"TONIGHT Matthew I'm going to be.... on TV!"

Michelle Guinness, press officer for the Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre NHS Trust has been on a tour of Israel with Stars In Their Eyes host Matthew Kelly for a national TV programme.

Michelle, a writer, broadcaster and wife of the Rev Peter Guinness from Lancaster, took Matthew to the Holy Land as part of a programme for ITV called Paradise Found, due to be shown on February 4.

Each week the programme will take a different entertainment personality on a pilgrimage to explore their spiritual identities.

"I took Matthew Kelly to Galilee for a week to try and discover the real Jesus," said Michelle. "We talked endlessly about the New Testament and the person of Jesus and his impact on our lives today."

The fly-on-the-wall style programme mixes film of Michelle and Matthew exploring their ideas of faith mixed with Matthew's video diary of his visit.

"It was a wonderful opportunity and I loved every minute of it," said Michelle.

"I thought it would be very difficult getting someone to talk about their personal life, but Matthew was honest, very charming and very easy to be with and I got a lot from it."

Something else Michelle found was that the Holy Land was not as peaceful a place to take a pilgrimage as might be expected.

"There was frenetic tourism, traffic roaring, and at night there were discos out on the lake," she said.

"It was a bit like Blackpool -- there were wonderful moments of tranquillity but you had to look for them."