Noah is a popular chap right now.
You remember Noah, right? Warned by God that a flood was about to engulf the world, he was told to build a massive ark, fill it with animals and ride things out ... yeah, that fella.
He has got his own big-budget movie hitting cinemas later this month, with no less than Russell Crowe portraying him.
Before that, however, the charming and curious Joanna Lumley, of Absolutely Fabulous fame, is taking viewers on a journey around the world and through history to uncover the legend of Noah and reveal why his story has such resonance with so many people.
The two-part documentary The Search For Noah's Ark follows Lumley - a travel-documentary veteran who has travelled the length of the river Nile and ventured to the Arctic Circle to witness the Northern Lights - as she visits various locations reputed to be the Ark's final resting place.
She learns there are variations on the story of Noah and the great flood in a number of religions and cultures.
That may come as a surprise to people who thought it was simply a Christian story.
In all honesty, the presence of Noah in Islam and Judaism surprised Lumley as well.
"I believe that's what we all thought!" she laughed. "But then you find, for instance, that his story is properly respected in the Islamic faith and that Noah is one of their four great prophets.
"And that you can go back 5000 years before the Bible was written to the epic of Gilgamesh, where there is the story of a righteous man told by God about a flood and given the task of building a boat and saving all the animals."
So was the world really flooded? Did Noah actually exist? And did he build an Ark that could contain two of every animal on the planet?
The way The Search For Noah's Ark frames it, there may well be some truth to the story, especially when you consider that thousands of years earlier people's view of the world was a little smaller: if, say, central Asia was flooded, it would be easy for its inhabitants to believe the entire Earth was under water.
But the story also has aspects that may have interpreted differently - or "embroidered", to use Lumley's term - by different cultures.
"Maybe there was a massive flood, the story of which got passed along by word of mouth, and it was changed in different parts of the world," she said.
"I'd been curious about Noah's Ark since I was a child, and it seemed worth pursuing which parts of the story had their basis in fact, which were legendary and which were simply made up.
"Really, it's about how human beings love a story and how it can be changed and reinterpreted by different cultures."
It's clearly a story with some staying power, and Lumley has some theories about why that could be the case.
"The story of Noah has a warning that God was displeased with the way man was treating life on Earth - carelessly, disrespectfully," she said.
"Maybe that's one of the reasons it's so fascinating now, thousands of years later, to look at the story again as we search desperately to fuel and feed the world, as our population continues to increase.
"The world is huge but it is finite. Maybe we should look around and see if there are better ways of doing things."
*Compass: The Search For Noah's Ark, screens on ABC1 at 6.30pm on Sunday
