Martin Clunes says he’s used to being called a “dim-dim” — which came in handy while filming his new Pacific Islands travelogue…
Ed Grenby - 9 April 2024
A travel programme about the Pacific Islands? Haven’t you already done this?
Ha! We were making a four-part series in 2019–20 and we’d just finished filming the third episode when the world slammed shut behind us because of Covid. So ITV put that out as a three-parter, and now we’ve done another three for this new series.
Did you find that the pandemic had changed things there?
Massively. In the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, we met three-year-olds who had never seen white people before. They would run beside us shouting “dim-dim!” [which means “white people”]. Luckily, I’m used to that. It’s quite cut off there, and it’s very much a tribal society. Everyone carries some sort of blade – even the babies are trusted with machetes. Spears get thrown, people get killed: it’s a society of retribution. One person we met was “chicken oriental” [that’s cockney rhyming slang for “mental” rather than Trobriand creole]. He looked like he really meant business.
Did you call home for backup?
There’s no phone signal there, no internet. Somebody had a generator they would switch on to power up a mast, and occasionally in the middle of the night my phone would briefly pick up some 3G. In fact, that’s how I got a message from my daughter telling me that the Queen had died. I told the chief of the village, and then throughout the day chiefs and elders from other villages came to seek us out to offer their condolences to Britain. I was the dim-dim conduit. When we got back to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, there was a newspaper front page with the headline “Goodbye Mrs Kwin”, so I took a picture of it and sent it to King Charles along with the village’s condolences. I never heard back from him, but I think he had a lot on.
Talking of funerals, tell us about the hanging coffins…
That was on Luzon, an island in the Philippines. There they say, “Why would you bury your loved ones away from the gods? The dead want uninterrupted access between their bodies and the gods.” So they peg these coffins in to the cliff face. There are remains left in caves, too, and because I sometimes like to bring back little shells or mementos from trips, I was looking at these bones, thinking, “Well, what about just one cheeky finger?” But eventually I decided that, no, that would be bad juju. Also in the Philippines, we went to Siquijor, which is known as “the island of witches”, and while we were in Bangaan we were able to film at a ritual sacrifice where a chicken’s life was taken to ask the rice god to bless the harvest. Bangaan is a Unesco World Heritage Site, with these beautiful ancient rice paddy fields where I got the chance to wade around with the ladies planting rice.
And did the blood sacrifice work? Will the children of Bangaan one day feast on the crops that you sowed?
Well, I wasn’t that good at planting, unfortunately. Or at bomb disposal, it turned out. We didn’t film this bit, but we were in East New Britain, a province of Papua New Guinea, at the house of our driver. He was just pulling up a tree that had died in his garden, and there among the roots was this five-metre unexploded torpedo, which had probably been fired by the Australians at the Japanese during the Second World War. There’s no one to deal with that sort of thing there, so I was going to pop my stethoscope on and get my pliers, but they decided to just leave it instead.
Did you visit anywhere people might want to go on an actual holiday?
It’s all lovely! The only downside is the journey – it took us 51 hours to get home. My shoulders were completely locked after so long on a plane. I was like a deckchair that’s been left folded up. Palau is stunning. Our trip to work was whizzing through this beautiful blue sea, weaving between uninhabited rocks green with trees. It’s mind-blowingly gorgeous. It was there I tried paddleboarding for the first time– successfully, too, because the water was like glass. The Philippines would be amazing for a holiday as well. We went for a nice lazy kayak trip down the Abatan River one evening and saw fireflies and bats flying overhead. And when we finished there was beer. It was great.
Ha! We were making a four-part series in 2019–20 and we’d just finished filming the third episode when the world slammed shut behind us because of Covid. So ITV put that out as a three-parter, and now we’ve done another three for this new series.
Did you find that the pandemic had changed things there?
Massively. In the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, we met three-year-olds who had never seen white people before. They would run beside us shouting “dim-dim!” [which means “white people”]. Luckily, I’m used to that. It’s quite cut off there, and it’s very much a tribal society. Everyone carries some sort of blade – even the babies are trusted with machetes. Spears get thrown, people get killed: it’s a society of retribution. One person we met was “chicken oriental” [that’s cockney rhyming slang for “mental” rather than Trobriand creole]. He looked like he really meant business.
Did you call home for backup?
There’s no phone signal there, no internet. Somebody had a generator they would switch on to power up a mast, and occasionally in the middle of the night my phone would briefly pick up some 3G. In fact, that’s how I got a message from my daughter telling me that the Queen had died. I told the chief of the village, and then throughout the day chiefs and elders from other villages came to seek us out to offer their condolences to Britain. I was the dim-dim conduit. When we got back to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, there was a newspaper front page with the headline “Goodbye Mrs Kwin”, so I took a picture of it and sent it to King Charles along with the village’s condolences. I never heard back from him, but I think he had a lot on.
Talking of funerals, tell us about the hanging coffins…
That was on Luzon, an island in the Philippines. There they say, “Why would you bury your loved ones away from the gods? The dead want uninterrupted access between their bodies and the gods.” So they peg these coffins in to the cliff face. There are remains left in caves, too, and because I sometimes like to bring back little shells or mementos from trips, I was looking at these bones, thinking, “Well, what about just one cheeky finger?” But eventually I decided that, no, that would be bad juju. Also in the Philippines, we went to Siquijor, which is known as “the island of witches”, and while we were in Bangaan we were able to film at a ritual sacrifice where a chicken’s life was taken to ask the rice god to bless the harvest. Bangaan is a Unesco World Heritage Site, with these beautiful ancient rice paddy fields where I got the chance to wade around with the ladies planting rice.
And did the blood sacrifice work? Will the children of Bangaan one day feast on the crops that you sowed?
Well, I wasn’t that good at planting, unfortunately. Or at bomb disposal, it turned out. We didn’t film this bit, but we were in East New Britain, a province of Papua New Guinea, at the house of our driver. He was just pulling up a tree that had died in his garden, and there among the roots was this five-metre unexploded torpedo, which had probably been fired by the Australians at the Japanese during the Second World War. There’s no one to deal with that sort of thing there, so I was going to pop my stethoscope on and get my pliers, but they decided to just leave it instead.
Did you visit anywhere people might want to go on an actual holiday?
It’s all lovely! The only downside is the journey – it took us 51 hours to get home. My shoulders were completely locked after so long on a plane. I was like a deckchair that’s been left folded up. Palau is stunning. Our trip to work was whizzing through this beautiful blue sea, weaving between uninhabited rocks green with trees. It’s mind-blowingly gorgeous. It was there I tried paddleboarding for the first time– successfully, too, because the water was like glass. The Philippines would be amazing for a holiday as well. We went for a nice lazy kayak trip down the Abatan River one evening and saw fireflies and bats flying overhead. And when we finished there was beer. It was great.