with Sir Fitzroy Maclean
A series of films from all over the world about our astonishing planet and the creatures that live on it.

"For lust of knowing what should not be known
We take the golden road to Samarkand"
A film about a 10,000-mile journey through the Soviet Union beginning and ending in Moscow, and showing some of the remoter and more exotic republics of this great country which has just celebrated its jubilee.
(First shown on BBC-1)

In 1937 Fitzroy Maclean went to Moscow to join the British Embassy as third secretary. His friends thought him mad to leave the glamorous world of Paris for Moscow which at that time was suffering the height of the Stalinist terror. They told him that he would be lucky to get beyond the Embassy railings and certainly lucky to get beyond Moscow. But due to his initiative and lust for adventure his Moscow posting became a passport to some of the most exciting places in the world with remote and romantic names like Samarkand, Bokhara and Alma-Ata.
The young Maclean discovered all these places and last year with a BBC-tv team he returned to the remoter Soviet republics in which these faraway places lie and looks at them again thirty years after his first visit, and fifty years after the Russian revolution.
Maclean has always possessed a sense of adventure, and during the war as a thirty-two-year-old Brigadier he headed a British Military Mission to Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia He lived and fought with them from the caves in Bosnia for two years.
After the war he went into Parliament and was knighted in 1957.
(Colour)