A few weeks ago in this very column I put together a few so-ridiculous-they-could-never-happen ideas for possible reality TV shows. Well, just to prove that life really is stranger than these weekly musings, Channel Five has only gone and created what is possibly the most far-fetched and tasteless TV programme ever to grace the idiot's lantern since someone decided to pair Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood at the Brits.

This week you can gorge yourself on nothing less than a recreation of the 1972 tragedy in which a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes, leaving the survivors stranded in a desolate landscape with nothing but the flesh of their dead compatriots to feast upon.

You possibly never realised that what this heartbreaking yet ultimately life-affirming event required was for four c-list celebrities to spend ten days following in the footsteps of the survivors in the name of "entertainment".

No lesser talents than former Coronation Street actor Adam Rickitt, lifestyle guru Carole Caplin, unknown minor royal Lord Freddie Windsor and inscrutable Gallic chef Jean-Christophe Novelli have been airlifted to the Andes and filmed tromping around the snow.

Sadly, the celebrities weren't actually forced to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Instead they were given a pile of raw meat to chow down on. This was particularly hard for Rickitt, who said (presumably in all earnestness): "This is the first time I've eaten red meat in four or five years. For us this is not too bad, but for them it was their best friends they were eating."

It probably explains why, in his last-minute appearance at Channel Four's celebs-do-superstars show The Games last week, Rickitt looked as thin as a Venetian blind slat.

The show's producers have missed a bit of a trick here by not simply dumping them on the mountains and filming them from afar, watching and waiting until real blood-lust set in. My money would have been on Novelli, who as a chef would certainly know the best cuts to go for and as a Frenchman would have no compunction about eating his dinner dripping with blood.

Or perhaps they could have flown in some other celebrities as food for the starving foursome - maybe they should have tied it in with Celebrity Fit Club.

They could have parachuted porky astrologer Russell Grant into the camp and we could all have enjoyed Carole Caplin looking at him as though he had been transmogrified into a cartoon roast chicken while Novelli was whistling innocently and sharpening his knives behind his back.

It does, though, make you wonder just how far the boundaries of taste and decency do extend when it comes to reality TV shows. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at the meeting of minds that approved Alive: Back to the Andes. Surely it must have flitted across the mind of someone at one of these meetings, even just for a couple of seconds, that this wasn't exactly in the best possible taste.

Where, I shudder to ask, do we go from here?

Michael Barrymore, Kelly Monteith and Grace Jones recreating the awfulness of Auschwitz while dressed as characters from the Banana Splits? Rory McGrath and Sinbad off Brookside facing off in a tense, livetelevision World Trade Centre Jenga tournament?

Toon Army Tsunami, in which celebrity Geordies including Robson Green, Sting and Donna Air are chained to the bottom of a rapidly-filling swimming pool?

Hey, you might think it will never happen, but if someone had described the Andes thing to you six months ago, you would probably have said the same thing. And people say this column's in bad taste. . .