TELEVISION star Mark O'Shea has been exploring some of the most remote parts of Australia in a bid to find the world's rarest reptiles.

The snakeman, famous for his smash hit TV show O'Shea's Dangerous Reptiles, travelled Down Under to film the first three parts of his new series.

And despite feeling exhausted by the mammoth seven-week trip, the 45-year-old said the filming had been a great success.

Mr O'Shea flew out to Australia to find rare broad-headed snakes, funnel-web spiders and rough-scaled pythons.

Along the way he found himself scaling 400ft cliffs in windswept conditions.

The curator of reptiles at Bewdley's West Midland Safari Park, said: "You had to be part herpetologist, part rock hopper and part mountaineer for the series.

"In New South Wales we were running along the cliff-tops of a national park being filmed by helicopter looking for snakes.

"The escarpments there must be 400ft high and the helicopters suddenly appeared out of nowhere like something out of a James Bond movie.

"They were blowing me all over the place and suddenly I was battling to stop myself from going over the edge!"

Mr O'Shea also visited the Blue Mountains, Western and Northern Australia on the trail of endangered species.

He added: "There are some great sequences in some of the films like climbing trees to get monitor lizards and thrusting arms down holes to get pythons."

And in a couple of weeks the reptile expert leaves for his "second home" of Papua New Guinea.

There he aims to find, among other reptiles, the crocodile monitor lizard which climbs trees.

He said: "Papua New Guinea is my stomping ground. It will be like a homecoming.

"The associate producer for the series has recently visited a village where the locals still talk about my visit 14 years ago.

"It will be nice to go back there and meet them again."