Television Review: Sahara with Michael Palin (2002)

Of the six members of Monty Python, Michael Palin has carved out a uniquely distinguished post-comedy career as a television presenter, driven by a genuine, deeply rooted passion for travel. Beginning with the landmark 1989 BBC series Around the World in 80 Days with Michael Palin, he established himself as the pre-eminent British travel documentarian of his generation—thoughtful, affable, and endlessly curious. By 2002, his fifth such venture, Sahara with Michael Palin, arrived as part of this acclaimed oeuvre. Though not as widely celebrated as his earlier journeys, Sahara remains a compelling, if occasionally uneven, exploration of one of the world’s most iconic and misunderstood landscapes.

Structured across four hour-long episodes, Sahara charts Palin’s journey through North and West Africa, beginning not in the desert itself but at its periphery. The opening episode, A Line in the Sand, commences in Gibraltar before crossing into Tangier—a symbolic threshold into a vastly different world. From there, Palin ascends into the Atlas Mountains, briefly enters the Algerian Sahara, and visits a Sahrawi refugee camp near Tindouf, where he engages in earnest conversations with Polisario Front activists. This early political thread is one of the few moments where Palin directly confronts the region’s fraught geopolitics. The episode concludes in Mauritania, where he meets Dave Hammond, a British participant of the Paris-Dakar Rally—a telling juxtaposition of Western adventurism and local endurance.

The second episode, Destination Timbuktu” ventures deeper into Sub-Saharan Africa. Starting in Senegal, Palin travels through Mali, encountering the Dogon people along the Bandiagara Escarpment—a culture renowned for its elaborate cosmology and cliffside dwellings. Yet even here, logistical chaos and the sheer unpredictability of travel in the region threaten to derail the journey. By the time he reaches Niger, Palin genuinely wonders whether Timbuktu—the legendary city that has captivated Western imaginations for centuries—will remain out of reach. This sense of uncertainty lends authenticity to the series; Palin is not a detached observer but a participant in the often-frustrating realities of overland travel in under-resourced regions.

In the third episode, Absolute Desert, Palin finally arrives in Timbuktu, only to quickly pivot back to Niger’s northern reaches. Here, he witnesses vibrant Tuareg festivals and journeys into the Tenere desert—the “absolute desert” of the title. It is in these moments that the cinematography shines; the BBC’s production values are, as ever, impeccable, capturing the stark beauty and haunting silence of the Saharan expanse. Palin’s narration remains gentle and observant, often letting the landscape and its people speak for themselves.

The final episode, Dire Straits, is perhaps the most historically resonant, if slightly rushed. Crossing into southern Algeria and then Libya—then still under Muammar Gaddafi’s reclusive rule—Palin gains rare access to areas typically closed to Western crews. His visit to Tobruk, where he meets British veterans of the WW2 North African Campaign, provides poignant historical context. The juxtaposition of wartime memory with present-day isolation is masterfully handled. A visit to Leptis Magna, one of the Roman Empire’s grandest cities, further enriches the narrative. The series closes with Palin in Tunisia, where he revisits filming locations from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, offering a wry, self-referential coda before returning to Gibraltar.

Sahara is not among Palin’s most celebrated works—overshadowed perhaps by the sheer novelty of Pole to Pole. Yet it remains a worthy entry in his travel canon. Palin largely steers clear of the Maghreb and Sahel’s complex political landscapes, save for the Polisario interviews and a brief exchange on a Spanish beach about African migration—a conscious choice that may frustrate some viewers but aligns with his ethos of cultural immersion over political commentary. His characteristic humour surfaces in unexpected places, such as a wry discussion about polygamy’s social implications, and he frequently adopts the perspectives of expatriates, like a Norwegian missionary in Niger, to reflect on cross-cultural misunderstandings.

Ultimately, Sahara works not through grand revelations but through its quiet attentiveness—to people, places, and histories often ignored by mainstream media. While the final episode feels hurried, its encounters with WWII veterans and ancient ruins carry undeniable weight. For aficionados of travel documentaries, Sahara exemplifies the BBC’s gold standard of production and Palin’s enduring gift for bridging worlds with warmth, wit, and humility.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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