Great ideas seem inevitable once they have been successful, and here is one of the very best. In 1873 Jules Verne, wrote Around the World in 80 Days, in which Phineas Fogg attempted to circumnavigate the globe in no more than the titular timespan. In 1989, for this nine-part BBC documentary, and using only the modes of transport available to the novelist's intrepid traveller, Michael Palin attempted to turn the fiction into reality. Hiring Palin was the masterstroke which ensured the series became a television milestone, for despite being one of the comedy-surrealists of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the perpetrator of Ripping Yarns, he proved to be the most amiable travelling companion imaginable. His charm and ingenuity, coupled with the race-against-time format and the opportunity to visit at second-hand places most of us will never see, made Around the World in 80 Days an unmissable television event. So much so that Palin soon returned to travel from Pole to Pole (1992), before taking an epic journey round the Pacific rim for Full Circle .Great ideas seem inevitable once they have been successful, and here is one of the very best. In 1873 Jules Verne, wrote Around the World in 80 Days, in which Phineas Fogg attempted to circumnavigate the globe in no more than the titular timespan. In 1989, for this nine-part BBC documentary, and using only the modes of transport available to the novelist's intrepid traveller, Michael Palin attempted to turn the fiction into reality. Hiring Palin was the masterstroke which ensured the series became a television milestone, for despite being one of the comedy-surrealists of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the perpetrator of Ripping Yarns, he proved to be the most amiable travelling companion imaginable. His charm and ingenuity, coupled with the race-against-time format and the opportunity to visit at second-hand places most of us will never see, made Around the World in 80 Days an unmissable television event. So much so that Palin soon returned to travel from Pole to Pole (1992), before taking an epic journey round the Pacific rim for Full Circle .