You never really know when the big breaks will come but this was one for me.

I was living out in Belfast doing three minute reports for local ITV when I got a call from a fellow filmmaker Steve Lenhoff - a talented director significantly more experienced than me.

He said Channel 4 was embarking on a new travel series, looking for a director to do the pilot and he was too busy to take it on. But he’d mentioned my name as somebody who showed promise and enjoyed travelling - little did I know I would be in at the start of a series that would run for years and be transmitted all over the world.

Anyway, I got the gig and went out to Vietnam first, loaded with passion but with little idea how to make something 1 hour long - it is much harder than it looks.

The shoot was amazing - as you might imagine. I got to work with a brilliant cameraman called Simon Niblett who became a close friend, but it was when the project arrived at the edit that my problems began. I had no idea how to put it together, just hadn’t done anything this long and complicated before and I floundered.

Discovery Channel said ”Jez’s ruff-cut played out like a bad hallucination”. The Channel 4 commissioning editor had his own quite different issues with it and nearly took me off the project altogether.

But by the time we did Morrocco we’d worked out the format and I’d let go of trying to control the edit (every good film-maker needs to do that eventually.

The morning after this was transmitted, I got so many offers of work from pretty well all the major Channels I had my first ever panic attack and could not go into the studio, I had to ask a production manager to come out and get me. I’d so longed for this moment but just couldn’t handle it. Thank you Clare.