Hungry and forgotton

As glamour model Jordan heroically consumes witchitty grubs in the Australian jungle, imagine a reality TV show featuring genuine acts of endurance and deprivation, where contenders fight for life in sweltering conditions.

Only this time, no TV producer will touch it. Why? Because in this version, 6million participants could die.

Famine in Ethiopia does not exactly pull in the viewing punters these days.

Not that this has stopped Sorious Samura, one of the few black Africans reporting on serious black issues.

Having decided the only way to bring the reality of Africa's food crisis into Western homes is via TV, he set about finding a production company foolhardy enough to help him do it; Insight News Television has worked with him on several projects.

When David Blaine was vanity stuntfasting, Samura was living with a family in Lalibela, a small village in the Ethiopian highlands.

He worked when they worked, slept when they slept - and starved when they did. The result, aired tonight on Channel 4, sees Samura dropping three stone and various shades of humour in the process.

'Even after day two, I was finding it hard,' he said. 'We were eating barely enough to stay alive.

'That was the idea. The media focuses on famine only when victims are helpless and dying, but we wanted to show the forgotten people, those who aren't dying

Award-winning film-maker Sorious Samura swapped the comforts of his East London home to spend six weeks living, eating and working with families in a remote Ethiopian village.

There he experienced the hardships of communities living on the brink of starvation, barely surviving as they fight to survive another day...but are barely living.

They are classed as OK, not officially famine status, but they are living off their wits.'

Suffering for art is not new to Sierra Leone-born Samura. While filming Sorious Samura's Africa in Liberia in 2001, he was charged with spying, imprisoned and tortured by the government.

And while making the award-winning Cry Freetown in his homeland, he lost hours of film after his documentary was deemed too brutal to broadcast.