Globetrotter

Travel across the world this summer with Diego Buñuel of Don’t Tell My Mother…

If you are looking for some real life action and adventure this year, try touring some of the remote and dangerous parts of the world without setting foot outside of your home. Just click on your TV and watch Nat Geo Mundo’s No Le Digan a Mi Madre. “You are going to be traveling to places that are crazy and exotic,” says host Diego Buñuel. “You will go across the globe and the stories will make your jaw drop.” It’s your chance to journey to some of the world’s most dangerous places. Encounter gun-slinging schoolgirls in Russia, border wars in the US..and even criminal war lords in Somalia. To get the story, Diego has put it all on the line. “Somalia was the most brutal and violent place of all. I had 30 bodyguards and I was locked up in a compound for 22 hours a day.”

Buñuel, who started out as a foreign war correspondent, wanted to tell the whole story. “Foreign news has been dominated by dry stories about war. It’s bang, bang; when it bleeds it leads,” he recalls. “I realized I was talking about just 1% of the stories over there and 99% were going unreported.” Interestingly enough, his war coverage also gave him the inspiration for the name of his show. “When I would leave for those danger zones, I would tell my production team ‘don’t tell my mother’ because I knew she would flip out. My assistant suggested the name and I thought it was great.”

As the grandson of the award-winning Spanish director Luis Buñuel, it’s not surprising that Diego is very hands-on with his show, from producing to editing. If you ask him, though, their similarities run deeper. “If we have something in common, it’s that I use humor to criticize the brutality of the world, and my grandfather used a lot of humor to criticize hypocrisy. Humor is a very powerful tool.”

When asked, his ultimate mission is very clear. “My job is to really bring that vision of a different world to a new generation; to tell young people today that virtual is great, but if we do not get out there and grab a handle on the real world and on our planet, nothing is going to change.”

Don’t Tell My Mother
Mondays at 9pm/8c