Michael Palin has told how he felt "very angry" and "very let down" after his BBC1 travel show New Europe was censured by the BBC Trust.

The BBC Trust's editorial standards committee ruled in August last year that Palin had oversimplified the issues when he talked, during the series' opening episode, about who was to blame for the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

This rebuke from the corporation's governing body followed one complaint from a viewer who felt the programme had given an "inaccurate" view of the conflict and had entered into the realm of "political commentary".

In its ruling, the BBC Trust said the programme-makers should have taken "greater care to ensure accuracy" but added that the show had not had a political message. The complaint was only partially upheld with regard to accuracy and impartiality. The trust also said non-news shows should remember the importance of checking facts.

It is over a year since the trust handed down its verdict on the show, which aired in 2007, but Palin is clearly still fuming.

"The complaint was upheld. That, I believe, brings the BBC into disrepute. I think it was a stupid decision. I felt very, very angry and very let down," Palin told a Royal Television Society veterans' lunch.

"I had a complaint from someone, as far as I gather a serial complainer, who said I hadn't condemned the Serbs roundly enough in the programme," said Palin, who is quoted in the current issue of the RTS magazine, Television. "Fair enough, everyone has opinions."

New Europe, in which Palin travelled around eastern Europe to discover what had happened in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, was the former Monty Python star's seventh travel series for the BBC.

Palin also told the RTS lunch there was not the creative freedom within the BBC to make a programme like Monty Python today.

"I think we would be looked at very carefully. There would be much more managerial interference, which there never was," he said.

"We were allowed to get on with our show once they had agreed it. I just don't think it would be the same nowadays and I think that is regrettable. We are in danger of having to be so accountable to everybody for everything [the BBC] does and the wider public."

Palin's globe-trotting series began with Around the World in 80 Days in 1989, which has subsequently been followed by Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway, Sahara and Himalaya.

One critic described New Europe, which aired on BBC1 in 2007, as "a tour, as always, liberally punctuated with booze and characters you would hesitate to make up".

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