In the cruiser HMS Newcastle (a sister ship to HMS Belfast which is now a floating museum across the Thames from the Tower of London) he toured the Far East with a front row seat at the end of the British Empire, watching the Union Jack being hauled down in various newly independent colonies to which he returned twenty years later as a documentary-maker.
In Britain The Times on 1 June 1986 called the series "a triumph of concertinaed history capturing the rhythms, the self-deceptions and the lie of this extraordinary land."
One critic coined the phrase "thinking man's travelogue" for Pizzey's work and he went on independently to make series about Australia (Aussies!
And the Financial Times on 29 August 1989 said, linking Pizzey to the outstanding reporters of the early days of the BBC, "remarkably stylish and literate."
Pizzey also appears in a special feature of the DVD release of Doctor Who – The Claws of Axos, in which he tells how the story came to be converted back from NTSC to PAL using innovative technology.