When Jenny Cathcart travelled to Senegal in 1984 as a member of the BBC TV film crew that produced The Africans, she met with the rising star Youssou N’Dour. It was a fateful meeting which led to her abiding interest in African music and culture. When the term ‘world music’ was coined in London, Jenny was a producer on the pioneering TV series Rhythms of the World. In 1995, she proposed an African summer season on BBC Two and produced two of the programmes: the first ever African Prom and the documentary Africa’s Rock ’n’ Roll Years, a social and musical history of post-independence Africa. Ten years later, in 2005, she was series producer and director of BBC Four’s six-part TV series, The African Rock ’n’ Roll Years. While working at Youssou N’Dour’s head office in Dakar, she managed the artists Cheikh Lô, Orchestra Baobab, and Pape and Cheikh.