Sahara with Michael Palin - Season 1

Series in which Michael Palin explores nine fascinating countries and their cultures during a trek across the Sahara Desert.

It is the size of the United States with the population of Norfolk, but first Michael has to get there. Gibraltar is the launching pad, and with a 21-gun salute in honour of the Queen's birthday ringing in his ears, he crosses the Straits to Tangier in Morocco.

It is only after pausing in Fez and Marrakech, and scaling the High Atlas, that Michael enters real desert. This is hard, hot country, controlled by the Polisario Front who have been in confrontation with the Moroccans for over 25 years. But this inhospitable land is softened by the warmth shown by the Sahawari people, who guide Michael south to the Mauritanian border. Here he climbs aboard the 'longest train in the world', breaking his journey at Chinguetti.

There is just time for Michael to defeat the local champion at a game of desert draughts, played with stalks and camel droppings, before he gets literally taken over by the 24th Paris-Dakar Rally and its sole surviving British entrant, Dave Hammond from Cirencester.

Series charting Michael Palin's trek across the Sahara Desert. Leaving the desert behind, Michael briefly savours the delights of cosmopolitan Senegal - jazz clubs, wrestling competitions, dance troupes and thequeen of the Senegalese soaps, Marie-Madeleine.

Joining the so-called Bamako Express, he endures two days and nights on the train, but in the process gets to know a schoolmistress who is nothing if not forthright about the disadvantages of polygamy.

In Bamako he finds renowned kora player, Toumani Diabate, and delights in a master class before heading off to Dogon country.

The Dogon people have one of the most distinctive and celebrated cultures of West Africa and they nearly kill him with a combination of excessively complex origin myths, an exploding flintlock and boiling hot millet.

Celebrating the Muslim 'Tabaski' feast in the beautiful city of Djenne with a man called Pygmy and securing a passage on a cargo boat with a Norwegian missionary called Kristin, the rest of the journey down the Niger River to Timbuktu seems plain sailing, until the boat runs aground a day from its destination.

Michael reaches Timbuktu along with a camel train carrying the giant salt blocks that made the city one of the greatest centres of Islamic learning up until the 16th century. He wanders through the rubble that is 21st-century Timbuktu to find the Imam who shows him original astronomical textbooks that predate Galileo's discoveries by 200 years.

Leaving one of Timbuktu's most famous addresses, the house of Alexander Laing, the Scottish explorer who had his thoat slit for not converting to Islam, Michael heads east to the land of the Wodaabe. These nomadic herders are some of the last true pastoralists of the African continent - famous as much for their male beauty pageant as their stylish cattle. Living in the bush with them, Michael watches the complex rituals surrounding this extraordinary annual pagaent, the 'Gerewol', where the girls get to choose the prettiest boy.

It is the season after the rains, a time of relative plenty for the nomads, and Michael's Wodaabe family, led by the English-speaking Doulla, travel to Ingall for the Cure Salee - a gathering of clans that takes place every year. Amidst the chaos of camel races, shopping and general mayhem, Michael meets up with a group of Tuareg for the next leg of his journey, a camel train across the Tenere desert to Algeria.

Omar introduces him to the delights and vicissitudes of life on the move in the most desolate landscape on the planet. Walking 12 hours a day, eating the odd sheep and learning the rudiments of Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg, Michael finally gets to grips with the heart and soul of the desert. The going is tough, but the sense of comradeship with both the other cameleers and the camels, who are their lifeline, is palpable.

Series charting Michael Palin's trek across the Sahara Desert. Michael arrives at the border of Niger and Algeria, the most desolate crossing, and then turning north Michael passes through the mountains of theHoggar massif before pausing in the oil and gas fields of central Algeria. Then onto Libya to attend the very last reunion of the Desert Rats of Tobruk, before turning west along the North Coast past deserted classical sites at Apollonia, Cyrene and Leptis Magna.

Crossing into Tunis, Michael re-lives the filming of The Life of Brian in Monastir, before taking the Maghreb Express to the dangerous city of Algiers, and then west to Algeria's second city, Oran.

Just along the coast is Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on Morocco's coast, where Michael talks to would-be immigrants before returning to Gibraltar. En route he learns of the terrible fate that has engulfed many Saharan people who attempt the eight mile crossing.