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Whistle Stopper - Pole to Pole (4pc)
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List Price: $39.95
Our Price: $16.95
Your Save: $ 23.00 ( 58% )
Availability:
Manufacturer: A&E Home Video
Starring: Michael Palin
Directed By: Clem Vallance, Roger Mills
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786302659733
Format: Box set
ISBN: 6302659736
Label: A&E Home Video
Manufacturer: A&E Home Video
Number Of Items: 4
Publisher: A&E Home Video
Release Date: 1996-12-23
Running Time: 400
Studio: A&E Home Video
Theatrical Release Date: 1993-01-10
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Palins travels
Comment: "Pole to Pole" was the second of former Python Michael Palins great travels around the world after the groundbreaking series "Around the World in 80 days", and is equally exciting, thrilling, and entertaining.
This time the team travels along 30 degrees east longtitude from the North Pole through Scandinavia, Russia and the Soviet Union, Africa, (and forced by fate South America) to the South Pole, this being the route covering most land. As with 80 days, and his subsequent travels, "Pole to Pole" is filled with a great, warm spirit of enthusiasm, interest, and real, honest, good humour. Palin guides us, the viewers, through the many different countries and cultures with his usual witty and insightful commentary, and does what the travel industry calls 'the Palin effect' (that you want to go where Palin has gone) great honour.
Describing Palins travel programmes in one word is impossible, but if I had to choose or be beaten to death with a shoe, I'd describe them as inspiring. Truly, utterly, completely, magnificently, and really inspiring. And there cannot possibly be any other quality in a travel programme that is better than that.
The extra material on the DVDs are, as with all the other series, abundant. Lots of clips and segments that didn't make it to the final cut and a half hour interview with Michael Palin.
Highest possible recommendation.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Palin is inspirational
Comment: This travel documentary is exceptional, showcasing great landscapes and
various cultures with an element of uncertainty. But what makes it
inspirational is Michael Palin with his spirit of adventure, great sense
of humor and ability to connect with local people.
Palin's journey shows us how people across different ethnicities and
cultures have one thing in common - the 30 degree longitude (as he
travels along this route from North Pole to South Pole). It gives us a
sense of how in spite of our differences in race, religion and culture
we still share the same planet.
We can learn the political, social and economic situations unfolding in
those countries during early nineties. The world has changed a lot since
Palin's journey but his adventures will always be relevant regardless of
time.
This vicarious experience inspires me to embark on a real adventure.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Michael Palin opens the world.
Comment: What can one say about Mr. Palin and his enlighting series of discovery and adventure. Pole to Pole and Around The World In 80 Days were the eye opening quests that brought a new look at adventure and the world around us. I first saw these at University and just new I wanted to see the world as Mr. Palin has. Which I now have. He takes the journeys beyond the documentary range of The National Geographic. His, take things as they come and if it can go wrong it mostly likely will, coupled with his wonderful sense of humor. Can only lead one to smile and laugh. His style taught me the value of adventure and that all folks are just folks. Give respect and most of the time you get respect in return. Thanks to this gentleman the world is a little closer. Enjoy Pole to Pole and go see for yourself. It's all an adventure. Thank you Mr. Palin
Customer Rating:
Summary: A FINE JOURNEY
Comment: MICHAEL PALIN`S DOCUMENTARIES ARE ALL A PART OF MY COLLECTION. ALTHOUGH THIS IS I BELIEVE THE EARLIEST OF HIS FOUR EFFORTS(SAHARA,AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS AND HIMALAYA ARE THE OTHER THREE)THE ENTERTAINMENT VALUE, HUMOR, AND PURE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PEOPLE, CULTURES AND COUNTRIES HE TRAVERSES IS SIMPLY STATED, EXCEPTIONAL. NONE BETTER. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED AND A MUST HAVE. THANK YOU MICHAEL FOR YOU TALENT AND YOUR PERSPECTIVES.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: On top of the world, and underneath it
Comment: 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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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
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