots of locations. You've seen some pretty pictures and been told that the traveller met Bert, Bill and Benny, but you have not learned a great deal about the people, places or their culture.

I suspect that people who have loved Palin's earlier travels will still enjoy this. But if you want to learn more about the ex-Soviet bloc nations then you'll have to wait for a more considered and in-depth series to come along.