Griff describes Paris as small, intense but full of flavour and sets out to find the ingredients that make up this great city.

Paris is exquisite in scale and content. New York may boast bigger, taller, London more extensive, but Paris knows it has the finest. It’s the attention to detail that makes this city tick.

Paris has probably had more admirers than any place on earth. From the Roman Emperor Julian who called it his ‘beloved city’ to Adolf Hitler, who in 1940 wrote that he had ‘always longed to visit Paris’, having just done so with his army and 40,000 tanks. It was considered ‘too beautiful to bomb’ and survived the Second World War unscathed.

In Paris they don’t just make bread, they make the world’s finest bread. Griff makes an early morning visit to the Poilone bakery, where they make bread by hand, and rolls up his sleeves to help prepare the morning’s traditional country loaves. French bread is special because of its simplicity: the law dictates that it is made with flour, yeast, salt and water, and nothing else.

Paris is keen on keeping up appearances, and with a freshly baked loaf under his arm, Griff sets off to join the city’s elite Graffiti Eradication Squad, who move swiftly into action when they receive reports of graffiti on any public buildings and monuments.

One of the most recognisable landmarks in the world is the Eiffel Tower, but it was not loved by all Parisians when it was built. The intellectuals and writers of Paris hated it, and Guy de Maupassant used to have lunch at the Tower every day because it was the only place in Paris that “you can’t see the damn thing.”

The Eiffel Tower is a feat of engineering and the real wonders are hidden away out of site. When it was built, the lift mechanism was hailed as a miracle of French engineering. It is still faithfully lifting and lowering, and Griff has been invited to help keep it lubricated. Once a week, special grease has to be applied to the mechanism, while it is still moving. It’s boiling hot and smells incredible, because it’s molten mutton fat. Griff muses that if he were a proper Frenchman he would take a big scoop of the mutton fat, slap it on some bread and have it for his lunch.

At the Officer Training School, Griff experiences unarmed combat at first hand and learns how to break a man’s arm in four places. From the cut and thrust of army training, Griff turns his hand to a cut and blow dry at a dog’s beauty salon.

When the apricot poodle has had the full treatment, Griff takes her out for lunch, at a fashionable restaurant, where she is perfectly welcome. Lunch is so important in Paris that nearly all office workers are still given luncheon vouchers to ensure they eat properly.

Parisians are renowned for their independence of spirit, especially when it comes to petty rules and regulations, and nowhere typifies that more than when they are behind the wheel of a car.

The Arc de Triomphe is in the middle of a massive roundabout. 12 highways converge on it and Griff takes his life in his hands to drive around it. It is the wild west of motoring, where there are no lane markings but there are lots of cars.

Griff explains that there are two rules, one, give way to the right and two, obey no other rules.

Leaving the driving to those who do it worst, Griff takes some well-earned respite at the last working vineyard in Paris, which produces 2,000 half-bottles of much sought after red wine every year.

But he is soon back on the road, with a group of Parisians who, every week, skate across Paris. It is still the rush hour but every Friday evening they close the streets for an inline skating ramble, which can attract up to 24,000 people. However, this is Wednesday, and novice skater Griff has to avoid the traffic and try to stay on his feet. He describes the experience as “the most dangerous thing I have done in my life”.

It may be approaching midnight, but it is still possible to eat out in Paris at one of the many brasseries, and Griff is working the late shift with head waiter Thierry. With fully laden trays causing a problem, and a lost order, Griff is more than a little relieved when the restaurant closes at 2.30 am.

However, he still has one last appointment – with a group of Parisians who are passionate, rebellious and nocturnal. The Untergunther restore monuments to exacting standards, without permission, in the middle of the night. Two years ago they broke into the Parthenon and spent a year restoring a clock, and the authorities didn’t notice a thing.

Griff joins them on their latest mission and is taken down a manhole to a tunnel underground. They reach a small hole in the wall and squeeze though it down to a deeper system of passageways where the team are making an illegal survey of the underground labyrinth in order to preserve it.

As Griff explores the tunnels he comes across a macabre sight. Part of the tunnel system was used to store bones, the remains of nearly six million Parisians. In the eighteenth century the cemeteries of Paris were getting full so they took all the bones and put them in the tunnels under Paris. About fifty years later they decided to tidy them up, and bizarrely made walls of the bones, with them all in neat patterns, and here they remain neatly stacked to this day.

As the night draws to a close, one of the Unthergunter team leads Griff to a superb vantage point to watch the sun rise over Paris, the Notre Dame cathedral.

As he looks over the city, Griff says that although there may be no such thing as a perfect city, what he loves about Paris is that people put so much effort and work into the quality of life. He says: “It’s rather nice to think that somewhere out there, someone is having a sleepless night about trying to improve a sauce, or make a delicious soup, or bake the perfect cake.”

Wednesday, 22 October 2008, 9:00PM – 10:00PM, ITV1