Saw one of those great TV shows last night where they get an incredibly jolly English academic and send him on difficult treks round the world looking for ancient historical treasures. Not this one, which I saw a few of while in England earlier this year, but I can’t find the actual one on the internets, which still don’t seem good at locating information on something as simple and obvious as last night’s TV shows, which is a shame. But the same sort of thing: a cheerful posh fellow who espouses fascinatingly and with total enthusiasm about historical wonders you couldn’t even dream of (that’s how he makes you feel, anyway) with a permanent broad smile that says “I can’t believe they are paying me to do this!” even as he devotes weeks on end to trekking across the Himalayas on a donkey while living on unidentified boiled mountain food in the freeing cold snow with altitude sickness.

One of the brilliant things about these shows is, you can watch them without feeling the urge to go there yourself. Last night’s was about the legendary town of Shangri La/ Shambala and whether it existed or not. Our jolly guide took us to a hidden place built into a mountain in West Tibet on the edge of the Himalayas, which was built as a retreat by a royal family which was unfortunately slaughtered when some Christians found there way over, made contact, built a church and apparently attracted aggression from the neighbours who came and sacked the whole place. We saw the remains of temples which had been preserved by locals until the 1960s when the Chinese bashed them up, and we saw the 400-odd year-old remains of the royal family which was decapitated and thrown into a cave.

Probably more interesting than that, though, was the monastery we visited towards the end of the journey to the mountain-town, which was stuffed with thousand-year-old Buddhist treasures saved from various ransacked temples. I can’t remember if it was here or the next place on, where we watched an evening’s entertainment by and for the villagers who lived in such isolation that their lives were completely unchanged from those of their ancient ancestors. In conversation with the leaders, our guide agreed to pass “a message” from them to people outside (not sure who, exactly). “They have lived like this for thousands of years,” he said to camera, “but they are absolutely clear about what they want: a hydro-electric generator.” The head monk interjected with something else. “And a telephone.”

How the world has changed since the first European visitors climbed over the mountains to Shamabala, had their own Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and unwittingly brought the place down. Nowadays we can watch ancient Tibetans on TV in Texas, although who knows how long there will be ancient Tibetans to make shows about. I wonder what they are planning to do with their new telephones.