Alone in the Wild, Channel 4, 9pm Channel 4

LET’S face it. Reality TV is a wuss. Jamie Oliver roughed it with cowboys this week, and took two “food stylists” with him. Gordon Ramsay can’t spear a sea bass unless it’s been subdued. And when Bear Grylls parachutes into virgin forest to face the elements all on his own, he’s recorded by three cameramen, and packing a hotel pass. Does a Bear shit in the woods? If he does, you can bet he has two assistants to wipe his arse, and ­another to style it.

What we need is someone to do it for real. Someone totally on their own. Someone, say, who’ll fail their ­“living alone in the wilderness” task and have to be air-lifted out of there a gibbering wreck. That man is film-maker Ed Wardle.

You see, we already know the outcome of tonight’s Alone in the Wild, where Wardle, a 34-year-old film-maker, is tasked to live on his tod in the Canadian wilderness for three months, to eat any vermin he can get his increasingly bony hands on, and try not to get eaten by bears in the process. The papers ran pieces on his eventual rescue last month, 50 days in. He became a bag of bones, began hallucinating and talking to insects.

Now, there are two ways to look at this. One: Channel 4 is hideously irresponsible to ask Wardle to risk his life, and should have supplied him with a vending machine, a Winnebago, a bazooka and Ross Kemp. Or two: there’s something hugely refreshing about setting someone a task they might fail – and the fact he was rescued after a distress call shows a perfectly safe back-up plan.

After watching the first ­episode, I’m in the latter camp. Watching the series is a little like watching The Blair Witch Project, or Werner ­Herzog’s Grizzly Man (where environmentalist Timothy Treadwell’s homemade tapes end with him being eaten by a bear). It isn’t a question of “Will it be all right?” so much as “When will it go wrong?”.

Well, the answer is simple: very soon. You suspect it won’t end well when he gets freaked out within five ­minutes (“I don’t know how to do this”). The “this”, incidentally, is the act of walking on mud.

From that we go to him screaming “Anybody here?” from the top of a tree, before glumly noting: “Like there’s going to be somebody here.” He weeps uncontrollably when a plane flies over (“He could have just waggled his wings!”). He laughs ­dementedly at the sight of a porcupine (“Haha, it’s a porcupine! Haha, up a tree!). He eats a porcupine (“it smells”). He constantly shouts at bears we never see (“Hello bears! Hello bears!”). And he becomes convinced a bear is stalking him (“I just keep… hearing things,” he says, huddled in his tent in the dark).

And there’s still two more episodes to come. Mark my words, by the third, Wardle will be performing a rain dance while wearing a moose’s head.

Take that TV fakery!