The idea was from Clem Vallance, who had the idea for "Around The World In 80 Days".
Um...
We weren't going to do a follow-up to "Around The World".
It was a once-off. I went back to acting and made "American Friends"
and appeared in Alan Bleasdale's "GBH" after "Around The World In 80 Days".
I thought, "That's what I do. Travel's just a one-off."
But it had made a big impact, "Around The World In 80 Days",
and people seemed to know about it. They'd say, "Off again, Mike?"
Or if you showed any hesitation about where you were going,
"Lost again? Can't get across Oxford Street?"
There was an expectation I should do another journey.
So I think Clem and I just kept in touch.
Um... Had lunch every now and then. Looked at a few maps.
I quite liked the idea of going north-south.
We discussed that.
But it was Clem Vallance who had the idea of "Pole To Pole",
certainly of the line going down 30 degrees east longitude,
because it went through the most land surface.
That was quite a crucial decision about "Pole To Pole", the route.
If you went north to south directly, it's mostly water, so it's boring.
You know, 35 different kinds of fish, and that's it!
So it was Clem who had the idea of going 30 degrees east.
I was very relieved that "Around The World In 80 Days" worked as well as it did
because we were all unsure
quite what would turn out of this documentary that had no script
and had me rushing round the world.
And er... the fact that it had been very popular in terms of audience
and that the book had sold amazingly well
made me feel we'd achieved something.
There's obviously something about this kind of travel that people relate to.
So I don't think I ever felt, "That's it, I never want to travel again."
My only feeling was, "How do we do another one?"
"Around The World In 80 Days" was based on a book.
It had a story and a life that we hadn't given it.
The life was given it by Jules Verne. There was nothing else like that.
So I was very wary of just doing a follow-up for the sake of it.
I think, certainly for 18 months or so, I resisted, as did we all,
the idea of trying to do a sequel, 'cause there didn't seem to be one.
But then, as I've said, there seemed to be such a popular enthusiasm
for the kind of show that "80 Days" was
that people were almost expectantly waiting for something else.
So I felt, "Perhaps it is worth doing."
As far as the travel went, I was still very, very enthusiastic about that.
I'd never done anything like "Around The World In 80 Days" on that scale.
And so I was putty in the hands of a nice map or atlas!
All these places I could go and the BBC might pay me to go!
The possibilities were attractive.
We learnt one or two things from "Around The World In 80 Days".
A key thing was that the things that worked best were just encounters,
the quick, casual, un-set-up, improvised encounters with people.
The things that didn't work were the set-up, formalised interviews.
On "80 Days" a number of pieces hit the cutting room floor,
like a long interview with a Turkish gentleman about politics in Turkey.
Interviews with ships' captains about the role of shipping in the modern world!
Um... I think probably because I found those rather stiff and formal,
they didn't particularly work.
What I like best was just sort of meeting people,
as much as possible ordinary folk, not the politicians with a line to sell,
but people whose lives we impinged upon.
And certainly the most successful episode of "Around The World",
in terms of audience response, was when we were on the dow.
We were stuck on this dow. It looked very unpromising.
No radar, no sextant, that sort of thing.
Our lives were in the hands of these Gujarati fishermen.
But it turned into a magical sequence,
people trying to understand each other and frequently succeeding.
So we did feel that um...
interesting people in unusual locations was the best formula,
and we were wasting our time if we got an ordinary study
and somebody going on for 15 minutes about the world situation.
So we felt that being on the move and shooting as spontaneously as possible
was what was working.
As I say, very often it was worth taking risks.
On "80 Days" we thought, "We'd better prepare this.
"Tell them what I'll ask them, ask them if they could hand the ticket over in a certain way."
A more traditionally documentary approach.
We decided you don't need to do that.
You can go in there and wing it and hope something will come of it.
Spontaneity works best.
I never really liked doing second takes of anything
because I miss the moment
when you struggle to make communication or you drink something you shouldn't have.
It happens once and that's the best time.
We learnt that from "80 Days", that this worked.
Um, and also I think that "80 Days", oddly enough,
was one of the most relaxed things we've done.
There was intense pressure, but also 12 days on a boat crossing the Pacific
where we barely filmed anything.
We felt when we did "Pole To Pole" that we could er... maximise our...
...er... our work, our output, more
by having fewer days when there's nothing happening,
being where something would happen.
That's been the pattern since. That's something we learned from "80 Days".
Use the time. Don't get stuck in a situation where you can't film for several days.
That's a waste of everybody's time and effort.
The one area that erm... concerned us with "Pole To Pole"
was whether we could recreate this time constraint, these deadlines
that "80 Days" was all about.
