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Julian and Camilla's World Odyssey
Documentary Channel (Sky 49) 7pm, Wed Nov 22
Camilla Andersen

Julian and Camilla?s World Odyssey is a very real travel series. It is not a holiday series with slo-mo spa shots of washed up boob jobs or ear to ear grinning presenters sipping sticky. Julian and I could not be ?presenters? as he is not hot enough and I am not stupid enough. There are no sharks or nazi?s but there are plenty of local characters, and not just the pool attendants and safari guides. The series is a real journey, an odyssey, not a week?s dip into the best hotel rooms and duty free shops. We start on Kuta beach in Bali and end up?

The shades of autism are almost inevitably bettered rendered by family than by medical professionals, and that's the case with The Autism Puzzle (9pm Jan 15), a documentary made for BBC4 by Saskia Baron, whose brother Timothy was born profoundly autistic in 1961, a time when the condition was barely recognised, let alone catered for in society.

Baron's father Michael jointly founded the National Autistic Society the year after Timothy was born. Her documentary looks at both the history of autism and the latest experimental research on its nature.

Another BBC documentary, Race for Everest, gets a Sunday Premiere showing at 9pm on Sunday January 7, followed by screenings through the month. Sir Ed, naturally, appears as himself (he has a surprisingly long CV on IMDB, including two appearances on What's My Line?).

Remember the Ya-ba panic? The domestic P plague has rather robbed the news value from other Asian amphetamines, but it was the MacIntyre Investigates programme on "crazy medicine" that first got the speed boom into the headlines.?

But that is what has happened to We'd be better off without religion, which is part of the Intelligence Squared series sponsored by The Times newspaper. The debate takes place in March next year.

The affirmative team – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Professor A.C. Grayling – certainly has pulling power, but the team arguing against the motion will also hold some interest for Documentary Channel viewers. Alongside Rabbi Julia Neuberger and Professor Roger Scruton is Nigel Spivey, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, a classical art and archaeology expert who came to public attention via Digging For Jesus, which screens, tidily enough, on Christmas Eve (10pm) on the Documentary Channel.

In the programme, which debuted last Christmas on Britain's ITV, Spivey examines the top 10 archaeological sites offering evidence that Jesus Christ did indeed walk the earth, and finding what?

Stokman's award-winning directorial debut was made in 1993, six years after Sly's last live performance, and it would be a full 13 years later before Sly would get back on stage, to be inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in February of this year. A tribute album, Different Strokes By Different Folks, featuring The Roots, Black Eyed Peas, Steve Tyler and others, was released at the same time.

The Washington Post ran a backgrounder as rumours of Sly's Grammy appearance spread earlier this year.

There's an official (ie: Sony BMG) Sly website and a fan-run MySpace page, which includes a link to buy the catalogue at the iTunes Store (don't bother with the New Zealand store – like most things of interest, it ain't there). And, naturally, there's a solid Wikipedia entry.

Where you really want to go after watching the doco, of course, is YouTube, where there's a real trove of fine Sly moments – not including this shocking what-were-they-thinking moment from the 1975 American Music Awards.?

The Documentary Channel's 9pm premiere slot on Sunday hosts the first episode of Long Way Round, the seven-part story (moving to 8pm Sundays thereafter) of a motorcycle journey from London to New York – via Western and Central Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia and Canada – undertaken by McGregor and his friend and sometime actor Charley Boorman, to raise money for an awareness of the work of UNICEF.

There's an annoying and over-engineered official Flash website for the project, but you're better off with the very detailed Wikipedia article about it, which notes the offscreen logistsics that made the journey possible, and records the physical trials it involved. Yes ladies, a flurry of mosquito bites renders Ewan's penis even bigger than usual.

The IMDB entry for the series is also comprehensive, and includes fan discussion about the music used, which includes Orbital, Massive Attack, Radiohead and Stereophonics, with the last group providing the title?

Which is why I'm encouraged by the looming launch (Sunday November 5, with a launch lig tonight, Friday) of the Documentary Channel. It's not free-to-air, but it is "basic tier" on Sky, which means every Sky customer gets it, and it is programmed in New Zealand "for New Zealanders", as they say.

So what is it offering? Well, it's not all gold, of course: old episodes of Piha Rescue pad out the schedules, along with Singles, "an observational series that follows single people looking for love." But the hit-rate still looks a lot better than that of the existing factual channels.

Schedules are arranged in thematic strands: a regular investigative slot, a time for shock-docs and crime and court strands (although I fear I've seen all the JonBenet Ramsey I need to see). A Premiere of the Week will screen every Sunday at 9pm, and 9pm Wednesdays is the World View slot, which?

David Slack (who doesn't do drugs but becomes adventurous under the influence of wine) was free-climbing the front of the building. (I actually saw two of him climbing the building in perefect unison, but the laws of physics dictate that two instances of Slack may not occur in the same space, so I put that down to double vision.) He was singing.

"Sly and the Family Stone," observed Graeme Hill. "Nice."

I turned around to ask Hooton how he was getting on, but at just that moment he was taken out in a flying tackle. The Prime Minister got up cackling and ostentatiously dusting off her hands. It's nice to see her smiling again.

After the DPS guy had helped Hooton to his feet, I asked if perhaps things weren't going a bit far.

"After all, Norrie Montgomery's here taking photos for Bridget?