Actor Martin Clunes (Doc Martin, The Man Who Lost His Head) has a secret wish: he wants to sleep with a lion. In MARTIN CLUNES & A LION CALLED MUGIE, his dream just may come true, as he joins a mission seeking to make wildlife history by returning lions to a remote part of Kenya. It has been 25 years since lions roamed in the Kora National Reserve, a park made famous when legendary conservationist George Adamson (Born Free) set up a camp to rescue lions and release them back into the wild. Clunes has long been concerned about the plight of African animals. He first met conservationist Tony Fitzjohn - a colleague of Adamson - after he'd traveled to East Africa in 1998. At that time, Fitzjohn was on a mission to release a rescued zoo elephant into the wild at Mkomazi - the vast and remote sanctuary he established and maintained in the north of Tanzania. Now Martin will partner with Tony to observe an historic mission fraught with risk: the reintroduction of lions to Kora. Martin, a patron of the Born Free Foundation, travels back to Kenya to witness the rescue of an orphaned lion cub named Mugie, and work in Adamson's rebuilt camp in the Kora National Reserve. Mugie had been washed up on a riverbank 140 miles away and will be Kora's first lion in 25 years, so it is a momentous occasion. Tony and Martin fly to collect him and then begin training the orphaned lion to be re-released to the wild. However, all does not go according to plan.
