Twenty-three hours and forty-eight minutes is a serious commitment, and it is the right shape for what this audiobook is: the third volume of Michael Palin's diaries, delivered by the man who wrote them. Diaries reward that arrangement more than almost any other form of nonfiction, because the entries were never composed with an audience in mind and the person delivering them is the only one who knows which ones still sting. It opens in September 1988 on the Adriatic, on the first leg of a journey the description calls a modern-day Around the World in 80 Days.
Palin's Diary Doesn't Know How the Story Ends
Palin spends this decade being pulled in directions that should not fit together, and the diary form is what makes the collision legible. He was not the BBC's first choice for the travel series that made him famous a second time, a detail the copy states plainly rather than burying. Then the series worked, the book that accompanied it worked, and the public wanted more of exactly the same thing, while he wanted almost anything else. What follows is a man with a proven format declining to repeat it: a lead role in Alan Bleasdale's award-winning GBH as a head teacher, a first novel, a play pushed into the West End, and a film built out of his own great-grandfather's diaries.
September 1988 opens the book, and the ten years the copy promises cover a stretch in which his working life held four or five simultaneous shapes at once. The honest pleasure of the diary form is that none of them arrive pre-sorted for you. He describes himself as drawn to risk like a moth to a flame, someone grounded and safe who can be tempted into almost anything, and the entries around A Fish Called Wanda and its much-delayed follow-up Fierce Creatures show what that temperament costs in practice. The copy is also direct that the doubts and the setbacks sit in here beside the successes, which is exactly the difference between a diary and a memoir. A memoir already knows how the story ends.
Set Down in Exhaustion or Set Down in Triumph
Diaries in the diarist's own voice are a specific pleasure, and the case for this edition rests almost entirely on it. No one else can decide which entry was set down in exhaustion and which in triumph, because only the original writer was in the room. Having the author take the microphone removes a whole layer of interpretation from between a listener and the page. The material suits the long form too: individual entries are short, the through-lines are real, and the two travel formats the copy names, Pole to Pole in 1991 and Full Circle in 1996, arrive here as work with call sheets attached rather than as adventure.
Curiosity is the organizing principle, and it is what keeps this from feeling like an archive. The projects the description lists are wildly unalike: a first novel titled Hemingway's Chair, a West End play called The Weekend, a head teacher in a serious television drama, two travel formats, a film assembled from family papers. Anyone who knows only the travel programs will find that range genuinely surprising, and the diary is the form that shows the switching cost between them. His family life, with three children growing up fast across the period, sits underneath everything as ballast, and this is the one form where the domestic layer cannot be trimmed out for pace.
An Invisible Publisher and Two Empty Series Fields
Blank fields do real damage on this particular listing. The publisher slot contains nothing except an invisible control character followed by the bare word Publisher, so the imprint responsible for the edition is not recorded on the page at all. The release date field is empty as well. Both series fields are empty on a book the description itself calls the third volume, which means nothing on this page tells a browsing listener that two earlier books exist, let alone what they are called. That is a great deal of missing scaffolding for a work whose entire premise is sequence, and it is worth checking with the seller before you commit.
Volume three carries an assumption worth naming outright: it begins in 1988 with the Python years already behind it and a decade of filming, writing and acting already covered elsewhere. The copy sketches enough context that individual entries make sense in isolation, but the emotional shorthand of a diary does not translate for a newcomer. Names recur without introduction. Working relationships arrive with histories you have not read. Ordinary days sit next to enormous ones with no change in register, because that is how they were written. None of this is a flaw in the writing; it is what diaries are, and it functions better as guidance about where to begin than as criticism.
Fans of the Travel Shows, Usefully Unsettled
Fans of the travel programs are the obvious audience, and they may be the ones most usefully unsettled, because the entries treat all that filming as a job with schedules, weather and fatigue attached to it. The demystification is the point. The ideal listener is someone curious about how a working life actually gets assembled: what gets agreed to, what gets refused, what a hit does to the years that follow it. Anyone who reads writers' journals as a form will recognize the appeal within an hour, and a book at this scale offers genuine immersion rather than a sampler of highlights.
Newcomers to these diaries should think hard before starting in the middle, since the listing offers no signposts back toward the first two volumes and the pleasures here compound with what came before them. Anyone who wants the travel writing itself, rather than the record of making it, should look instead to the companion books the description mentions. Listeners who dislike the form, its repetitions, its unresolved threads, its perfectly ordinary weekdays, will not be converted at this length. Come to this one already knowing you enjoy reading someone else's working calendar, and it repays the hours with interest.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the running time of the Travelling to Work audiobook, and does Michael Palin read it himself?
He does. The edition lasts twenty-three hours and forty-eight minutes, and the diaries are spoken by the diarist rather than handed to a hired performer. Little else on the shelf runs that long in this form, which suits a book assembled from many short dated entries instead of chapters.
Which years does this volume of the diaries cover?
It opens in September 1988 and runs across the ten years that follow, taking in the aftermath of A Fish Called Wanda, the drama series GBH, a first novel, a West End play, and two later travel formats dated 1991 and 1996 in the description. The subtitle calls it ten years in different directions.
Is this the first volume of Michael Palin's diaries on audiobook?
No. The description identifies it as the third volume, following the Python years and a decade of filming, writing and acting that earlier books already cover. The listing's series fields are blank, so the page itself will not tell you the titles of the first two or the order they run in.
Why does the listing show no publisher and no release date?
The publisher field holds an invisible control character followed by the word Publisher, and the release date field is empty. That is a data fault in the listing and says nothing whatever about the edition, though if the exact imprint matters to you, put the question to the seller before you pay.
