Michael Palin’s three-part travelogue for Channel 5 tracks the Tigris from its Turkish headwaters to the Persian Gulf, clocking 1,000 miles through a country Britons chiefly know from war reports. Shot in late 2021, the series lands on 20 September 2022, with Palin, then 79, bargaining for river taxis in Baghdad, sipping tea with Marsh-Arab reed-house builders and watching oil flares glow over Basra. The schedule is tight: three hour-long episodes shot in four weeks, produced by ITN with Miguel d’Oliveira’s lute-and-string score stitched between locations.
Palin’s on-screen persona remains the gently curious outsider, but the territory forces concessions: bodyguards shadow every stop, the road to Mosul is scratched at the last minute, and in Tikrit he interviews a Yazidi family still living in a half-built shopping mall seven years after fleeing Islamic State. These encounters are folded into the travelogue formula rather than foregrounded; the camera still lingers on Palin tasting masgouf beside the Tigris and reciting Byron outside the ruins of Ctesiphon.
The accompanying book, also titled Into Iraq, appears the same week from Hutchinson and supplies the historical footnotes the television cut leaves out. Ratings hover around 1.2 million, respectable for Channel 5 yet half of Palin’s 2018 North Korea haul, and the series quietly ends without the live farewell tour that accompanied his earlier BBC journeys.
Production Details
5 / 1 Season / 3 Episodes / 2022
Created by: Michael Palin
Writer(s): Michael Palin
Music: Miguel d'Oliveira
Main Cast
