Michael Palin spends three weeks on the road in Venezuela for his first Channel 5 series, filming while black-market dollars buy fewer bolívars by the hour. The three-parter, transmitted on 16, 23 and 30 September 2025, starts in Caracas at dusk, where he travels only by armoured car because the murder rate is 81 per 100,000, then heads south through the Orinoco Delta, the Andean páramos and the oilfields of Maracaibo, ending at the Colombian border town where 5,000 people now cross daily. Palin wrote the scripts himself, composing diary-cadence narration that counts out the price of coffee in millions and measures distances by how many checkpoints require bribes.
ITN Productions shot the series in February 2025, a month after the government dropped three zeros from the currency and still missed IMF inflation forecasts by half. Director Vicky Hincliffe keeps the crew small, often just Palin, one camera operator and a local fixer, so scenes unfold in minibuses, bakeries with empty shelves and evangelical church services where congregations pray for visas. Miguel d'Oliveira’s score threads Venezuelan cuatro motifs beneath footage of kids diving for coins off Lake Maracaibo’s rusted drilling platforms, while Palin’s book, released the same week, adds the detail that he changed hotels five times after one manager warned him the tap water was shutting off at night to save electricity.
The programmes were commissioned as Channel 5’s first travel commission since 2019, part of a slate designed to prove the channel can still handle current affairs without the BBC budget.
Production Details
Channel 5 / 1 Season / 3 Episodes / 2025 - Present
Created by: Michael Palin
Writer(s): Michael Palin
Main Cast
Michael Palin as Self - Host
