Call them festivals. Call them carnivals. Call them holidays from the humdrum. Call them wild, mad and dangerous. What we’re going to call them is REVELS. But whatever you call them, they’re the greatest celebrations - the biggest, longest, loudest, most exotic celebrations - that you’ll ever see.

Take 26 of the best of them from 26 different cultures. Make a half-hour documentary about each one. Call the series REVEL NATION. And suddenly, the lonely planet isn’t so lonely any more.

‘Revel’ is a time-tested Old English name for those events where people “light-heartedly rebel during a particular period of every year”, as the Oxford English dictionary would have it. The 26 revels which have been chosen for this documentary series - from amongst literally hundreds of

global possibilities - were picked because they offer more action, more excitement, and above all, more good-hearted subversive passion, than anything else human beings get up to. Which is no small claim if you look at world- famous celebrations like New Orleans’ Mardi Gras which didn’t even make our cut.

Every revel on our list had to have a deep, living connection to the place where it’s celebrated; a positive message about community; and a ton of exotic beauty and colour - along with all the untamed passion that makes a revel what it is. During the time for revelry, shop girls become carnival queens; taxi drivers harass doctors, lawyers and bankers; musicians grab control of the streets from the police and politicians; wives dress as men and order their husbands about; husbands dress as women and do what they’re told; and children flaunt every authority as they’d never otherwise dare to do. In short, the high are brought low – and the low take over. But paradoxically, a few days of cutting loose each year turns out to be a great way to pull communities together. In the final analysis, that’s the whole point of REVEL NATION.

Each half hour segment of the series will explore one of the revels on our list. We’ll look at just enough of the history of each revel - using interviews with participants, archival footage, and photographs – to ensure that our viewers can find their feet. Then we’ll show the hectic build-up, the extraordinary community willpower, that’s behind each and every revel. And finally, of course, we’ll capture the swirling, incessant energy of the revel itself – right from the heart of the action.