IF YOU enjoyed the previous two series of BBC Two travelogue Pilgrimage, you'll love the third. Hot on the heels of their famous predecessors, who journeyed to Santiago and Rome, seven new celebrities are set to embark on their own journey of discovery – this time to Istanbul.
Taking part is journalist Adrian Chiles, a converted Catholic; former politician Edwina Currie, a lapsed Jew; Olympian Fatima Whitbread, a Christian; broadcaster Mim Shaikh and TV presenter Amar Latif, both Muslims; and two confirmed atheists: comedian Dom Joly and Irish actress Pauline McLynn, best known for her role as Mrs Doyle from Father Ted.
Starting in Serbia's capital Belgrade, the pilgrims will travel through Bulgaria and the mountainous Balkans, before crossing the border into Turkey, with their goal of reaching Istanbul and the Suleymaniye Mosque.
So why did they sign up and how – if at all – has the experience changed their beliefs? We find out.
PAULINE McLYNN (57)
"We all did a master interview before we went off on our travels, and I'm afraid I quite shallowly said that I like walking, a little bit of an adventure and I was hoping to have a right laugh. That is indeed what happened. All [the trip] did for me was cemented the fact that I really have no time for organised religion of any sort. We visited an awful lot of places where the most extraordinary atrocities occurred, and it's all in the name, really, of religion. Certainly the ones that we saw. I was glad to be an atheist at the end of it all."
AMAR LATIF (45)
"For the last 15 years, since I've become blind, I've travelled the world. Why I went on this adventure was because in our day-to-day lives we're working hard, and religion is just pushed to one side. Apart from the historical stuff, I felt I was experiencing such joy from most of the places that we went to. There was just a feeling of contentment. It just made me realise that religion does bring people together and it provides so much peace to people. I was getting a lot of that from this trip."
DOM JOLY (52)
"I'm totally non-religious and I just wanted to spend two weeks arguing with religious people and telling them how ridiculous they were, but actually they were all quite reasonable, so that didn't really happen. Everyone we met along the way was lovely and friendly, and yet you knew the things that they believed in are used to divide. That's my problem with religion."
MIM SHAIKH (28)
"I've got this curiosity about me of just wanting to learn about other cultures, religions and people, primarily, because I feel that's how I'm able to learn in the best way. I felt like, as a Muslim who practises and who is devout, that I have a duty to show, 'Look we're not all fundamentalists, we're not all extremists, we're good human beings'. It's our form of meditation or yoga or what everybody else is able to do. I realised that all of us, no matter what our religions are, our ethnicity, our class, our gender, what jobs we have, there's more common in us than there is different."
ADRIAN CHILES (52)
"I found it spiritually dispiriting, if I can put it like that. Every place we stopped, there was evidence of unspeakable things that had been done to people in the name of religion, which was bugger all to do with religion. I've been asked, 'Could you be a Muslim? A Jew? But it's a meaningless question. It's not about which religion, it's where you are on the loony spectrum."
FATIMA WHITBREAD (59)
"I am Christian; however, I am not devout. I believe in God and a higher power. I find that praying helps me in times of need. [This] was a spiritual and eye-opening experience, both religiously and culturally. I thoroughly enjoyed the mountaineering, as well as walking through the villages and seeing local life in its simplicity. It was one of my best experiences ever."
EDWINA CURRIE (73)
"First of all it's an area of the world I'd never been to; I knew it was beautiful, but it was stunning. I learned that there's a heck of a lot of change going on in that part of the world that we're not aware of. We saw villages that were virtually empty – people had gone to work and live in other countries. We saw areas where a lot of effort is being made to raise standards, giving hope; and we learned some places, which are still very cut off like Serbia, are still in a mindset that we, perhaps, wouldn't find very comfortable."
:: Pilgrimage: The Road To Istanbul starts on BBC Two on Friday March 27.
