This is Around the World in 80 Days week. That’s right, with its depiction of the Reform Club being so iconic, I’m going to do a separate post for 6 days this week, each one looking at a different version of Around the World in 80 Days, and how it depicts the Reform Club.
Today, I am looking at Around the World in 80 Days with Michael Palin (1989) - not strictly an adaptation, but the first of Palin’s travelogues, using the concept of the novel. He had to follow Phileas Fogg’s 80-day itinerary as closely as possible, taking comparable transport - and no aeroplanes.
He also had to start and end his trip at the Reform Club. Uniquely, this is the only screen adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days of any kind to actually film inside the real-life Reform Club (however briefly).
We only get a few brief shots of the Club in the first episode. After the initial establishing shot of the exterior, there is a close-up on the main clock embedded in the central saloon.
Then Palin checks the time, and prepares to set off. We have a nice view of the pillars that encircle the saloon (even if the late 1980s photography with low colour saturation doesn’t fully do justice to the real thing).
Note how different this looks to anything we’ve seen in any other live-action screen version so far - certainly not the 1956 film, or the TV miniseries aired earlier in 1989.
Then Palin picks up his suitcases. We get a nice view of the tiling, though we can also see on the left how faded the colours were at the time. By contrast, on the right, it can be seen twenty years later in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, post-2000s restoration, with bolder colours.
Palin then sets off on his journey, not to return here onscreen, because…
...when we get to the final part of the series, six episodes and 80 days later, we see Palin reach the front doors, late one dark December afternoon. He tries to talk his way in, and then sheepishly steps back out onto the street and tells us, “Unfortunately, for reasons of their own, the Club do not want me to go in there to film this afternoon.”
For many years, it had been widely reported in the press that Palin was not allowed back in because he was not wearing a tie.
It turns out this was not true. Palin set the record straight with the publication of his diaries, in which he recorded that he was told the Club was very busy that evening, and they did not want him coming in disturbing the members. He has since repeated this in several interviews.
And so, on that slightly anticlimactic note, Michael Palin’s epic journey around the world in eighty days ended with him on the footsteps in front of the Reform Club (before going off to get drunk with Terry Gilliam).
(This piece was adapted from an old Twitter thread I wrote on the topic three years ago. This is Part 5 of my 6-part look at six different versions of ‘Around the World in 80 Days’; previous articles have looked at Jules Verne’s original novel; the 1956 film adaptation; the cartoon adaptations; and at the 1989 mini-series.)
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Index
Articles are centred around several distinct strands, so the below contains links to the main pieces, sorted by theme.