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Arabia with Levison Wood: You'll be moved and entraced by this tour of the complex Middle East

There are lots of ex-Army guys presenting TV shows at the moment, most involving competitive feats of physical endurance. Levison Wood, also a writer and photographer, is a bit different.

After service in the Parachute Regiment, including tours in Afghanistan, he walked the length of the Nile, the resulting shows becoming Channel 4’s most successful factual programme of 2015. Since then he has made similarly successful series for C4 on Walking the Himalayas and Walking the Americas.

Yet here he is with his next adventure — an exploration of the whole Arabian peninsula, a 5,000-mile trip through 13 countries — on Discovery. On Twitter, Wood has been pretty confrontational about this. “A lot of people are asking why Arabia is not on their channel of choice. Maybe ask your channel of choice. Or watch drivel like Love Island or Big Brother.” Good for him. Arabia is well worth watching.

So far he has trekked through the Syria/Iraq border, the Dhofar Mountains in Oman, into chaotic Yemen, through Saudi Arabia and into Jordan. Tonight he explores Jordan, visiting Petra, before visiting Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

Explorer: Wood is a measured guide to a complex area
Explorer: Wood is a measured guide to a complex area

Wood, still only 37, has such a sympathetic, appealing presence, and is hugely watchable. He has easy confidence in himself and sympathy with others yet always remains a little bit wary, so characteristic of those with his military background. It makes him a measured guide to the complex conflicts he encounters here in the Middle East.

Wood may style himself an explorer but he’s well aware that exploration has changed its meaning. For him, whatever the rigours of the journey, it’s about the people he meets along the way. The casual, unrehearsed filming, using handheld cameras and selfie-sticks, facilitates this approach.

Tonight, after visiting Petra early in the morning before the tourists arrive, he stays with a Bedouin family and gets in a fair tangle asking one of the men about wearing kohl mascara. “Do you know Johnny Depp?” he asks. No, no. What about Goths and Emos? He persists.

A tribe? the man asks, puzzled. Then there’s a cross-purposes conversation about multiple wives. Wood admits he doesn’t have any, not even secret ones. His host has just the one so far but he’s allowed four. His one wife interjects that she will shoot him if he has any more.

Moving on to the West Bank, Wood is guided by a Palestinian activist and stands in the midst of local youths risking their lives to taunt the Israeli Defence Force with catapults and burning tyres. In Hebron, a Palestinian family tells him about their daughter having been injured by a bottle thrown by a Jewish settler. But then a vocal pair of settlers tell him that without the Israeli soldiers standing around, the settlers would be murdered, “simple as that”.

Wood takes no sides, saying only that the hatred is unfathomable, “groups of people that absolutely hate each other also living next door to each other.” He volunteers that he, “like many others, can’t see a way out of this awful stalemate.”

C4 should be kicking itself for missing out on a travel programme as engaging, honest and revealing as this.

Arabia with Levison Wood. Episode 4 of 5: Holy Lands is on Discovery Channel at 9pm.