Here's a Palin with a truly global outlook

Eight days from now, Britain's favourite traveller may regain the franchise to his name. Michael Palin is unrelated to the Republican vice-presidential candidate. But the sudden emergence of Sarah Palin from Alaskan obscurity – to which, the polls suggest, she may return when the election results start coming in on 4 November – has caused a kerfuffle in his north-London household.

"Before, if I saw the name Palin in the paper, it tended to be to do with something I had done. Suddenly, it's, 'Shock! Palin daughter pregnant'. Which our daughter, bless her, found quite difficult to take. As did my wife, with headlines like, 'Mrs Palin attacked by Democrats'."

The term "Palin Effect" has also become muddied since John McCain selected the Governor of Alaska as his running mate. Until this year, the phrase applied exclusively to a sudden rise in visitor numbers to locations that had been revealed to an audience of millions by the most entertaining and influential travel presenter in television history. Bhutan and Niger are among the beneficiaries of a sudden tourism surge after being anointed in, respectively, Himalaya and Sahara.

Thankfully, the Monty Python fan base has responded on the presenter's behalf to the counterfeit Palin: "There is a website where someone has done a 'Michael Palin for President' YouTube clip, with bits of 'Python' in there." (See michaelpalinforpresident. com to see the film, which includes the memorable line, "Although a British citizen and technically not qualified to run for office in the US, he's still more qualified than the other Palin".)

Our original Palin is also energetic in preserving the planet; indeed, on 13 November he is giving a talk at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall called Around the World in 80 Ways, on behalf of the Campaign for Better Transport. And before that, several hundred people in South Yorkshire will learn some of the tricks of his extraordinary trade in a masterclass as part of Doc/Fest, the Sheffield international documentary festival.

What I want to know is, how did Palin go from comedy to travel in a single bound?

"The bridge was one of the Great Railway Journeys I did. The director had seen that and saw that I had enthusiasms for things other than hitting people with fish."

Surely, though, anyone associated with Python will be presumed to be making a spoof of a documentary rather than the real thing?

"Doing a spoof is not always a dismissal of something. Very often, it's an act of homage to people you've grown up with. Most of the travel documentaries at the time were done by the serious travellers, by the Attenboroughs and the Whickers. We did spoofs of both David Attenborough and Alan Whicker on Python. I suppose it was probably me edging myself into that world, because it was a world that interested me. So maybe it wasn't quite as much as a leap as it might have been thought."

Palin thinks that 21st-century television may not provide such opportunities. "They do tend to like to have people in their various boxes"

The 21st century has also brought revolutionary technology, a world away from when the first Palin travel documentary, Around the World in 80 Days, was filmed 20 years ago. Yet he says his team still makes programmes in a similar style to the first one. "We did it with a small crew because the idea demanded easy access for me and a certain amount of mobility and fluency when we were actually shooting, so the fewer people to get in the way, the better. And we've really kept that way of shooting right up to [last year's series] New Europe. We go with about six or seven people, and that's pretty much how we did it in the first place."

Remarkably, every Palin series up to and including Himalaya (2003) was shot on film. The high quality the medium offers comes at a formidable cost in terms of weight and logistics alone, never mind the stock and processing. "Our cameraman has won two Baftas, so we have to listen to him. He felt he could get better contrasts and all that with film. But the [digital] techniques got better and better, and New Europe was done on digital."

Palin misses, however, the discipline of knowing that he had to encapsulate every interview into a finite number of frames: "It may sound ridiculous, but you can say probably all you want to say in an interview in 10 minutes. I don't know whether you necessarily get the best out of people after 40 minutes that you wouldn't have got after 10 minutes. As a presenter, I liked the discipline of knowing that you didn't have an unlimited amount of time."

Time, the great enemy of any film-maker, is particularly unforgiving to the travel-documentary director – and especially so when the team is attempting a journey. Part of the appeal of Palin's trips, of course, is that they are extreme. But the logistics of getting a crew and camera gear over deserts and mountain ranges – and across frontiers that are invariably guarded by zealous customs officials – demand flexibility.

"The route is the product of a lot of days spent by both directors, out there on the ground, talking to people. But the idea is that moving along that route, we will encounter people who weren't in our original plan. It's always good to have room to meet people on the street and on trains, and occasionally fit in interviews that we'd never planned. A certain amount is left to happenstance, and I value that."

Palin's latest project – from which he returns just in time for his close-up in Sheffield – is a new departure: to revisit some of the places he encountered, and people he met, during his first series. "This being the 20th anniversary of Around the World in 80 Days, the idea came up to mark it in some way. Rather than do lots of interviews, and clips from various programmes, the idea is to go back to one of the best remembered episodes – the dhow journey from Dubai to Bombay – go back to Dubai, go back to Bombay, try to find the guys who were on that ship, actually make a new programme.

"Some have died, some we know are still around up in the Kutch area, north of Gujarat. So it's going to be a three-pronged approach: back to Dubai, see how that's changed; back to Bombay, see how that's changed; then out up into the countryside, to see what that's like, for the first time."

That the former Python is now a gilt-edged national treasure becomes evident if you take the railway line between Cambridge and Ipswich – on which the single-coach trains are named after Benjamin Britten, Delia Smith and... Michael Palin. Yet would he ever consider making a documentary series about his home country?

"I feel there would be so many people who know me from something else that it would distort what I'm trying to do, which is to look at the world through the eyes of an anonymous Everyman. I want to be an observer; I want the people I see to tell the story. For a long while, we had battles with the BBC wanting me to have my name below the title.

"I always saw Attenborough as the person one looks to for the right way to do these things. It was Life on Earth, never "David Attenborough's Life on Earth". He resisted that. I resisted right up to New Europe, when the BBC wanted "Michael Palin's New Europe". I thought, it's not mine, it belongs to all the people who live there. It was a silly battle I'd always have with the BBC, to get my name in smaller letters."

Something of which Sarah Palin could never be accused.

Sheffield Doc/Fest, in association with 'The Independent', 5-9 November; Michael Palin's masterclass is at 4.30pm on 7 November. For more information, see www.sheffdocfest.com