TO say Martin Clunes is a busy bloke is something of an understatement.

When not plugging the sixth series of Doc Martin on DVD, he’s working on a future two-part show for ITV “observing man’s different relationships with different animals around the world in different cultures”, and a version of Julian Barnes’ book Arthur and George, about Arthur Conan Doyle.

Then there’s this one-off, which is something of a dream come true.

“It’s so exciting,” he enthuses. “For two years I’ve been trying to make a film about Tony Fitzjohn, who used to live and work with George Adamson. They lived at this place called Kora, where all the famous photos of George with the lions were taken.

“The Somalis burnt the camp to the ground, but the last couple of years, Tony’s rebuilt it, stick by stick, faithfully as it was.”

Adamson was an acclaimed conservationist who found worldwide fame thanks to the movie Born Free. Sadly, he was murdered by Somali bandits in 1989, but George’s colleague, Tony, continues to work in wildlife conservation at Adamson’s rebuilt camp Kampi Ya Simba, in the Kora National Reserve.

Clunes has had a close friendship with Tony since they met two decades ago; they released Nina, a zoo elephant, back into the wild.

Here the actor visits Tony in Kenya, and meets his first lion cub to be brought to the Kora camp for a quarter of a century.

He can’t wait to bottle-feed the youngster, and hopes it will lead to a follow- up film: “I think it would be nice to see how the little fella gets on, wouldn’t it?”

Absolutely, but what many fans closer to home want to know is when can we expect a new run of Cornish cracker Doc Martin? “We’ve just started working on it and we film that next year – we do every other year, so we’ll start shooting that next year,” he explains.

And what can he tell us about the seventh series? “Well it’s all under wraps,”

explains Clunes. “When we left it it was pretty gloomy. Our American fans are very rigorous with us and tell us, ‘we shouldn’t have left it like that. We should have had a happy ending’. We had a happy beginning so we had to move somewhere, and it gives us somewhere to claw back from... or not.”