Once at the heart of the American motor industry, and birthplace of a music genre earning global recognition for black artists, Detroit was a thriving city. Ben sets out to explore the underbelly of Detroit as he tries to discover what went wrong.

A brutal war in the 1970s left Cyprus split in two and displaced a third of its population. Ben spends a week with the UN's Peacekeeping Force, who patrol the enormous buffer zone on the island, keeping the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities separated. Ben is on a mission to understand more about the so-called 'Cyprus Problem', visiting ghost towns left behind, learning how criminal gangs profit from the division and hearing often tragic stories from people on both sides whose lives have been devastated by the conflict.

Ben travels from Stroma, which has been inhabited for 1,000 years and has been owned by the same family for generations, to Swona, which was first inhabited by Vikings and later by a multigenerational family who coexisted with a feral herd of cattle, and finally to the most remote of Scotland’s Lost Worlds, the towering prehistoric cliffs of St Kilda.