Review | What to stream this weekend: in Michael Palin: Into Iraq, veteran presenter is as genial as ever as he travels around a cradle of civilisation on BBC Earth
- BBC Earth’s Michael Palin: Into Iraq takes the octogenarian travel presenter around the Middle Eastern cradle of civilisation, including the rubble of Mosul
- In Netflix K-drama Strong Girl Nam-soon, Lee Yoo-mi plays a Korean woman, lost in Mongolia as a child, who heads to the Korean capital to find her parents
But for Michael Palin, plus his friend and photographer sidekick, Cheung Chau’s Basil Pao Ho-yun, Hong Kong might never have appeared on as many world travellers’ “must do” lists as it has.
It featured memorably in the acclaimed 1989 travelogue Around the World in 80 Days, which became the avuncular ex-Python Palin’s ticket to a new career as the genial, non-confrontational travel documentary presenter par excellence.
Now 80 himself, in Michael Palin: Into Iraq (BBC Earth), he is still calling on those qualities to deliver a three-part sketch of people and places from the north to the south of the country.
Palin’s expedition begins not in Iraq, but across the border in what’s called Turkish Kurdistan, depending on political persuasion.
Following the Tigris River, he crosses into Iraqi Kurdistan (an autonomous entity), before continuing into Iraq “proper”, then taking in Mosul, Erbil, Kirkuk, Tikrit and Basra – names familiar from the “war on terror” of 2001 onwards.
“Glittering”, relatively cosmopolitan Baghdad naturally stands out, but it’s not just in the capital that the intimate but never intrusive Palin, with his conversation-with-a-smile style, evinces snapshots of the lives of his hosts.
Sometimes, even Palin’s “natural optimism” wanes in a country that he says “certainly wasn’t the obvious place to visit”.
But when the wonder and delight return, and he achieves a childhood ambition or two by finding himself at the Great Mosque of Samarra, the Great Ziggurat of Ur and even the extensively rebuilt Babylon, one is reminded that, “axis of evil” declarations or not, it is governments, and not their peoples, who make wars.
Pillars of strength
As if to prove the world’s inescapability from Psy and his satirical 2012 Gangnam Style video, the heroine of Strong Girl Nam-soon (Netflix) is seen grooving to his moves in a yurt in the Mongolian wilderness. How small the world has become.
Tsetseg is learning Korean from the television because eventually she will undertake a mission to find her birth parents, her father having carelessly lost her on a trip from Seoul to the Land of the Eternal Blue Sky years earlier.
Nevertheless, the sky always seems to be blue for the sunnily disposed teenager, otherwise known as Gang Nam-soon (yes, really), who will finally touch down in the promised land – although it takes another decade.
On arrival, Gangnam disappoints Nam-soon (Lee Yoo-mi), not least because of its heartless scammers, but this 16-parter is an optimistic series, so our returning native, despite the alien culture and her naivety, won’t be downhearted for long – not when she can turn on at will her outlandish superpower of extreme physical strength (always for the good of society’s downtrodden or exploited).
A spin-off from Strong Girl Bong-soon, this periodically comic, lighthearted action-adventure series is clear-headed about how much better the world would be if it were run by women.
Nam-soon’s mother, the ridiculously wealthy Hwang Geum-joo (Kim Jung-eun), who has the same supernatural gift as her daughter, is even a sort of Batman clone, with her all-black vigilante-avenger outfit, secret house vault and high-powered motorcycle.
So it’s hardly a surprise when mother and daughter decide to help fresh-faced detective Gang Hee-sik (Ong Seong-wu) rid Seoul of illegal drugs.
After all, the men in their family are morally and physically feeble, unambitious or grossly overweight: a fitting metaphor for these increasingly inclusive times.
