Michael Palin gets job creators vote as the last BBC tv
presenter who is truly his own man. By which we mean he chooses only to present
topics where the censors at the BBC will not come into play as he lets his
curious mind explore the world with love and humor. This clipping of Palin
celebrating being with the Russian navy at Vladivostok
is priceless:
- Funny
- Loving on all sides
Somehow MP got through both Russian and BBC censors at the denoument of his program full circle which visited neighboring cultures from north to south to north. Not even the open spaces linked in by Xi Jinpings amazingly gracious Belt Road explores with such grace travel through neighbors who have had high walls erected between each other but turn out to have such decent people inside. Communities made desperately lonely by failure to resolve historical conflicts which weren’t the peoples fault, but were the maddeni ng games of big bankers and big carbon.
Michael isn’t just a navigator of how any two peoples
cultures could find there’s more common kindness aching to be released between generations than historical angst
He comes from what I dare call the amateur school of acting
which is Cambridge footlights and which we Scots also celebrate annually as free
arts festival of the Edinburgh Fringe
Cambridge Arts Theatre is
a 666-seat theatre on
Peas Hill and St Edward's Passage in central ... When only £2,300 was raised
by subscription of the town, Dr Keynes underwrote
the rest himself. Intending to represent both "town and gown", ...
Capacity: 666
Opened: 1 February 1936
|
Cambridge Footlights
remains that space in Cambridge University
and Theatre where students active amusement grows round experimenting as stand
up comics and performers of satirical sketches. Back in the student days of
Palin, none of the famous footlighters as far as I know were expecting to go
into a career in entertainment- they all had academic degrees to study but did
so with an extrovert joy of youth which used to have some peculiar coinstraints
in the old style male Cambridge Colleges. Moreover in Micheal’s student days Cambridge
didn’t yet have a busineess school. Extraordinary innovatoions rthat had come
out of Cambdige like the discovery of DNA were done as pure exploration to
improve the human lot not as pure commercialism
Palin was part of the team whose 1960s renditions of Monty
Python stood on a free spirited par with say the Beatles “imagine” of IF man
and computer can race to the moon- why should there be any challenge that
humanity will not be able to solve. In those 1960s, we (English-Speaking youth)
were naive to believe that our race would never be confronted with any
challenge to our societies sustainability other than ridding the world of
nuclear superpower.
Back in 1984 my family argued, so far wrongly, that the BBC
would be the jewel in the English speaking crown that would help the peoples mediate
any conflict. Here you can see the list of timelines we were hoping the BBC asa world service owned by the peoples would open inter-generational space to but
which it has so far failed to do
This isn’t Michael Palins fault. You can guage how the BBC
gets censored by considering Tony Blair (or later the parliamentary inquest
into Rupert Murdoch tabloid abuse in a mobile era) . Some of The BBC’s
journalists had reasonable proof that Saddam didn’t have chemical weapons but
Blair fancied being George Bush’s Little Big Brother, and so we went to war.
What bothered me about this Iraq
war is illustrated on the other side of the Atlantic at Geoirgetwon
University where I was doing some
volunteer work on media reality. Usually people are relatively free to enter
Georgetown Campus. That day there was a pompous professor manning the gate – do
not come in unless you believe in the war. I told him oh I am sure you will win
your glorious war but I am scared your leader has no cultural plan on what to
do as soon as he won the war. He looked as if he would pop out of his skin but
by that time others were pushing through. The bullypit embedded in Georgetown
and I survived to battle student freedoms for another day
I would love it if Micahel Plain could take back his own BBC
footage and issue a youtube series on how the north south belt roads are as
important to debate openly worldwide as te east west. More to the point his
fans in Vladivostok would love to
see a tunnel between the most extreme tip of north east asia and the nearly
adjacent state of Alaska . That
would be the day when small enterprises of the world’s most cold and
land-locked peoples could get back to flowing free trade across all 4 hemispheres.
If Americans truly are the free and the brave lets help the worldwide
generation celbrate building bridges and
tunnels, no walls, and no more black&white holes in what is meant by the
kind of social justice Baltimore girls stood up for in 1881 when their case law
was the first to turn the 13th amendment end slavery into a local
win-win (which became the social networks whose most famous 20th C
alumni was Thurgood Marshall)
Michael has also had a pure green spirit. He selflessly chaired
the Rural Geographical Society during the times when the great BBC naturye correspindent
David Attenborough confessed his biggest mistake. Said David: being a broadcaster
at the BBC is such a huge responsibility that I have never taken sides on an
issue until I a sure its proven beyond all reasonable doubt. David was
self-justifying why natures number 1 broadcaster in the English-speaking world
had taken so long to come out on the side of the climate crisis. And there’s
the mathematical rub- here is a pre-eminent naturalist saying in effect he only
dared question something after its was exponentially breaching a tipping point
towards collapse. How sad the BBC’s lack of freedom of speech has so far been
when it faced critical tests of Truth’s Inconvenience.
Will English speaking peoples ever regain the essence of world service that the BBC is so uniquely funded to be?
Will English speaking peoples ever regain the essence of world service that the BBC is so uniquely funded to be?
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