We honestly felt that was our most vulnerable...
er... most vulnerable point about the whole new journey,
that people would miss this, so we tried to recreate it.
We had day numbers, which we still use quite effectively, on the screen.
Um... we'll um...
...try and create some sort of deadlines within the journey itself.
"Michael's got to get to a certain place to get a ship at a certain time.
"The rainy seasons are coming. He's got to get out of Sudan at this time."
So we over-egged those a bit,
although the South African supply ship to the Pole was genuinely a real setback.
But there were slightly... I remember thinking, slightly false goals.
"Around The World" was a story, and there were 80 days.
Pole to Pole in, whatever it was, 253 days, doesn't really mean anything.
Um... but we kind of tried to, as I said,
play up the various deadline situations at various points during the journey.
"Michael's got to move on." In many cases that was true.
Any journey crossing lots of different borders, you have a lot of problems.
You can't plan it all and hope it'll work like clockwork.
You're going to different countries with different governments, different passport requirements.
So you have situations where people say, "We can't do it today. Come back next month."
We have to argue through that.
So there were moments in the journey that were deadlines we had to meet.
But we played those up trying to hang on to the day thing in "80 Days".
The huge relief when "Pole To Pole" went out was that it didn't matter.
We still got the audiences we got for "80 Days".
People accepted there were moments when there were time problems,
but they were fascinated and interested in the countries we went to
and the people we met and the cultures.
The day deadlines became less important.
Having said that, we had to shoot the whole thing over about five months.
We had about a ten-day break - no, less than that - a five-day break at Aswan
when one of the boats didn't leave.
It was actually quite tight - you're working to a budget
and you have to keep moving, so there was no let-up.
It was just as tough as doing "80 Days", in fact, more so.
1991 was an extraordinary year for change.
That was when we travelled. We were in a lot of countries that changed.
Er... The major change was that the Soviet Union was still in existence
when we went through what's now Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
It was all part of the Soviet Union.
It was quite unthinkable at the time that the Soviet Union would collapse
within the near future.
I don't think anybody realised that. There were problems. It was a bit wobbly.
We went through in July.
We interviewed Ukrainians who said, "One day, one day...
"We will have our country back. Not in my lifetime, but one day."
They had their country back by December! Extraordinary.
And then we got down south to Ethiopia
where um... Mengistu, a very um...
...oppressive, repressive dictator, had been in power for a long time.
He'd just been kicked out by a citizen army of teenagers from the north.
So a major change of situation in Ethiopia.
Zambia, we get there on the day that Kenneth Kaunda loses power after 26 years!
And then South Africa, where apartheid was beginning to collapse.
It still was official policy but it was beginning to change.
In a couple of years Mandela came out.
An extraordinary year of not just governments but whole systems collapsing.
I'm not taking credit, but the places we went through collapsed behind us!
Sorry about that!
Not our fault, but it made um...
It gave a little extra element of excitement to all the countries,
especially Ethiopia, where there was a real sense of celebration.
If we'd gone to Ethiopia a year before,
we wouldn't have got the interviews or the upbeat feeling, the excitement,
that we got when we went.
And the same with Zambia.
It was coincidental that we chose one of the most momentous years in history
to go through Africa and Russia.
How many of the 23 toasts in Novogood do you remember?
Novgorod.
Er, well, I just have to do what I'm asked to do.
If I'm asked to appear at a banquet in Russia,
I know there are going to be a few vodka toasts!
There's one toast for each person and a follow-up toast.
When you see a table with 12 people, you know it'll be a heavy evening!
The vodka was not, as I remember, legal vodka.
It was all illicitly brewed in his garage. Potent stuff!
And, er... I just lay back and thought of England!
Round about 18 vodkas, I think I was fairly mellow.
It was one of those moments when you wish you had the camera still running.
Next morning I woke up with an awful headache.
I'd had to change rooms in the night
because a big party official was coming.
My room had been set aside for him. I was put downstairs.
I was slightly disoriented. I got up and something had to come out.
So I rushed to the basin and clung to the side of the basin.
I was just about to throw up
when I look down and realise the basin's not attached to anything!
I'm looking through the plughole and see my feet!
I reeled back and the basin came away from the wall!
I'm staggering round with a basin, looking for somewhere to throw up!
Trying to find a hole in the ground. In the end, I didn't.
Such a strange moment, I managed to control myself.
But if Nigel had had the camera there then, we'd have got some unique footage!
If Patric Walker and the witch doctor had predicted good luck,
we'd have told them to do a second take!
Bad news is better to work on.
