Christmas: The Sahara

S2 E5: A year ago, Romesh Ranganathan visited the Arctic to film a Christmas episode of the Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan. It was the hardest trip he has taken in his life - it was minus 40 degrees, he had to camp in a tent on a frozen ocean and he had to go to the toilet in a bin bag. Like a fox. This year, he has agreed to do another Christmas episode - on the strict understanding that he will not go anywhere cold. And so Rom is travelling to the Sahara Desert. Owing to the tradition of shooting Christmas episodes in July, he has arrived at the hottest time of the year - over the next week temperatures will rise to 50 degrees Celsius - an inescapable wall of heat that beats down from above, rises up from the sand below and makes everyone massively narky. Guided by Bobo, a local of Berber descent who was born and grew up in the desert, Rom discovers a place that is vast and inhospitable - at once impossibly bleak and impossibly beautiful. His journey takes him from Marrakesh in Morocco all the way through the Sahara to the ocean in Western Sahara, 700 miles further south. Along the way, he takes in hot air balloon rides and obscure villages where they make world-famous pottery, and he learns how to treat your arm if you get bitten by a snake (cut open a dog and stick your arm inside its dying carcass). Rom meets nomads who have learned to survive in the middle of the desert, endures sand storms, hears about the largely forgotten war fought for control of Western Sahara and discovers why indigenous people are abandoning the desert in record numbers. Epic, informative and ever so slightly silly, Romesh's misadventures in the Sahara shine a light on one of the most overlit places on earth.