Michael Palin, the former Monty Python star, has refused a food dish for the first time in four decades of TV travel. In his new Channel 5 series, Michael Palin In The Philippines, the 83-year-old turned down a recycled chicken dish known as Pagpag, calling it a “bridge too far”.
The dish is made from half-eaten fried chicken collected from the bins of fast food restaurants and re-cooked. Palin said: “I've never seen anything that illustrates poverty quite as clearly as half-eaten fried chicken, which has been taken from the bins of fast food restaurants and then re-cooked. So this is ultimate food recycling. Food that's already been on someone's plate has been left behind, and this nice lady goes and collects it. Seeing this, I'm starting to understand why so many people are angry about the inequalities here.”
A bridge too far
Speaking to the Mirror, Palin admitted he was intrigued by the snack but not enough to try it. He said: “It was a bridge too far for me, certainly. Yeah. But it was interesting. The lady who was selling it again, she wasn't conning anybody. She wasn't a gangster or something like that showing off. She was a middle-aged woman. She was obviously a pillar of the community. People trusted her, and she'd been recycling these food for years and years, and no one seems to have died.
“I've eaten everything on my journeys, but I couldn't eat recycled food. I'm afraid at that time of the day.”
Poverty in Tondo
The food was for sale in Tondo, an area of poverty. On the morning he was there, Palin learned that the seller and friends had gone to fast food outlets the night before. He added: “Any meat that had been thrown away, they brought it back, scraped it off the bone, cleaned it all up, and reboiled it, so everything was sort of officially hygienic, and then sold it the next the next day as little sort of delicacies.”
Elsewhere on his trip, Palin travels through underground rivers and swims with thousands of sardines in Moalboal. Under military escort, he explores the destroyed city of Marawi, and on the island of Jolo he meets a member of the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf.
Feeling young at heart
Palin said the trip, filmed last year when he was 82, made him feel young at heart. He told the Mirror: “When I actually did the Philippines show. There’s no special sort of conditions because of my age or something like that. I just did it like I used to travel, and it's extraordinary how your body or your mind can help your body to carry on. And physically, I didn't feel the strain of the Philippines journey until I came home, and it was a long flight, 16 and a half hours to get to Manila from London, and that's what really wears you out. It's the airports and the long flights.
“Time in the Philippines was rejuvenating. I felt great, you know. And I thought to myself, I'll check on my passport that I really am 82.”
Michael Palin in the Philippines starts Monday, September 28 at 9pm on Channel 5, available to watch or stream on 5.