But they did both say there would be problems ahead.
I don't really believe in that stuff. I thought, "What will be, will be."
But actually we did have some nasty moments on the journey as a whole.
More so than any of the others. Um...
The landing at the North Pole was one of the scariest things I've ever done.
One of the few moments where I felt I shouldn't be doing this.
It was not fair to my family, friends, the crew,
bringing them here just to go from Pole to Pole.
We were trying to land on a moving ice floe.
It had ridges on it, so the plane could have turned over. It was bad news.
But we got down and were able to do it.
Then there were other moments.
There was that feeling in the Soviet Union, a tension.
Something not right. People very unhappy about the way things were.
That was buzzing around.
Then, of course, in Sudan,
we were not allowed to go south of Khartoum because of the civil war.
We'd managed to get these Eritreans to take us across the border.
And, you know, that was a memorable 24 hours
struggling through these roads which were already...
Rain had fallen. They were deeply pitted and rutted.
The vehicles kept getting stuck.
It was the worst 24 hours' filming I can remember
in terms of discomfort and feeling, "Where are we going?"
We were stuck in fields.
No one was sure where the border was, or if we could cross it anyway.
So that was a kind of very difficult period.
Morale got quite low then.
Um... so there was a certain pattern.
Then we interviewed the witch doctor, or healer. He's a healer.
As far as they're concerned, this is better medicine than Roche Chemicals
or, you know, the international drug companies.
Maybe they're right. He was a strange-looking character.
He did say that I'd lose my money and possessions and that sort of thing.
Within a few days, things did begin to go very wrong.
Almost that... The night after I saw this Dr Baela,
I had this terrible semi-fever which I've never had before.
Hot and cold sweats. It came on very quickly.
Most of the night I was shivering or very hot.
Couldn't get this on camera 'cause Nigel was asleep.
I was shivering on the only loo in the place.
Then I got over that gradually and we moved on.
Then some bags being sent on by Zambian Airways just went missing.
They were never found. That's the only time we ever lost gear on the journey.
And then we went white-water rafting in the Zambezi River,
at the end of which I was persuaded to get out of the raft and swim down the last rapid.
And I hit rocks underneath the water quite hard.
In the end, I cracked two ribs.
This was all within a very short time of meeting Dr Baela.
He had said to me... I'd asked him, "Is there anything I can do
"if these curses or problems occur?"
He gave me a bit of tree bark and said, "Here's some tree bark.
"Grind this into powder, rub it all over your body and you'll be OK."
I thought, "Joke!"
After all these things had happened, I got the bark when no one was looking,
ground it up a bit, put it on my back and washed it off!
After that, things were fine, so...
Actually, they weren't fine. We couldn't get the boat out of Cape Town.
Another thing that we were trying to... that we'd learnt from "80 Days" and wanted to carry on
was always travelling on the surface if possible.
Um... not to take planes unless we absolutely had to.
Originally I'd wanted to call it "Pole To Pole By Public Transport."
That was very important to us, to give the idea of surface travel.
Having to cheat at the end,
go to South America and down to the South Pole that way, seemed a setback.
So that was another thing that went wrong
and was not the way we saw things.
So there were a number of moments in the journey
which were quite sort of difficult.
The problem with me is I'm a bit impulsive.
Part of my life is very safe and organised
and then there are moments when I do very silly things.
This will happen as long as I live.
White-water rafting was fine.
It was jumping out of the raft on the Zambezi that was a silly thing to do.
What happened was we'd filmed quite exciting and dramatic rafting,
speeding down and torrents coming in, totally submerged at points.
It was a great thrill and I felt perfectly safe.
Then the camera was put away, we'd finished the filming.
And er...
Um... The people I was with were a group of Zimbabweans.
They said, "A great thing is to swim down a rapid."
I said, "Aren't there rocks under there?"
They said, "Oh, no. They're a long way down."
So I'm on the back of the dinghy
and the guy in charge tells people when to go.
"Go," he says, and you drop off the back.
So I dropped off.
I tumbled down under the water, quite a long way down.
I felt this sharp jab into my back on the right-hand side there.
I knew I'd hit a rock.
And I just was so indignant,
'cause I knew there were rocks there.
We'd been over them for the last four hours.
So I came up to the surface and shouted,
and saw these people swimming happily to the shore.
They were on the other side of the boat. I shouted, "You b*****ds!"
I then went down again, submerged and hit another rock,
this time on the front of my lower calf.
I'd been bashed in two places. I came up and swam to the shore.
Apparently my indignation was a good thing because I'd gone a long way down
and the best way when you come up is to expel the air as quickly as possible,
and so my impassioned scream of abuse at these people
probably saved my life at that time or saved me from getting bashed again.
