MICHAEL PALIN, the armchair traveller’s favourite guide and probably the world’s most popular Englishman, has done roaming. He has decided never to make another television travel series, writes Richard Brooks.

After 25 years of traversing the globe pole to pole, hopping on trains for great rail journeys, trudging through the Sahara and yomping across the Himalayas, the former comedy actor believes he has done the full monty.

“That’s it,” he said last week “I could never top Himalaya. I had a fantastic crew on that series and I can’t believe I’ll be so lucky again.”

Palin, who shot to fame in 1969 with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, has been feted in the past week with a Bafta special award for his television career and the television and film book of the year prize at the British Book Awards for his tome on the sweeping majesty of the mountain range.

The presenter, who is 62 next week, added: “I’m too old now for these big series. They can take, with planning, filming and editing, up to two years or even more.

“I might do the odd one-off programme, but no more series and definitely no more long trips. Perhaps I could do a simpler one, like A History of Gospel Oak.”

For many years Palin has lived in the north London “urban village” of Gospel Oak with his wife, Helen, whom he met on a childhood holiday to Southwold in Suffolk. Himalaya was the other extreme.

The series took Sheffield-born Palin across 2,000 miles into Al-Qaeda territory on the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan and to a brush with Maoist rebels in Nepal.

He met the Dalai Lama, who greeted him saying, “I know you, I’ve seen you on the television.”

Palin also washed a 55-year-old elephant in Assam, learning how to make it shudder with pleasure by tickling it on the cheek, and visited the self- proclaimed “best toilet in heaven and earth” perched 4,000ft above the Yangtze river in China’s Tiger Leaping Gorge. There was no paper.

Himalaya gained audiences of more than 8m people when the six-part series was shown last autumn on BBC1. The associated book has sold more than 600,000 hardback copies.

On previous adventures Palin has eaten bull’s penis and maggots and drunk a palm wine in Peru fermented with human saliva.

Critics have praised him for his “inquiring mind and being an ordinary person just like the viewer in his sitting room”. His Around the World in 80 Days in 1989 was an attempt to replicate, albeit in a very different way, the fictional journey of Phileas Fogg.

In Pole to Pole in 1992, Palin covered 16 countries and, in Sahara in 2002, he spoke about “covering an area as big as the United States, but with the population of Norfolk”.

His droll travelogues are credited with increasing the demand for exotic holidays. The tourist industry has dubbed it the “Palin effect” and he was awarded a CBE in Tony Blair’s millennium honours list.

The Sunday Times described his Himalaya series as superb. “Come back soon, say the people en route, and that is a sentiment echoed by the public,” a reviewer wrote. But Palin’s emphatic decision to film no more overseas series makes that wish redundant.

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