The border guard with the gold teeth asks me if I speak Russian. “Choot choot,” I smile back. A little. “Open the bag,” he snaps. I do as I’m told, and of course the first thing he finds is the caviar. Eight big pots of it, wrapped in my underwear, worth more than a grand at Harrods prices, but which I’d acquired for less than $100 a couple of days earlier in the mysterious Caspian Sea port of Turkmenbashi, straight from the fisherman’s wife. The guard wags his finger at me, and sucks in a disapproving “tst” through those tatty gold teeth of his. He know it’s illegal. I know it’s illegal.

Next he finds the camera, and asks me to show him the pictures. I was ready for this. Starting at the end of the memory card, slowly, deliberately, I begin clicking through all the images I didn’t mind him seeing. There’s me in front of the fifth-civilisation ruins in Merv. There I am in Ashgabat, looking up at the Arch of Neutrality. And that’s a Turkmen woman I saw in the street. I thought she was very beautiful. All your women are very beautiful, Mr Guard. He smiles at that. Shoves the caviar and the camera back into my bag, and waves me on. I’m through.

A couple of clicks further and he would have found my picture of the presidential palace. And he wouldn’t have liked that. Hadn’t I heard that it was illegal to photograph the big gold palace? And what’s this? Me with a silly grin on my face gurning up at a giant pink statue of the book that the president wrote. Didn’t I know that making jokes about the president’s book carries a five-year mandatory prison sentence? Actually, I did.

But the guard didn’t have the patience to get to the end of my memory card. Or perhaps he suspected what he might find there, and chose to ignore it. Perhaps he wanted me to find out more about his country and his president. Perhaps he was sending a message to the world, through me. Anyway, I was out. And just 300 yards up the road was the Uzbek border.

My heart was thumping against my chest like a raging gorilla as I trudged along the scruffy desert path. I’d done it. I’d gotten into Turkmenistan, and out. Behind me, I could see that the rest of the crew had got through as well. Secreted about their persons, a tape here, a cassette there, were the various bits of the first film to be made for British television about one of the world’s most bizarre and impenetrable societies. With 100 yards to go, my mouth started twitching, and a foolish smile began muscling its way onto my face. Not just because we’d done what nobody else could do. But also because, to my utter amazement, I had actually grown to enjoy what I was leaving. I liked Turkmenistan. My feelings about the president had changed too. I had gone in there assuming he was the devil. Now I wasn’t so sure. Which is exactly how the devil operates, right?

You must have noticed that dictators aren’t what they used to be. A couple of decades ago, when Saddam was just starting out and Gadaffi was still awake in his tent, you could easily locate a decent crop of monomaniacs in action around the globe, abusing their nations. Pinochet was misplacing large chunks of the population in Chile. Milosevic was perfecting his removal skills in Serbia. Dear old Kenneth Kaunda was robbing Zambia blind. Go back a few years further, and there’s a positive cornucopia of rights-abusers and poster-hoggers to choose from. Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti. Marcos in the Philippines. Noriega in Panama. Ah, the good old days.

Compare this rich cast list of demented governmental soloists with the feeble array of dictators currently on show in the world. Castro is in an old people’s home. Assad junior in Syria is – perish the thought – being talked of as a peacemaker in Iraq. Saddam is locked away, and about to hang. So thin on the ground are the authentic tyrants that even one-party lightweights like Mubarak in Egypt and Musharraf in Pakistan, who are only technically dictators, have managed to wheedle their way into the global count. Among the real totalitarian McCoys, the hardcore one-man governments of our times, we are, I suggest, down to the last three examples.

There’s Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Kim Jong-il in North Korea. And my man, Saparmurat Niyazov, the one who calls himself Turkmenbashi, the Leader of the Turkmen, or, as he recently enhanced his title, Beyik Turkmenbashi, Turkmenbashi the Great. Here at least is a proper despot.

You may be thinking: where is Turkmenistan? Most people wouldn’t know because it’s deep into Borat country: south of Kazakhstan, west of Uzbekistan, north of Afghanistan, and east of Iran. In short, right in the middle of the central Asian cross wires, where nobody in their right minds would wish to be. But instead of tiptoeing around the Afghanis, or cowering before the Iranians, Turkmenbashi has adopted the fascinating foreign policy of pretending they do not exist. And acting accordingly. In 2002, he decided his country needed a new calendar. So he invented one. January was renamed after himself: Turkmenbashi. April was changed to his mother’s name, Gurbansoltan. And September became Ruhnama, the title of the large pink philosophy book he wrote, the one you have to answer questions on to pass your driving test. With the months done, he turned to the days of the week. Tuesday became Young Day. Wednesday is now Favourable Day. The other Main Day, formerly a Monday, he noticed that a woman speaker at an agricultural ceremony he was attending had capped her teeth with gold, as Turkmen women are apt to do. So he sent her off to his health minister – a dentist – to have them fixed. From now on, he decreed, Turkmen women must have white teeth. And the best way to maintain them was to do what he’d seen dogs doing when he was young: gnaw lots of bones.

The president is lucky to have seen a dog. In Ashgabat, Turkmenistan’s spotless white capital that he is building in the desert out of unfeasible quantities of imported Italian marble, dogs are banned. Turkmenbashi doesn’t like their smell. Also banned are foreign newspapers, journalists, opposition parties, and, apparently, women’s make-up, because, according to the president, Turkmen women don’t need make-up. They’re beautiful enough already. Cinemas, circuses and ballets are illegal too, on the grounds that they are un-Turkmen. So are video games, lip-synching on television, car radios, and recorded music at weddings. On the face of it, therefore, if you believe all the stories, we have here a reincarnated Ceausescu, Caligula revisited, a new Idi Amin. But are the stories true?

With hardly anyone allowed in or out of there, it’s almost impossible to be sure. Tons of hilarious hearsay about Turkmenbashi swirls about the international ether, but not much evidence. Several of the best-known tales can be traced back to their unreliable origins in fun-poking American magazine reports. Most can’t. To prove or disprove the tallest tales, you need to get into Turkmenistan and see for yourself. And the only way to do that, is my way. Apply for a tourist visa. Concoct a story about why you want to go there. Cross your fingers. And wait.

Our cover was that our director was getting married, and wanted to go to Turkmenistan for his stag week because he had been fascinated by the place ever since he was a boy. Ridiculous, I know. But you try thinking of a better reason why a film-crew-sized group of men of assorted ages would wish to go to Turkmenistan and take pictures of it. The stag-week story seemed to explain our excessive need to film, pose, question, cheek the police, and scoot about the country.

I’d also noticed that the president had been unusually active in the field of hotel building. Ashgabat has more five-star hotels in it than London. There’s a street in the capital along which are positioned no less than 22 five-star hotels in a row. Since the only tourists we saw on the entire trip were us, and we were only pretending, there clearly exists a sizable gap between the president’s unrealistic holiday hopes for his country, and the actual touristic situation. Into this sizable gap we sneaked. With all these empty hotels to fill, Turkmenistan needed us.