But I got to the shore and I was fine.
There was a long, difficult walk up which I managed.
But that night I got very stiff. It was impossible to sleep.
A couple of days later I got to a hospital.
They X-rayed me and said, "You've cracked two ribs.
"There's nothing you can do. They'll heal in the end."
I said, "I'm going to the South Pole." They said, "Bad luck!"
The next day I was cycling across the gorge, the Zambezi Gorge.
A stunning location. I'm on a bike with two broken ribs.
If you see the tape, I'm moving rather gingerly
all the way until we get to the South Pole!
Again it was a moment we didn't get on camera.
The director said, "Next time you do that, make sure it's on camera."
"Thanks!" As though I meant to!
But looking back,
that was the only time in any of the journeys
where I did myself a serious injury.
We had to just keep going.
It was about two weeks before I could get a decent night's sleep.
I'm crawling out of beds in various places.
You'd be sleeping on trains - not the best places to have a cracked rib!
I'm quite fond of Cairo.
I like it because it's to me the essence of a good city to travel in.
It's very unfamiliar, very strange, very different.
The way of life there, the buildings, the food, the religion.
All sorts of things are basically quite different.
You see camels waiting at traffic lights. You don't see that anywhere else.
But at the same time it's got a very long history.
So you feel you're in a city which has been important for thousands of years,
much longer than any city at home.
So you have a feeling of important events having happened there.
I like the fact it's very lively.
I remember the traffic only moved when the light was red.
You could only get across at the very end of the green light.
So everyone would move on the red. The traffic lights were out of sync.
Very sort of Cairene.
There are some places you're glad to be back in, a friendly place,
and some places are threatening or dull.
Cairo is neither dull nor threatening. I find it very exciting.
The globe had become a bit of an icon of the journeys.
They'd say, "Michael, it's time for a globe sequence."
I'd blow it up, sit on a train and say, "We're in Estonia" or something.
"We've only done this, we've got to go all that way."
So it was useful. I found it useful also for sleeping on.
Half-inflated, it made a very good pillow.
Um... Had to avoid sticking your head in the sea, that's all!
"I'm drenched!"
Anyway, it had its uses, but I think it was becoming a bit of a cliché.
The decision to abandon it at this school in Kenya
came quite spontaneously.
Er... we were revisiting this school
where I'd filmed a film called "The Missionary" in 1981.
There was the school building. I used the globe to talk about my journey.
It just seemed a nice thing at the end to say I'd give it to the school.
I wanted to give them something. I couldn't give them anything tangible.
"We'll give you a new door or money to build..." The globe was tangible.
I said, "Have it and learn about geography."
As we were leaving I could see the children playing football with it!
So it may not improve their geographical skills,
but Kenya's chances in the next Africa Cup
will be greatly enhanced by kicking the world around!
The news that we weren't going to be able to get the boat to Antarctica
actually came through before we got to Cape Town.
We knew about two weeks before that that there were real problems.
They were trying to be helpful, but this is a once-a-year supply ship.
They said, "We've got three berths but not six."
It was impossible. We needed all the crew there and Basil to take the photos.
It wasn't possible to split the crew at that point.
So we reluctantly had to decide to get to Antarctica another way.
But it spoilt everything - the symmetry, the 30 degrees east line,
our determination to go on the surface.
It spoilt what I thought could have been a good adventure.
The Southern Ocean is notorious as the roughest sea in the world,
but I thought, "This might get some interesting stuff."
So, disappointed on all those counts.
In the end it turned out that our actual approach to the Pole
through Patriot Hills and Antarctica was still pretty good.
The plane flight from southern Chile
was as hairy as the boat journey would have been anyway.
So there was a sense of danger.
As soon as it had gone out and the figures came in,
it was very good viewing figures and the book sold well.
Various people - publishers, BBC documentary departments -
were saying, "How about another journey?"
Um... And Clem and I both said, "Let's forget it for a year.
"Go off and do other things."
That's exactly what we did.
And although ideas did come in,
we didn't put our minds to any new project for another couple of years.
And I think I wrote a novel during that period.
I began work on "Fierce Creatures" with John Cleese.
But um... again you have to...
There's quite a long period after making a series when I have to do publicity.
The directors and myself get together and say, "How did that work?
"Have you seen this in the newspaper? What about the figures?"
Then you begin automatically to think about where we'd go if we did another.
But it was a couple of years
before I had the idea of going round the Pacific Rim, which became "Full Circle".
We went off again! Fools! We just don't know when to stop!