Joanna Lumley's Nile

Joanna Lumley embarks on an epic journey, exploring the world's longest river from sea to source. She begins her adventure on a fishing boat on Egypt's coast, where the Nile spills into the Mediterranean, before capturing the spirit of Agatha Christie in Cairo and enjoying a Nile cruise. She also travels along the river by train, road and felucca sailing boat, and ends the first part of her trip in Aswan, a town the Victorians described as being on the edge of civilisation.

The actress follows the river into the deserts of Northern Sudan, where she meets the survivor of a crocodile attack and goes in search of the creature. She is then introduced to the treasures of Nubia, an ancient kingdom of Africa ruled by the little-known Black Pharaohs, before visiting Sudan's capital city Khartoum, where she talks to nomads who live in the remote sub-Saharan desert.

Joanna reaches Khartoum where she meets the famous Whirling Dervishes and experiences a Dukhan, a Sudanese beauty treatment for women using wood smoke. Khartoum is also where the Blue Nile flows into the White Nile. Joanna takes a short diversion up this treacherous river into Ethiopia, far into the Simien Mountains where she meets with an unusual group of Olympic hopefuls.

On the last stretch of her journey and high above Southern Sudan, Joanna is flying south along the Nile and the world’s largest swamp, The Sudd. In Southern Sudan’s main town Juba, a fragile peace process has enabled a re-emergence of the country’s Beauty Pageants. Joanna then heads south from Juba into Uganda and here she picks up the White Nile to the iconic Murchison Falls and encounters some of Africa’s greatest wildlife from Hippos, Rhinos to an unusual bird called a Shobill. Finally, Joanna meets up with a modern day Nile adventurer who takes her to a recently discovered new source, high up in the Rwandan mountains.