Dara O Briain goes deep into mystery of the pyramids for Channel 5 series

WHY DID YOU WANT TO DO THIS DOCUMENTARY?

It was a very easy sell to me – we were offered not just a chance to visit the pyramids, but the access to actually go underneath and scrabble around and do the whole Indiana Jones thing with them. And you kind of go: ‘Well, I’m not gonna be able to do this again – how often do you get offered this?’

WHAT WAS IT LIKE WHEN YOU FIRST LAID EYES ON THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA?

Checking in, when you arrived at the hotel, you turn around in the lobby or you look up and they’re there. It’s just this astonishing, iconic thing.

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The actual site, particularly in Giza… it’s insanely busy. Hawkers, people with camels… there’s wild dogs walking around… The angry tourists who are there on their bucket list trip to Egypt, passing by rubbing bellies with other tourists who are on their bucket list trip to Egypt. It’s all a bit tense.

We got this insane access all to ourselves, and then we got to go beyond there to the other sites, which are much quieter. And we were kind of (like): ‘Why are you not here?’ You go to these other places, which is like: ‘This is fabulous’. And you could get a real sense of the history.

AS YOU SAY, YOU GET THIS UNIQUE ACCESS INSIDE THE PYRAMIDS. HOW WAS THAT?

Going down into the chamber… That was a little bit scary, because you do a similar walk up to the first one. And you’re kind of going: Okay, this is about 60 metres of up and up and up, careful, careful, careful. And now the one down is like 100 metres plus, in a lower tunnel, and then you have to crawl through a tunnel, and you can’t see the tunnel you’re crawling through because it’s too far away to see. I’m a little bit claustrophobic, and I thought: ‘I dunno, am I going to freak out at the bottom of this?’…

THE PYRAMIDS CARRY A LOT OF MYSTERY, AND SOME PEOPLE THINK ALIENS MIGHT BE RESPONSIBLE. WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT?

Broken down, you need a small town, you need 20,000 people, basically (to build a pyramid)…

I found myself constantly just going: This is an incredible human achievement, so why do people keep inserting aliens into it? It’s such an almost defining human thing to build, and it happened independently in all these different cultures. But rather than seeing that as a celebration of who we are as a species, how we wanted to construct something greater than ourselves, whatever we believe in each society, the sense of people going: ‘Must have been aliens’…

Mysteries of the Pyramids with Dara O Briain starts on Monday May 20 at 9pm on Channel 5 and My5.