Clive Barker's Salome

Clive James sends a postcard.

Clive James explores how to succeed in Los Angeles by learning the secret of the film business from Hollywood experts, advisers to the stars and the celebrities themselves.

Clive sets out to find out about a city that was once known as the Paris of the East and discovered China on the brink of revolution. As demonstrating students joined three million cyclists to clog the streets, he encounters a once-wealthy socialite who survived the Cultural Revolution, a baby-washing entrepreneur, a local eel-gutter and a jazz band playing Jingle Bells on an empty ferry cruising up the Huangpu River.

Clive James returns to Paris, the city calls his spiritual home. As a young man he wondered how to meet the women of Paris. This time he does, including writers, models and actresses.

Clive James visits Rio de Janeiro, where the poor live by their wits in the city's favelas while wealthy Cariocas live in a world that is very different, making contact with their less fortunate neighbours only when a servant is paid or a millionaire is mugged.

Clive James makes his first visit to the Middle East, where he explores the pyramids, tries to buy a camel and talks to Omar Sharif about his love for Cairo's traditions of tolerance and cosmopolitanism.

Clive visits the Windy City and finds there is a lot more to Chicago than memories of Al Capone and the St Valentine's Day Massacre. The people are surprisingly forthright about the problems of living in a city where millions of dollars change hands at the board of trade, but little is done to solve the problems of gang violence in the housing projects where shootings are a daily event.

Clive James goes to Miami in search of vice. He's given a boat tour of the Miami islands by an ex-CIA agent, speeds out into the Gulf with US Customs to track down drug runners, and cruises through Coconut Grove in a Miami Police patrol car. He also meets Miami Vice star Don Johnson, Gloria Estefan of the Miami Sound Machine, columnist for the Miami Herald Dave Barry, and Joel Hirschhorn, who defends alleged drug barons.